Review: The Dual-Xeon, HP xw6600 Workstation

But evaluating a system means a lot more than just running benchmarking software. Stability, long-term life cycles and support for high-octane, 64-bit applications are traits that we need to consider when looking at workstations for engineers, designers, video editors and others.

How well does a workstation support 3-D? How well does it handle audio? How many virtual machines, including virtual servers, can it run? These and other considerations have to be thought out by solution providers, unless they want to field a lot of phone calls from flustered customers who are engineers and designers.

The Test Center has taken a look at Hewlett-Packard's HP xw6600 Workstation; it came to us against the backdrop of headlines about Intel's Core i7 processor -- a chip and platform that smashed all records we previously held for CPU and system performance on desktops and in the data center. But HP is no typical workstation manufacturer. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has a long history of engineering and design excellence.

A pre-brief with company representatives several weeks ago led to the company loaning us a system for review with specifications that we agreed made sense: A dual-Xeon workstation, running E5440s at 2.83GHz, an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 512MB graphics card, 8GB of DDR2 memory and preloaded with Windows Vista Business 64-bit.

This is not a configuration for simple word processing, e-mail and solitaire. It also arrived preloaded with Adobe's CS3. Without overclocking, the system registered a score of 8,498, using the 64-bit version of Geekbench 2 by Primate Labs. It was one of the highest scores we've ever seen.

What does the performance mean in a practical sense? In the lab, the system was able to run two virtual machines (via Sun's VirtualBox) of Windows Server 2003; launch the 3D version of Microsoft's Virtual Earth mapping application; and run a 3-D flight simulator -- without any noticeable latency to a single application.

With this system, HP has designed a high-performing system with excellent thermals. Running for several hours with various workloads, the xw6600 was mostly cool to the touch and, essentially, room temperature except for the small area of the rear exhaust fan, which was still a comparatively mild 98 degrees. The nice thermals come at a small price; the system threw as much as 72 decibels of sounds, primarily from the fans built into the system. For a dual-Xeon workstation, though, it was fine. The system consumed about 150 watts of power running a standard load.

The xw6600 also supports dual monitors out of the box.

The configuration we examined came in at just under $5,000 -- which is about on par with several potential configurations of PCs built with Intel's "Nehalem" Core i7 965 Extreme processor.

What's important to remember about the system is that it was built to an industry-standard specification, supports Windows Vista 64-bit as well, or better than, most machines you're likely to see, performs like a champ and -- not least -- showed itself to be highly stable. There's a lot of value in the HP xw6600 Workstation, especially with a dual-Xeon configuration, and it easily rates a top score of "5" in technical stars.