xw6400 workstation

What’s in a name? A name like xw6400 doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, unless you work in the marketing department of a large PC and business technology corporation. This missing creative impact sums up the problem facing HP’s PC division and its new workstation range. These are boring boxes aimed at business users. The company wants to get more involved in the creative space – as its current TV ads show – but can it?

This lack of insight into the needs of creatives means that anyone buying this machine gets a generic high-spec fast business PC, without the tweaks or extras that add appeal. HP’s Cool Tools come pre-installed, but are just a collection of back-up, recovery and performance-tuning features. Useful enough, but not quite pitched at your typical designer.

There is lost opportunity to make these workstations more accessible for design professionals. In terms of price and performance – if not in looks and extras – these are powerful and attractive machines. They run cool and quiet, an obvious plus in any design environment, and the impressive dual-core Xeon-based architecture offers plenty of speed.

Our quad-core 2GHz test machine clocked up a speedy 19 seconds on a Photoshop zoom blur test. By comparison, a generic dual-core Athlon 4200+ took 26 seconds, and a 2.17GHz MacBook Pro running Windows XP under BootCamp took a disappointing 40 seconds.

With core speeds of up to 3GHz available, this HP is not a slow PC. The quad-core option is currently a speculative purchase, as only a couple of software products in the 3D market can use four cores and Windows XP remains dual-core. With Vista, all four cores will come into their own, or alternatively HP can pre-install a variant of Linux.

Up to 16GB of DDR2 memory can be installed – although again, Vista or Linux will be needed to make use of more than 2GB. Our test machine came with an NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 card. This offers a digital resolution of two times 1,920x1,200, but there’s no support for the largest dual-DVI 30-inch monitors. You can buy a more sophisticated card – in fact the HP can support up to eight monitors – but it’s disappointing not to get more out of the box.

It’s a similar story with disk space, which starts at miserly 80GB, albeit at 15,000rpm. This increases to just 250GB – only about half the starter size you want in a professional graphics, video or 3D workstation.

Overall the picture is mixed. The top-end variants are very fast indeed. As a PC there’s no OS X support, but this range offers the same sort of Windows power as a MacPro at roughly half the price. The catch is that HP doesn’t seem to have realised that dual-DVI large monitor support and generous disk space are essential components for a graphics workstation. You can add these at a little extra cost, but it would have been smarter of HP to do this for you.