New Workstation Technology
HP puts together solid machine featuring new 3GHz P4 "C" chip, 800MHz front-side bus
 by Charlie White
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HP Workstation XW4100 review by Charlie WhiteHP sent us its latest XW4100 workstation, and it's sporting some brand new technology inside. Revving under the hood is Intel's newest chip, the P4 3.0GHz C, running alongside a fast new 800MHz front-side bus. The new P4 C also uses Intel's tricky hyperthreading technology, making one chip act like two. All this comes in a pleasing package, a fine product that's the first new desktop from the newly-combined Compaq and HP. Let's take a look.

First, let's just talk about the computer itself. The first thing to impress me? It's quiet. That's always an important consideration if you don't want that whooshing sound akin to a vacuum cleaner roaring inside your head all day. HP has achieved quiet nirvana with the XW4100 -- it's so silent, you can hardly tell it's on. Bravo. It also makes life easy for you with plenty of input-output accommodations, with 1394 (FireWire) inputs front and back, along with USB 2.0 front and back as well. It's easy to open, too, with a car door-like lever inviting you to open it up and take a look inside. It's not as easy to open as a Mac, though, but it's an improvement over the safe-cracking techniques needed to open lots of PCs.
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Click for enlargement -- HP workstation interior
(Click graphic for enlargement) The inside of HP's new workstation features up-to-the-minute components.
Looking inside, you'll see five PCI slots, with four available, along with an AGP 8X slot for your graphics card. Included with our test machine is the NVidia Quadro4 980 XGL 128MB graphics card, a $424 option that certainly can take advantage of that speedy 8X AGP slot. It won't help much for video editing but will certainly accelerate those games you might find yourself playing, after hours, of course. But I think for digi-vid jockeys, a smarter buy would be to save your money by choosing a more basic graphics card and then splurge on, say, a sophisticated audio card instead. I also wish it wasn't necessary to use up a slot for the 1394 card -- how hard can it be to include 1394 on the motherboard? The sound is on the motherboard, as is USB 2.0 and gigabit Ethernet networking, so why not FireWire, too? I remember 1394 developers telling me that FireWire would be on the motherboard of all computers "by the end of the year." That was 1997, six years ago. What's up?

Anyway, there's a lot more nice technology inside this box, with the new 800 MHz front-side bus (FSB) being the star of the show. The fastest FSB available before was a 533MHz chip set, also offered on Intel boxes. This new 800 MHz version offers a wider data path, increasing the bandwidth of the machine so that it matches up well with a gigabyte of speedy PC 2700 DDR-333 RAM included with our test unit. Those numbers all sound impressive, but how much faster does all that technology make the computer run? Well, not much. Take a look at our benchmark tests (table below), the same tests we've been running on various workstations for about a year now, and compare this machine with others we’ve tested. It's faster, but its extra speed is bordering on statistical insignificance. We ran six After Effects benchmarks, each using real-world After Effects projects, three Photoshop benchmarks using smaller files that would be typical of those used by digital video editors, and a new benchmark we're using, CineBench 2003, which tests the computer's raw processor speed while rendering complex graphics. Surprisingly, there's not a whole lot of speed difference between this HP workstation and our previous king-of-the-hill, the Dell 3.06GHz P4 Precision Workstation 350 (which also includes Intel's hyperthreading) we tested a few months ago. I thought, because of the new 800 MHz front-side bus, we'd see a bigger improvement, but no. However, the HP was slightly faster than the Dell, somewhat significant because the new 3GHz P4 "C" chip is running 60MHz slower than the Dell's 3.06GHz P4.

Results in minutes: seconds, winner in boldface type

Dell Precision Workstation 340
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
512 MB RDRAM

 Alienware 2001DV
Intel P4 2.53GHz,
1GB RDRAM

Apple Power Mac G4 Dual 1.25GHz with 1GB DDR RAM


 Dell Precision Workstation 350
Intel P4 3.06 GHz,
1GB PC1066 RDRAM

HP Workstation XW4100 3GHz, 1GB PC 2700 DDR-333 RAM $2520
1. After Effects: Simple Animation :10 :09 :14 :07 :06
2. After Effects: Video Composite 1:12 1:21 1:25 :54 :54
3. After Effects: Data Project 3:01 4:06 3:47 2:05 2:02
4. After Effects: Gambler :32 :38 :43 :29 :28
5. After Effects: Source Shapes 5:54 8:19 7:06 4:14 4:06
6. After Effects: Virtual Set 8:42 9:39 8:15 4:24 4:15
1. Photoshop: Layer styles & transformation :06 :05.1 :07.1 :04.5 :04.3
2. Photoshop: Filter Effects :50 :62.1 :62 35.1 :52.4
3. Photoshop: Manipulations and adjustments :04 :03.5 :04.5 :03.4 :02.8
CineBench 2003 Rendering Time (lower is better)       73.3 sec. 74.0 sec.
CineBench 2003 Rendering (CB-CPU score -- higher is better)     171 360 356


The good news is, the hyperthreading (HT) inside these new Intel chips makes a notable speed difference. Hyperthreading is Intel's technique for making a single processor behave like two, splitting up the data into two parts and processing it separately and simultaneously. This machine, for some reason, arrived with its hyperthreading capability turned off, but a quick trip to the BIOS let us easily turn it on. I'm just wondering, though, how many new users will even know about this default-off state of hyperthreading? If you do end up with a P4 machine with hyperthreading -- that would be, at this writing, a box containing either the 3.06 P4 or this 3.0 P4 C -- be sure it's enabled in the BIOS, because I saw a nearly 20% speed increase with the feature turned on. For example, I ran our After Effects benchmarks with hyperthreading both on and off, and noticed an improvement on every test with hyperthreading enabled. This was especially noticeable in render-intensive routines like benchmark 6, which without hyperthreading completed in 5:37, but with hyperthreading enabled, shaved off more than a minute, at 4:15.


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