Review: HP Workstation Matches Server Performance

Desktop PCs are fine for most business uses, but there comes a time when more power is necessary. A server can handle anything thrown at it, but it comes with a hefty price tag. A workstation straddles the middle ground, with fast processors, high memory capacity, larger hard drives, and a high-end graphics card. Workstations are ideal for computer-aided design engineers, computer animators, video editors, and graphics artists. HP has positioned the xw8400 towards the high-end of its workstation lineup.

The xw8400 is designed for maximum performance for maximum productivity. The workstation's configuration can be either the dual-core or quad-core Xeon processors and is based on Intel's 5000X Greencreek chipset. HP also designed and certified the workstation to handle resource-intensive technical applications, such as AutoCAD.

Test Center engineers received a workstation with quad-core 5300 Series Xeon 2.66 GHz clock speed, a front-side bus speed of 1.3 GHz for 21 Gbytes/second throughput, and 4 Mbytes of L2 cache. With 3 Gbytes of memory, and two hard drives with approximately 223 Gbytes in combined total storage capacity, the system supports both Serial-Attached SCSI and 3 Gbps Serial ATA drives. The dual-core processor configuration would have had the 5100 Series Xeon with 2 Mbytes L2 cache.

For graphics, this workstation came with a mid-range NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 card with 256 Mbytes memory. The xw8400 can be ordered with 32- or 64-bit Windows XP preloaded and it is Windows Vista capable. It can also come preloaded with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

There are eight storage bays, five for hard disk drives and three for optical drives. The system can support up to five internal SATA hard drives or up to four internal SAS drives. An integrated controller supports RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. RAID 5 is SATA only. For increased graphics performance, the workstation supports multiple displays and graphics cards. The NVIDIA card can be upgraded to the high-end FX3500 or FX4500 card, or even the G-Sync card. All of these cards support dual DVI or dual VGA displays. Adding a second FX1500 card allows the use of four displays at once. The ATI FireGL V7200 card is also available.

The xw8400 includes integrated high-definition audio, Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet adapter, a CD-RW/DVD combo drive, and a 3.5" floppy drive to round out the system. The 800-watt power supply is more than enough to handle all the drives and components inside the case.

The system is quiet, which is very unusual for a workstation of this size and power. The Xeon processors are known to run faster and cooler than previous chips, which in turn translates to less noise coming out of the box. The special acoustic engineering and wide vents on the case also does a lot to minimize the sounds.

Measuring 17.9 inches high, 8.3 inches wide and 20.7 inches deep, the silver and charcoal gray case is attractive to look at. The sleek box is also highly customizable, which is an added plus for heavy technical environments. There are three PCI Express slots (x8 and x16) and four PCI slots on the motherboard. The optical drive can range from a simple vanilla CD-ROM drive to a DVD+/-RW Dual Layer LightScribe units. The xw8400 workstation has eight memory slots, so that system can be expanded up to 64 Gbytes of onboard memory, once 8 Gbyte memory DIMMs come on market. Currently, 2 Gbyte DIMMs are available and 4 Gbytes have been announced. Even 16 Gbytes or 32 Gbytes is not shabby for a workstation.

The system has plenty of I/O ports to support additional devices. It comes with seven external USB 2.0 ports, with five in the back and two in the front, and an internal USB 2.0 port. There are also two external Firewire ports, one in the back and the other in the front, and an IEEE 1394b port via a PCI card.

The xw8400 workstation was tested for performance using PassMark's PerformanceTest software, which can be used for free by anyone for up to 30 days. The system's PassMark score was 1260.7, considerably higher than the entry-level xw4400 reviewed earlier this year, which scored 925.2. The workstation is even faster than some servers previously tested by the Test Center, such as the HP ProLiant DL360 G5 server with a 1.87GHz quad-core Xeon processor, which scored 949.6.

With increased interest in virtualization software and appliances running on virtual machines, Test Center engineers tried out a variety of packages on the workstation. Virtual e-mail archiving packages, virtual network management suites, and virtual security appliances all ran without any hiccups or lags on the system. Engineers also edited large videos and Flash animations on the workstation. The large memory capacity resulted in a smoother and faster video editing experience.

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