State of the Art: HP's XW8200 Workstation

By David Em, Alex Pournelle

August 2, 2004

(State of the Art: HP's XW8200 Workstation :  Page 1 of 1 )

PC workstations are at a curious point in their evolution. On one hand—contrary to Moore's Law—CPU processing speeds have become incremental instead of revolutionary. Until some radical leap forward such as an eight-processor workstation or an AI-based operating system, we've reached a relatively flat spot on the curve of PC innovation. Even the upcoming Windows Longhorn OS looks more like a short jump than a quantum leap, though the next two years could prove otherwise.

On the other hand, scientific, engineering, and entertainment community power users are eager to take advantage of a potential new level of performance made possible by data pipeline improvements such as Serial ATA, faster memory, a faster CPU bus, and the new PCI Express graphics card standard.

For the last month, we've been testing HP's new xw8200 workstation, which incorporates all four of these pipeline improvements as well as the latest Intel Xeon processors and the ability to address up to 16 GB of RAM. Hopefully, application software developers will soon take advantage of all this horsepower, particularly the RAM count, but in our tests we found so far that's not the case.

Inside and Out

Our first impression of the xw8200 was of a well-built, thoughtfully designed workstation. Its chrome and charcoal case shows a common ancestry with its predecessor, the xw8000. There's a slightly redesigned front-panel about halfway up the case for two USB 2, one FireWire, and two audio ports. There are also six USB 2 ports and one FireWire port on the back panel. The front-panel 5-1/4" bays will hold three half-high devices (ours came with an optional 3-1/2" floppy in the third).

Once we opened the tool-less side panel, we found subtle internal layout differences from the xw8000. CPU cooling is now horizontal instead of the xw8000's "volcano" cooling layout. A variable-speed back-panel fan never runs above a whisper in normal operation.

 Page 1 of 1