HardwareGeeks.com - HP Personal Workstations

Posted by: John on Thu, Jun 05th, 2008

Yesterday, I was at the HP facility in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was briefed on HP’s offerings in the workstation space.

I went in to see what the offerings were with a view to finding out more information about the systems, and to see if they would pass muster, and become Logikworx’s recommended line of workstations, replacing our current line.

In a nutshell, I came away impressed.

Impressed with the range, power, pricing, and engineering that has gone into the HP workstations.

I was also shocked to find out that my engineering past had let to a tunnel vision as regards HP in workstations.

“We have been doing this for over two decades,” said Jeff Wood, Director of Product Marketing for Personal Workstations for HP, “and as a result, we are close to capturing the top spot in workstations using ISA (industry-standard architecture).”

That assertion was an eye-opener for me, since I always assumed that Sun and the lamented SGI held the top spots.

HP workstations also utilize both Intel and AMD CPUs, and AMD (ATI) and Nvidia GPUs, satisfying a great range of operational and personal preferences. Being CPU and GPU agnostic might be one of the reasons HP is taking share from competitors.

These systems have been designed with HP’s customary attention to detail, aesthetics, and with user ergonomics factored in. For example, despite the fact that I was in a demo room with over ten, yes, ten (10) low to high end workstations demoing away in the very finest, and tasking the underlying systems to boot, the sound emanating from all those systems was less than that of my current gaming system, it with its’ 1000-watt PSU!

The HP workstations range from the xw4550 on the low end to the xw4600, thexw6600 in the mid-range, and the xw8600/xw9400 at the high end.
The xw6600, if I remember correctly, is the first desktop dual-socket quad-core, small form factor, personal workstation in the market today.(That baby is the quietest system I have ever encountered!)

The xw8600 and the xw9400 are quasi-complimentary, with the xw8600 line using the very latest Intel quad-core Xeons. The xw9400 series uses the quad-core AMD Opteron (Barcelona) microprocessors. . I remember at the launch of AMD’s Barcelona (quad core Opteron), HP was one of the companies touted by AMD as a world-class partner.

The workstation as a personal desktop system

In the quest to satisfy our cravings for more power on the desktop in order to adequately perform our daily tasks, quite a few of us have taken to getting fully decked-out gaming systems as desktop units.

This is especially true in the architectural, digital content creation, engineering, and drug-discovery fields. At Logikworx, more than one client has expressed the desire to use either a VoodooPC or some other gaming rig to get compute-intensive work done. I almost purchased a Blackbird 02 system ad my dev system several weeks ago because I needed more power!

Well, look no further!

The HP Personal Workstation range starts with pricing at $599 USD for the xw4550 series. That is not a typo! $599!

In the next few weeks, and stretching over several months, I will be reviewing the entire range of HP’s personal workstations in several usage scenarios and posting those reviews here, and accepting feedback on a forum dedicated to the topic.

All these systems are available today.