Remember the Xeon? It was Intel’s leading-edge processor for PC-based workstations in the late 1990s. Then it was eclipsed by AMD’s Opteron processor. Now the Xeon is back in the headlines with a vengeance.

On June 26 of this year, Intel released its first dual-core Xeon processors, code-named Woodcrest. According to Intel, the new 5100 series, dual-core Xeons perform as much as three times faster than previous single-core processors. Intel also claims the 5100 series is as much as 60 percent faster than the Opteron. You have to take Intel’s benchmark results with a grain of salt, though it’s clear the Xeon-based workstations are now fully competitive with Opteron-based workstations.

The new Xeon processor is the engine that drives the xw8400. That’s HP’s new line of Xeon workstations, just as the xw9300 is HP’s line of Opteron workstations. In addition to running faster than previous Xeons, the new Xeons run significantly cooler. HP’s xw8200 workstation, which uses the previous Xeons, has a power envelope of around 120 watts per processor. The xw8400 with the 5100 series Xeons has a power envelope of less than 70 watts per processor. As a result, the xw8400 runs cooler and is quieter than you would expect for such a powerful system. Because it runs more efficiently, it’s more compact than you might expect, too. It measures 17.9 inches high, 8.3 inches wide and 20.7 inches deep. The xw8400 sent for review looked and sounded more like a standard desktop computer than a powerful workstation.

I was also impressed by the expandability of the xw8400. Using 2 GB DIMMs (which should be available by the time you read this), you can fill out the eight memory slots to a total of 16 GB of system RAM. Even more impressive, when 4 GB DIMMs are available later this year, you’ll be able to bring the system to a whopping 32 GB of RAM. When 8 GB DIMMs are available sometime in the future (assuming you can afford them), you’ll be able to expand this workstation to a mammoth 64 GB of RAM, the maximum amount allowed with the current Intel chipset. If editing large video files from RAM is important for your work, the xw8400 should be at or near the top of your shopping list.

The same goes for storage-starved professionals who find themselves continually adding hard drives in order to have everything close at hand. The xw8400 can handle as many as five internal SATA (Serial ATA) or five internal SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drives. You can also have as many as three optical disc drives. Seven expansion slots provide for three PCIe cards, three PCI-X cards and one legacy PCI card. Like the TARDIS spacecraft in the Doctor Who television series, the xw8400 seems to have more room inside than would appear from the outside.

HP offers a wide range of professional-class graphics adapters for this model, including the relatively inexpensive NVIDIA NSV 285 (with 128 MB of memory), the mid-priced ATI FireGL V7200 (with 256 MB of RAM) and the high-end NVIDIA Quadro 4500 (with 512 MB of RAM). If you choose the Quadro 4500, you’ll have the option of adding a Quadro G-Sync card, which can genlock the graphics output from an external source. The same combination of cards can also frame-lock signals from multiple displays in order to create a single large virtual display. The review unit was equipped with an NVIDIA Quadro 1500, which is a mid-priced workstation graphics card with 256 MB of RAM.

The review unit also featured two dual-core Xeon 5160 processors running at 3.0 GHz, 2 GB of system RAM, two 80 GB SATA hard drives and a 48X DVD-ROM/CDRW combo drive. All configurations of the xw8400 provide for three external 5.25-inch and five internal 3.5-inch drive bays, seven USB 2.0 ports (two in front, five in back) and two 1394 ports (one in front, one in back). The motherboard has built-in connections for five SATA drives and four SAS drives. If you want to use a fifth SAS drive, you’ll have to add an SAS controller to handle the last drive.

Even though the Xeon processor runs significantly cooler than previous generation processors, all these expansion options could quickly erase the power and heat savings from the processor. Though I wasn’t able to fully populate the bays and slots to max out the system, I could see that the review unit was cooled by four fans: one placed over each of the processors, one placed over the DIMM slots and one large fan positioned over the back of the unit. Also standard is an 800-watt power supply, which should be able to support just about anything you throw at it.

The xw8400 performed admirably with all the software programs I tried, including rendering and video editing programs that didn’t directly support multiple core, multiple processor or hyper-threading technologies. The system’s 1333 MHz front-side bus speed (this is the first processor to support that speed) provides a lightning-fast communications path between the processor and memory.

If you’re looking for a system that lets you load up with RAM and edit your video files from memory, the xw8400 is currently one of the best choices around. If you tend to run other applications while rendering in the background, you’ll find that its speedy dual-core Xeon processor (or processors) can give you back control of your desktop even when rendering highly complex scenes. For those who can afford to step up to a Xeon system like the xw8400 the reward will be a workstation that remains competitive well into the future. It’s a first-class, well-designed machine that’s powerful enough and expandable enough to
handle almost any task.