The Hewlett-Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is the first ever recipient of The SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.

Why?

The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.

This workstation embodies the very best of the massive amount of engineering IP and manufacturing prowess HP has amassed over the past nearly four decades.

I have been in possession of a copy of this fine system for the past couple of months.

The HP xw8600 Personal Workstation
The xw8600 sits at the top of HP’s line of personal workstations, and is powered by your customizable choice of several Intel Xeon processors. As the top system in the workstation line, the xw8600 is configurable in so many ways that even the most demanding of users/companies will be accommodated.

Immediately, you notice that this system is built for speed, reliability, expandability, and power.

Unboxing
I took no unboxing pictures, for I was too excited tearing the box and setting the system on its testing pedestal.

However, some pictures of the unboxed xw8600 are below.

Target
The xw8600 is targeted at the upper end of the personal workstation segment. Indeed, if you require more processing power, you would have to get a cluster of these workstations together, or obtain budget authorization for a supercomputer.

For upper-echelon digital content creation producers, architectural design, engineering, oilfield and geologic/geophysical telemetry and analysis, and Wall Street types, this system is perfect. And without peer.

It is that powerful!

However, that power left me in a conundrum: how do I test such a system correctly, sufficiently reaching its performance headroom, and tasking components and subsystems in real world scenarios?

Have no fear though; I was up to the task.

Review Scenarios
In order to adequately review the xw8600, I set up a test scenario using each of the professions listed above. I also configured the system to serve as my command center for my managed services operations.

Scenario 1: Digital Content Creation
For the digital content creation or DCC testing, I used two tools to create content: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium and Microsoft Expression Studio 2.

The xw8600 seemingly made a mockery of the tasks I threw its way in this scenario, though a double-secret script I was given utilized all eight cores, and pushed the CPU’s VU meters to 100%. Even then, memory utilization was quite low.

Scenario 2: Architectural Design
Taking a different tack, I decided to be use Microsoft’s Caligari TrueSpace v7.6 to create a dream home.

While free, TrueSpace is not for the faint of heart. However, it allows even design neophytes such as yours truly, John Obeto, to be really creative.

I started with basic design, and then moved to using it to create a basic animation of the building.

The fluidity with which the twin NVIDIA FX5600 GPUs handled 3D modeling is just impressive. I was able to manipulate and modify my design very fluidly, without hiccups.

After getting somewhat depressed by the difference between what I wanted in the home as evidenced by my creation, and what I can afford, I pulled the plug.

However, I will gladly let HP provide me with the dream home I designed, so that I might re-test the xw8600.

Scenario 3: Structural Engineering
I drew on my earlier-in-life training to use AutoCAD and the xw8600 in an attempt to perform flow analysis of a part I designed.

Conclusion: design using the xw8600 = easy. Me, I need more classes, these past couple of decades away from the field having caused my design skills to atrophy.

Scenario 4: Oilfield Services and Geological Analysis
Geological analysis is one of the sectors that must be on the radar of the designers of this system.

As a result, I decided to use the xw8600 as the workstation for an oilfield services engineer.

In order to do this, I employed the resources of a client, a global oilfield services company, in the setting up of a client station with their software suite, allowing a selected user to use the xw8600 for the following:

• Perform decision analysis using stochastic modeling uncertainty
• Graphically determining casing setting depth
• Automated drilling control software
• Drilling reporting
• Project management
• Casing design
• (Oil) Well control software

It was cool seeing this guy warm up to the xw8600 as it performed his tasks easily, and I was most pleased when he looked totally dejected as I took his new ‘toy’ away from him.

I have informed his superiors at a certain French oilfield services company that we will be glad to furnish their entire African operation with HP xw8600 Personal Workstations. For a small fee, of course.

Scenario 5: Financial Services
Another target for this system has to be the financial analysis market.

For my review scenario here, I downloaded several client software packages from online brokerages and proceeded to install them on the xw8600.

Running all of them simultaneously, and reviewing the result of the four-monitor setup, my untrained eyes went straight into information overload.

Calming down, I tried to track trends, stocks, and futures like the pros, only using imaginary money. The week spent doing that was a revelation since it came during a time of great uncertainty in the (US) stock markets, and it provided me with results that were surprising.

Scenario 6: Remote Operations Center Console
One of the reasons I use a powerful desktop, or a converted server is that I want to have a system powerful enough to allow me to monitor and control our MSP operations from my remote locations, if required.

Enter the xw8600. This computer didn’t blink. With all the stuff I threw at it, it just kept on working. At all times, I kept a watchful eye of CPU utilization, which never seemed to want to get over 20%.

Scenario 7: Mega-tasking
The hardest task I took the xw8600 through was during my virtualization tests.

Since the system had passed each of the tests with excellence, I needed something so out there that it would bring the dual X5492s to a halt.

Mega-tasking

Mega-tasking
Mike Diehl taught me that word.

