Test System: HP XW8400

We received a Hewlett Packard workstation, model 8400, for this review. We found two 15,000 RPM Fujitsu Fujitsu MAX3073RC SAS hard drives in a RAID 0 setup, an Nvidia Quadro FX4500 graphics card and 8 GB of fully buffered DDR2-667 RAM inside the system - not too shabby. The motherboard uses the 5000X chipset and offers a fully-powered x16 PCI Express slot for graphics and two more x4 PCIe slots. One of them is a physical x16 slot, the other one has x4 dimensions. In addition, we found three 64 bit PCI-X slots, which are powered by an Intel 6700PXH PCI-X bridge component, and there is a single 32-bit PCI slot.

The workstation came with a pre-installed Windows XP x64 Edition, which is a good choice for the intended environment. We agreed and used this system for all of our benchmarks and simply exchanged the processors to test Woodcrest and Dempsey as well. You will find all the system specifications on the Hewlett Packard product page. HP expects to start shipping December 11.

The test system was equipped with four 2 GB DDR2-667 FB-DIMMs.