Compaq Evo W4000

The Pentium 4 has consistently lagged behind the Athlon XP in our 2D benchmarks, but 3D has often been a different story. The Athlon has the upper hand in raw processing power per clock and now even has some help from SSE. However, the Pentium 4 has the second-generation SSE2 and, armed with 512Kb of on-die Level 2 cache represented by the 'A', the 2AGHz Pentium 4 is a feature-laden chip that should make light work of 3D rendering and anything else that can utilise the extra instructions.

What's more, if you hook it up to one of Nvidia's CAD-optimised Quadro chipsets, you can expect even quicker performance. This must have been precisely what Compaq thought when it put together the plans for its Evo W4000 workstation.

Things got off to a good start when we opened the Evo's box and revealed a swish and stylish case finished in silver and black. It doesn't come with a monitor as standard, but our review sample arrived with a matching 15in Compaq TFT5030 monitor, which will cost an extra £479.

However, once we fired up the PC, we realised - to our horror - that Compaq hadn't installed the correct drivers for the Quadro2 and had instead relied on the default Windows XP driver. If you buy this machine, it's worth checking this and upgrading to the latest Nvidia Detonator drivers before you start any work - we tested with version 27.48.

However, once you're up and running, you'll find the Evo incredibly fast. It even outperformed the latest Quadro4 750 XGL (see p130) in our dual Athlon XP 1900+ test bed in some of the SPECviewperf tests, most notably the medMCAD generic CAD benchmark. The only tests it was notably slower in was the ProCDRS industrial design benchmark and the Alias/Wavefront test, although the Evo was still faster than the FireGL 2 in these areas.

The Quadro2 started to crawl more noticeably in the more generic Direct3D and OpenGL tests, with a 3DMark2001 score of 3,445 at 1,280 x 1,024 in 32-bit colour, compared with the Quadro4's 6,943 and a Serious Sam frame rate of 40.4fps against the Quadro4's 76.4fps.

It may surprise you that Compaq has only gone for a Quadro2 in its current range of workstations, but the good news is that Compaq - along with HP - has announced that it will use Quadro4 graphics cards in its future workstations, which may well be worth holding out for. You can purchase the Evo without the Quadro2 graphics card, save yourself £450 and shop around for a cheaper card elsewhere, although you may well still benefit from buying the system as a whole from Compaq - graphics card, monitor and system unit.

The main reason you might want to do this is to take advantage of the standard three-year, on-site warranty, which guarantees next-business-day service that includes parts and labour.

In terms of raw 2D performance, the W4000 isn't quite so hot, with a lowly overall score of 4.40 in our 2D benchmarks, and a 2D graphics benchmark of just 6.76, compared to the 9.08 from Armari's R760AX dual 1.66GHz Athlon MP 2000+ workstation (see p111). This, however, is still more than enough for day-to-day use, and the Pentium 4's contribution to OpenGL graphics performance more than makes up for it.

Features are a different story altogether, however. The Evo is a barren desert of a workstation, but this also provides a wide-open upgrade path for future expansion. The 512Mb of PC2100 memory is supplied on a single DIMM, which leaves another socket free on the Compaq Intel 845D motherboard. But, more importantly, the lack of PCI cards means that three slots are left free on the microATX mainboard, and a further two are available on the P30 extension card underneath.