The Task Manager showing 4 CPUs! All images courtesy of Bryan Hoff.

If you crave productivity and reject futility, it may be time to look at a brand new HP graphics workstation. The system I received for review was an xw8400 and included two dual core Intel Xeon 5160 processors running at 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 video card with 256MB RAM and a 73GB Serial Attached SCSI hard drive running at 15,000 RPM. This is the story of how my productivity went through the roof.

The proverb “a watched pot never boils” translates rather well to the 3D graphics world, as “a watched bucket never renders.” There’s nothing more painful than watching and waiting as each small square render bucket fills in to complete your test image. When you’re experimenting with lighting or textures it’s even harder to bear. Imagine my joy as I watched four buckets rendering at once, rapidly popping up in a new location as each region was completed. HP’s new xw8400 workstation puts that reworked axiom to bed while allowing you to get down to work.

Pricing and Configuration
The new HP workstations are provided in four tiers: entry, mid, high Intel and high AMD. As I mentioned, the particular unit I reviewed was a $6,432 Intel-based system with two dual core Xeon processors and 4GB RAM, but you can have your system equipped with up to four dual core processors and 64GB RAM. What I neglected to mention is that the system will happily accommodate two video cards in SLI mode with its 2x16 PCI-E slots. Are you getting excited yet?

The HP xw8400 computer.

Putting the HP Through Its Paces
First I wanted to see how well the xw8400 handled view port rendering, so I loaded some of the scenes included on the 3ds Max 8 DVD. First I opened ButcherBoy_Rigged_JolyonWebb.max and then Viewport-Dragon.max, both with view ports set to Maximized, Smooth + Highlights. The scenes played back perfectly in realtime.

Next, I decided to create some complex objects of my own. 3ds Max choked when I created a cube and then repeatedly tessellated its faces or applied a MeshSmooth modifier and cranked up the iterations. The magic number for both systems (the HP and my Athlon 1200) seemed to be nine iterations of MeshSmooth. Switching it to 10 caused Max to run out of memory and close. Of course, any system dealing with an inordinate number of faces in a given scene is going to come to a crawl sooner or later, and nine iterations of MeshSmooth results in a cube with 1,572,864 faces. While both systems ran out of memory, the HP system was never unresponsive for more than a few seconds, whereas my Athlon system became catatonic for five minutes at a time.

Finally, I opened a scene from an old project I worked on: a model of Alcatraz depicting an entire prison wing, and containing 8,140,776 faces. Not surprisingly, the HP couldn’t render a preview of this scene in realtime, but it did open the file quite quickly: about 24 seconds as opposed to 1:06 minutes on my Athlon system. Rendering the scene took a mere 2:05, compared to 15:38 on the Athlon. Even launching Max was painless, at 6 seconds on the xw8400 vs. 35 seconds on my own system.