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HP xw9300

May 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By S. D. Katz

AMD Opteron 200-Based Workstation Delivers Blinding Speed

The HP xw9300 is HP's latest smoker for digital content creation and the company's first workstation based on the AMD Opteron 200 chipset.

When it comes right down to it, digital content creators, whether they use After Effects or Maya, primarily consider performance, expandability, and price. Other issues are how quiet the box is, how easy it is to add RAM and change out internal peripherals, and style. Because there are plenty of AMD-based motherboards from various manufacturers, workstation performance is really a board-based issue, not a computer-based one. Assembling a box from common components, however, does not guarantee reliability. Today's workstations could contain any of dozens of individual hardware components and software applications, and everything might not work well together. HP addresses that concern, maximizing its system with what it calls the “Performance Tuning Framework.” An advantage in working with a large packager is that these systems are thoroughly and carefully tested.

Before getting to performance issues, here's what's in the amped-up configuration that HP sent to Millimeter for review: The HP xw9300 uses a dual Opteron 200 series motherboard with AMD64 technology and Hyper Transport operating at 2.6GHz. Hyper Transport is an important factor in the xw9300's performance, and it is the internal bus that AMD licenses to Apple for the G5 (at a lower speed than the xw9300). An eight-member nonprofit Hyper Transport Consortium promotes this AMD-developed technology, and any manufacturer, including Intel, can license HT. The actual transport is a low-latency, chip-to-chip I/O bus. It connects all parts of the motherboard, including the microprocessor, memory, PCI, AGP slots, and USB ports. At the moment, HT is the fastest bus on the market (available in various speeds). In the case of the HP xw9300 dual 2.6GHz system, the Hyper Transport operates at 1GHz, bringing the individual link throughput to 8.0GBps. By comparison, the previous version (in the Mac G5) is an 800GHz with throughput of 6.4GBps.

The Opteron 200 series is available in four speeds: Model 246 (2.0GHz), Model 248 (2.2GHz), Model 250 (2.4GHz), and Model 252 (2.6GHz.) I'm reviewing a dual 2.6GHz version, which is the only one that sports Direct Connect Architecture. DCA basically reduces memory latency so the CPU gets information faster. This becomes even more of an issue because the Opteron is 32- and 64-bit enabled to address more RAM. Before we get into the debate of who got to 64-bit first, Apple or AMD, or get bowled over by the math, a reality check. I say, “The Opteron 200 series with 64-bit capability can access up to 1TB of physical memory.” Fine, except that few applications actually address this amount of RAM, and the 64-bit version of Windows XP is currently available in only a trial version. Still, 64-bit OS and software compatibility will be remedied over time as more developers get on board.

Overall Design

A few years ago, workstation cases became BIG.

Absurdly so. This arose from the necessity of cooling hot chips with enough fans to make some boxes sound like airports. The HP xw9300 case is a rackable mini-tower with a large fan sitting right over each chip in the dual configuration sent to me. There is a key lock-protected side panel, and inside there is room for eight registered DIMMs capable of holding a maximum of 16GB of RAM.

The silver and black plastic case has three front-access 5.25in. bays and five internal 3.5in. bays. A 48X CD-RW/DVD combo occupies the top external bay in the review system. Also on the front panel are the power switch and two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire Port, and mini jacks for headphones and a microphone.

The HP xw9300 has a four-channel serial ATA II (SATA II) disk interface ready to go (the drives will be available later in 2005), meaning you can control up to four SATA drives with a peak bandwidth of 300Mbps. The system sent to us for review has a single SATA drive.

On the back of the xw9300 are two serial inputs for keyboard and mouse, four USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire port, an Ethernet port, a microphone jack, and left and right mini jacks for stereo speakers. It's too bad, however, that the front and back FireWire ports are not the 800 version.

The xw9300 also has six expansion slots: two PCI Express x16 graphics, two I/O, and three full-height PCI-X slots (133MHz, and two 100MHz), along with a single full-length PCI slot.

The review box came with dual Nvidia Quadro FX cards that allow for several high-end configurations, such as support for four monitors deployed as a continuous canvas. What's really cool about these twin cards is that they have SLI (Scaleable Link Interface), a feature enabled in the Nvidia Quadro FX 3400 that allows two cards to support parallel rendering on a single frame of video. Developers must take advantage of this technology, which basically allows for higher resolution and more detailed rendering modes.

Ease of Use

The side access cover comes off easily and without the sloppy fitting of my older Dell or the old Intellistations. It fits right back on and snaps into place. Once open, there is room to access the RAM and internal drive bays easily enough, but the slots have the same annoying rickety design that plagues all PC workstations. There is a spring-loaded pressure mechanism to keep the graphic cards in place that has to be removed to access any of the other slots. This is an anti-intuitive design that requires lots of force to remove. Similarly, the reinstall of the protective mechanism is a two-handed affair, which forces you to press down on the graphic cards with too much pressure. It's hard to imagine that there are not better mechanical designers out there who could make more elegant solutions.

The HP LCD panel that came with the xw9300 is a 17in. unit with a very small bezel around the actual viewing panel. Since this is not a display review, I will only mention that the base is remarkably heavy and unusually complex. It's spring-loaded and could probably withstand a direct attack by small artillery. But there is a reason for this: The screen rotates 90 degrees to access two USB ports. In this configuration you can more easily reach the two USB connectors that are buried in the rear of the panel. This is a complex solution to having the ports on the panel frame (as in the Apple Cinema Displays). I was also disappointed that FireWire ports are not included.

Silent Running

There is an underground of “silent computing” users out there (www.silentpcreview.com), and while silence has become an end in itself for these folks, lately they have been winning me over. This is particularly true because I have become more involved in the editing of audio while editing video. PCs are loud mainly because of fans and disk drives. If you are using the Final Cut Pro feature that lets you record narration directly over video in realtime, your whirring PC may be a problem. Generally, the bigger the processor, the noisier the fan. Performance comes at a price. Since the HP xw9300 has monster CPUs, it's a fairly loud box. I did not use a sound level meter, but I did place the xw9300 in the middle of a carpeted room with the room heat off, windows closed, at 12:30 a.m. in a quiet neighborhood. This subjective test is far from perfect, and I repeated it with an older Dell dual processor and the latest G5 (reputedly very quiet). In all cases I let the workstations heat up to get the fans running loudly and then paged the disk to add hard drive noise. The Dell was by far the loudest, and the G5 was very quiet. The HP xw9300 landed in the middle. To place this in context, if I were recording sound for FCP or any sound app — well, it's just not a good idea with any of these computers. This is what happens when you get a $399 sound editing application that is exceptionally powerful and deserves a soundproof studio. Ultimately, HP appears to be average when it comes to acoustic awareness. Quiet computers are still not much of a priority in the industry.

Conclusion

HP is one of the last large computer companies that can support real R&D and worldwide service. In the U.S., the HP xw9300 has a full three-year warranty against defects, with three years of phone-in hardware support, parts, labor, and next-day on-site response. All the main parts of the system are included in the warranty. Additional technical information is available at www.hp.com.

The HP xw9300 is well designed, and although it's not elegantly styled like a G5, the tool-less case and considerable expandability place utility over looks. The dual AMD Opteron series 200 CPUs deliver smoking performance, and for most Photoshop work it was difficult to find operations that were anything less than nearly instantaneous, even on huge files. This is partly due to the dual Nvidia cards and to the fact that the processing power across the industry is fast enough now to hammer out most print work. For 3D and 2D compositing tasks, we are still years away from realtime, all-the-time performance, so the xw9300 is worth every penny it adds to an artist's day rate by rendering files as quickly as possible.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.