Eight Heavy-Hitting NT Workstations

With the 440LX chip set at the helm, the Pentium II steers its way clear to
workstation nirvana.

Michelle Campanale

You can't ignore the dramatic shift occurring in the PC industry now. Traditional Intel-based Windows systems are aggressively moving into markets previously dominated by Unix workstations and high-powered Macs. These PC workstations, which run Windows NT and are based on the Pentium II (PII) processor with the 440LX chip set, run at breakneck speeds of 300 MHz. Many vendors even provide the power, drivers, and BIOSes that allow an upgrade to the 333-MHz version of the PII p rocessor, soon to be released. At such speeds, these systems are fully powered for applications such as CAD, animation, financial analysis, and digital-content creation.

Future-generation PII processors are expected to run even faster, at a speed of 400 MHz. With Intel's upcoming 440BX chip set, these processors are expected to support a 100-MHz system bus. Therefore, PII systems with the 440LX chip set may have limited upgradability beyond 333 MHz.

On the up side, the PII with the 440LX chip set has add-ons that can better capitalize on the PII's abilities. In our roundup, we see some exciting new features of the 440LX, such as support for Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP), error-correction code (ECC) RAM, synchronous DRAM (SDRAM), and Ultra DMA hard drives.

Indeed, the 440LX chip set surpasses the 440FX chip set (which is its predecessor) on several levels, making it ideal for use in high-end workstations. Additionally, when the PII with the 440BX chip se t rolls out, you can expect prices to drop on systems based on the PII with the 440LX chip set.

Habits of a Highly Effective Chip Set

The 440LX chip set is compatible with AGP, which gives graphics chips dedicated access to main memory. Many gamers and content creators have recently become aware of the possible applications for this technology, which provides a 66-MHz pipeline between the 440LX chip set and the graphics processor, and boosts system performance. AGP's main benefit, though, is that it removes the graphics accelerator from the PCI bus.

Motherboards based on the PII with the 440LX chip set also support PCI graphics cards, which we based our graphics tests on. In truth, few applications can currently exploit AGP other than games and perhaps Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML). Nor is there native OS support for AGP, though Windows 98 and NT5.0 should change that. For this roundup, standards-based OpenGL application tests did the trick for us, in our quest to name the best graphics subsystem.

Another important addition to the 440LX is ECCRAM, which detects and corrects both single-bit errors and double-bit errors on the fly. This makes the PII with the 440LX chip set ideal for high-end workstations, because it works well in systems that are designed to run critical applications where data integrity is vital.

We're also seeing support for SDRAM, which can boost overall system performance by synchronizing itself with the CPU's bus. Replacing extended data out (EDO) DRAM in many newer computers, SDRAM is capable of running at 100 MHz, about three times faster than conventional fast page-mode (FPM) DRAM. That's about twice as fast as both EDODRAM and burst extended data out (BEDO) DRAM.

The 440LX chip set also has Ultra DMA hard drive support, which enables faster IDE-device transfer rates. Ultra DMA, which is a protocol that was developed by Quantum and Intel, supports burst-mode data transfer rates of 33.3 Mbps. This is twice as fast as the previous disk drive standard for PCs and is necessary to take advantage of faster Ultra ATA disk drives. (However, all the systems we tested included hard drives with anywhere from 4.3 to 9.1 GB of space with SCSI-based controllers, running the gamut from SCSI-2 to Ultra Wide SCSI.)

Finally, like the 440FX chip set, the 440LX chip set also supports symmetric multiprocessing (SMP), which provides fast performance by making multiple CPUs available to complete the individual processes simultaneously. Many of the workstations that we tested were available with an extra, empty slot.

Heavy-Duty Hardware

Makers of high-end workstations are racing to provide 300-MHz systems that scream. We asked vendors to send in their best-performing systems based on the PII with the 440LX chip set. We were sent eight systems, from Compaq, DTK, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intergraph, Micro Express, Polywell, and Xi. All were high-performance NT-based PC workstations. Unfortunately, Dell didn't have any NT workstati ons with the 440LX chip set. Also, Digital Equipment, NetPower, NEC, Gateway 2000, and Micron were not able to send systems in time to meet our test deadline.

For this roundup, we wanted to see how NT workstations with PCI-based graphics cards and a minimum of 4 MB of video RAM, 128 MB of system RAM, and a 3-GB or higher hard drive stacked up against each other. We looked for top performance across the board and used a number of standards-based benchmarks, paying special attention to C++, Viewperf, and Fourier tests, which represent the bit-crunching applications that are synonymous with high-end workstations. We ran all tests under NT 4.0 Workstation with Service Pack 3, including C++, Fourier, Viewperf (CDRS-03, DX-03, and AWADVS-01), Bapco Sysmark 4.0 for NT, Access, InterMark, and BYTEmark.

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Contributors

Steve Platt
, Managing Editor/NSTL 

Dorothy Hudson
, Project Manager/NSTL

Maryanne Eves
, Acquisitions Edi
tor/NSTL

Michelle Campanale
, Technical Editor/BYTE

Linda Higgins
, Editorial Associate/BYTE

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300-MHz of Power in the Workstation

illustration_link (84 Kbytes)

Illustration based on the Intergraph TDZ 2000 3D.