HardwareGeeks.com - Review: HP xw4600 Personal Workstation

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Posted by: Michael on Mon, Nov 10th, 2008

was pretty impressed by the portability the HP Compaq Ultra Slim Desktop PC dc7800, I was blown away by the power of the HP xw4600 Personal Workstation.

The HP xw4600 is a great machine for the power office user, such as Radiris who tends to work with excel files with 20 plus tabs and typically take 5 minutes to open up on her slow laptop. (Took less than 10 seconds on the xw4600). It’s also a great machine for digital content creation or photographers which is what I liked the most about the machine. It also can handle CAD pretty darn well.

I have had the HP xw4600 Personal Workstation for about two months now and I have to say and while I am pretty impressed with it. I don’t use wok-stations often so I forget about the power these things have.

The System I had the pleasure to test came pre-installed with Windows XP Pro, Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 Ghz processor, NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 512MB PCIe, 3 GB of memory, 500 GB HDD and a 16x DVD RW.

The first thing I did with the system after powering her up the first time was wonder how it would run Vista, but after speaking with a colleague of mines who installed Vista on his I decided to leave XP Pro on mines and link you to his review so you can see what his experience was like.

Being the type of person who likes a system to boot up fast, I am happy to report that the HP xw4600 is probably one of the fastest booting systems I have personally used in a while, from the time I hit the power button to the desktop loading, it took less than 35 seconds, and in the world of business when time is money a quick boot saves money.

When the system was up and running, I installed Office and opened up a rather large access database along with some large excel files. I opened them simultaneously and the system handled the load pretty well. This really impressed me as my AMD Desktop with a quad core CPU sometimes stumbles when opening those files alone, let alone simultaneously.

I then tested out AutoCAD on the machine, and again I was impressed how the system handled the load. I honestly am jealous.
The power from the CPU and the Graphics card combine to deliver a powerful experience that won’t slow you down.

The wx4600 is also energy efficient with an 80+ rating. HP also offers tools to help make your workstations energy friendly, so if you want to go green the wx4600 is for you.

If you like to customize your systems look, HP also offers skins for the wx4600 from their SkinIt site, mines is currently decorated with flames.

Overall the system is a powerful workstation and it handled everything I threw at it, and a definite must have for any business large or small.