Hardware Geeks

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of attending the launch event for the new Z series line of workstations from HP. During the event I saw how HP worked with BMW to design the chassis for the Z Series and heard from their various partners about how these machines have made their jobs easier and how much money they have saved since they started using the Z Series workstations.

About 2 months, HP sent me a Z600 to test out and man does this thing live up to all the hype surrounding it, and I don’t even have the top of the line Z800.

The first thing I did when I got the system was check out the insides, because one of the biggest features in the Z series of workstations is how easy they are to maintain. To show you how easy it is I made a quick video on what the insides look like and how easy it is to remove certain key parts. Check out the video below.

One of the things you may have noticed in the video are the USB ports in the front, there are 9 in total. 6 External and 3 Internal so you’ll have a hard time running out of USB ports on this machine.

You might have also noticed how thin it is, it has a width of 6.5 inches which makes it pretty easy to stick anywhere.

When I turned the Z600 on for the first time, I wasn’t sure it turned on until I saw the blinking lights. That is how quite it was. It sort of felt like when you buy an electric car and turn it on for the first time, it’s so quite you don’t realize it’s on.

Anywho I couldn’t help myself so I installed some games on it, yes I know it’s a workstation but I couldn’t resist, who wouldn’t want to game on two LX5500 processors and 6 GB of memory? Come on you know you would of done the same.

I installed Crysis, The Sims 3 and my all time favorite Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The all played like a dream, no lag no loan load times no nothing just pure fun.

After I gamed for a few days and was impressed with how things went, I ran a benchmark using PCMark Vantage and got a score of 6780. That score seemed pretty low to me so I was surprised. After digging around I discovered that it seems PCMark Vantage doesn’t rate Xeons correctly. Here are a list of benchmarks for similar systems, and the numbers just seem off. Anywho time to move on.

The Z600 I have has 2 Quad Core Xeon L5520 CPUs and 6 GB of memory running on Windows Vista 64-bit, making it the perfect machine for video editing and design work.

So I installed onto the Z600 Adobe Premiere and PhotoShop, Google SketchUp, and TurboCAD 16.

I also had these software’s installed on other machines that aren’t spec’ed as nicely as the Z600 is so I kind of knew what to expect in load times, render speeds etc.

Each of the programs which are resource intensive all opened up quickly, I was even able to have them all open at the same time with no significant slow down to the system. I was even able to run Adobe Premiere have it render a DVD for me while Turbo Cad rendered a 3D model and I was still able to open up Outlook and IE so that I could check my email and browse the web at the same time.

I have seen companies give their employees two or three workstations so that they can multi task, with the Z600 you only need one as its powerful enough to do everything and then some.

Just think of your savings. No need to give employees more than one machine and since you now have fewer machines you have lower maintenance cost.

Have I mentioned how quite the system is? You hear nothing coming from the machine, and even if the side door is open the hum you hear is so low you don’t even notice it.

While working on the Z600 I think I actually got more work done because of how silent it was, I found that I focused better. Not sure if that was because it was so silent or because I digged the power and how quickly I was able to finish task.

Overall the Z600 is an amazing piece of machinery, it’s the perfect solution for any business and with a starting price of just $1,800 it’s an affordable machine.

For more information about the Z600 and the other Z Series Workstations visit: http://www.hp.com/sbso/busproducts-workstations.html

Post Tags: hp  workstation  z series  z 600 

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