Product Reviews

Now that Intel has launched its extravagant 3.06GHz Xeons with 1MB of cache, the old 512KB parts have plummeted into bargain-basement territory. We're talking under £200 for a 2.4GHz Xeon now, which is great news if you're looking for an affordable workstation. The Pentium 4 may have the same amount of cache, not to mention Hyper-Threading technology, but it can't have a dual-processor configuration, and now machines like the HP xw6000 are offering a dual-processor upgrade path for just £1,029.

But price isn't the only thing that could put you off dual processing; the other factor is noise. With several case fans and two CPU fans, it's easy for a workstation to sound like a wind-tunnel experiment. Not the xw6000. HP has come up with an ingenious cooling system where the two rear case fans cool the two CPUs at the same time. This is helped by a plastic shield, which guides the air past a huge heatsink tower on each processor, and the end result is a workstation that's unbelievably quiet.

Only one 2.4GHz Xeon is supplied with the xw6000 AA772A as standard, but if you added another CPU (a helpful sticker inside the side panel shows you how to do this), it wouldn't make the machine any noisier, as both the fans are running anyway. What's more, with two processors, you could execute up to four threads simultaneously with Hyper-Threading enabled.

As it is, the xw6000 can only run two, and it's not particularly fast in applications like LightWave. Our LightWave 7 test frame was rendered in 14 minutes, 37 seconds; a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 does the same test in 11 minutes, 17 seconds. However, a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 costs about £100 more than a 2.4GHz Xeon, and you can't add another processor later either.

It's this kind of open upgrade path that makes the xw6000 tempting as a foundation to build on. The basic £1,029 model doesn't even come with a graphics card, although our review sample came with a basic Quadro4

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200NVS, which costs an extra £108.

This is quite slow and limited by modern standards, though. We ran SPECviewperf 7.1 on the xw6000, where it could only manage an average of 5.4fps in 3ds max, 6.4fps in the ProE-02 test, and parts of the Ugs-03 test ran so slowly that the weighted geometric mean came out at just 0fps. It doesn't even support DirectX 8 and scored just 4,255 in 3DMark2001 SE at 1,024 x 768 in 32-bit colour - bad news for monitoring your work. If you're serious about 3D modelling and animation, we suggest buying the xw6000 without a graphics card and adding a Quadro4 FX1000 instead. A PNY card may cost you an extra £680 from www.dabs.com but it will boost the performance in 3D apps by a phenomenal margin.

But even without a graphics card and monitor, the £1,029 asking price is incredibly cheap for a workstation. So what are you missing out on? The most notable area is hard disk space. You get only 36GB on the supplied Seagate Cheetah 10K.6, but this is still adequate as long as you're not pushing it with video-editing apps. It's also incredibly fast, spinning at 10,000rpm, with the potential of up to 320MB/sec of bandwidth through the integrated Adaptec SCSI Ultra320 controller. The only downer is the violent chugging noise it makes when it's being pushed - this isn't one you'll want to have defragging when you're trying to work.

HP hasn't cut any corners on the memory speed either, with two 256MB PC2100 DDR ECC DIMMs filling two of the four slots. Not only does this mean the Intel E7505 chipset can run in dual-channel mode with the two modules interleaving, but the DIMMs are also rated at CAS 2.5, so latency won't be an issue either.

Otherwise, the specifications list is pretty sparse. There's no removable storage except the floppy drive, and all four of the motherboard's PCI slots are vacant. It's also worth noting that while HP has paid good attention to the design of the cooling system, it hasn't done the same with cable routing. There's little use of cable ties inside, and it's not nearly as neat as the insides of the Boston 7033TR (see issue 106, p56).

But the Boston costs more than twice as much, and the xw6000 provides an affordable workstation with fantastic upgrade potential, not to mention a superb three-year, on-site warranty covering both parts and labour. In its current state, however, the performance and features are the bare minimum for 3D work, and we advise starting out with a faster graphics card and adding a second Xeon if you can afford it.