When I was up at the HP Personal Workstation Business Unit in Fort Collins, Colorado, a while back, I had the privilege of being briefed by Mike, who is a Product Manager for the high-end workstations for HP.

Describing the roles and computing activities required by purchasers of such a system, and the many tasks I would perform as a power user, Mike let me know that I had gone past the power user level to a whole new realm – that of a mega-tasker. The sort of user for whom the xw8600 was conceived.

A true light-bulb moment.

What better way to task this machine to the fullest than by employing virtualization.

I cleaned out the xw8600, installed Windows Vista x64 Ultimate edition and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2* on it, and proceeded to create virtual machines, all Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

I then proceeded to replicate all of the test scenarios above, apart from the oilfield services scenario for which I did not possess the necessary software, and would not be making a return trip to their offices before I posted this review.

After setting up each scenario in a discrete VM, I brought each VM online until I had six VMs running concurrently. It was a remarkable sight!

It was at this time that the xw8600 started to show some signs of actually working, as opposed to the seemingly mocking 12% to 18% CPU utilization, I was seeing consistent readings above 50%.

Yet, my TrueSpace animation stayed fluid, indicating that even with such a heavy load, the graphics subsystem was not even doing anything more strenuous than reading the Sunday paper!

I was impressed!

*For this review, I have not used any unauthorized software. However, wink-wink, nod-nod, I know the xw8600 works well, and very well too, with both Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, and Windows Hyper-V Server 2008.

*Furthermore, following PDC 2008, I hope to bring you a review of the xw8600 running those hypervisors, and….tada…Windows 7 alpha bits.

Conclusions
One of the things we tend to forget as a result of the Lego-like nature of the PC and workstation industry standard architecture, or ISA, is that simply plopping best-of-breed components into a fancy box does not a true workstation create.

A workstation, by its very nature, is like a tractor for the task it is designed for, unsexy, yet powerful and reliable.

HP’s Personal Workstation line embodies the very best of HP’s heralded engineering heritage, and it shows. From the entry-level xw4600, to the silent xw6600, and now the xw8600, I have reviewed a line of well-engineered and constructed workstations. (The nightmare of the beating these babies take at the physical testing and dropping facility at HP’s Workstation BU still scares me…)

The HP xw8600 is the best workstation on the market today. Period.

In every aspect, this workstation excels: engineering, build, configurability, reliability, future proofing, support, and power. The indomitable way it resolutely completes assigned tasks is just impressive

I tasked this unit to the max, each time trying to get it to sputter in protest; however, I could not achieve that. It just worked. Very well. Reliably, too. Moreover, with extreme dispatch.

There is no doubt that it will take and incredibly monstrous task to bring this system down, or at least slow it somewhat. It will do the work assigned to it in virtually all task scenarios.

The results of our review of this system placed us in a quandary: what honor do you award a product that has excelled in all facets? A product that went beyond excellence? Indeed, a product for which excellence could be described as ‘mere’, and just a starting point?

With that in mind, the editors at SmallBizVista.com decided to create an entire new class of award, one to be given only to those products we deem as going way beyond excellence.

Since the Hewlett Packard xw8600 Personal Workstation is simply the best deskside system in the world, we have honored it with the SmallBizVista.com Absolute Best Award.

 

Review configuration
In my review configuration, this xw8600 came with

• Dual Intel Xeon X5492 quad-core processors speeding along at 3.40 GHz,
• 16 GB of DDR2-800 ECC FDB RAM,
• Dual Nvidia Quadro FX5600 graphics processors, each sporting 1.5 GB of video RAM,
• a 250 GB 7,200 RPM SATA 3.0 hard drive as the primary, and
• Dual 300 GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives in a RAID 0 configuration as the secondary. Also sporting eSATA, as well as several available internal drive bays, you know this rig was configured to burn rubber.

While this system looks loaded for bear, and for most humanoid inhabitants of this planet, it might be overkill, please understand that this configuration is just about at the midlevel of what the HP xw8600 can actually do.

Apart from the wicked fast Intel X5492 Xeons (top-of-the-line) and the insanely powerful dual FX5600 graphics (top, too), everything else was pretty average.

Look at the maximum configurations you can achieve in the xw8600:

• RAM: up to 128 GB, with 16 DIMM slots and 8 GB DIMMs
• Hard drives: up to 5 TB spread over 5 SATA drives; several configurations using the onboard SAS controller
• Drive bays: 5 internal hard drive bays, and 3 external drive bays
• Expansion slots, 7 full-length slots, including 2 PCIe x16 Gen 2 Graphics

All these with configuration options allowing for 80 PLUS efficiency ratings.

For this test, I used four monitors, an HP w2207h 22” monitor (variable view, portrait or landscape), a Viewsonic vx2235 22” monitor, and dual HP w2007 20” monitors.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank everyone that made this happen, with my most gracious thanks going to Amy Reardon and HP. Jeff Wood, Will Wade, and the entire Personal Workstation team at HP, Mike Diehl for expanding my vocabulary, and finally Marco Pena and Edelman.