HP xw6200 workstation: the xw6200 provides an excellent price-performance ratio.(Product/Service Evaluation)

With its new line of workstations, Hewlett-Packard enters the world of PCI Express (PCIe), a serial bus technology with much higher speed than conventional PCI. Although it initially will benefit graphics performance, PCI Express can be used for any number of applications.

I reviewed the mid-range HP xw6200, a high-powered workstation for digital content creation. The 6200 can be configured with Linux or Windows XP Professional. The review system came configured with Windows and shipped with a very snazzy 21-inch HP L2035HP flat-panel monitor having excellent image and color quality.

Both attractive and well designed, the xw6200 packs a lot of features into a compact, black enclosure. The workstation is approximately 19 inches high, so it can be turned sideways and placed into a rack, if desired. The front of the case has large cooling fins, room for two external 5.25-inch drives, a power switch, audio, FireWire, and two USB ports. The back of the unit contains the requisite serial, parallel, and mouse ports, along with six USB, two more FireWire, audio, and Gigabit Ethernet connections. I like the overall layout of the case and its quality construction.

Flipping a small latch pops open the side of the case, revealing a well laid out interior with all the cables neatly routed. The card cage is tool-free for easy servicing. The workstation has room for only two internal hard disks, but the drive mounts are toolless and configured so the drives pull straight out easily and without obstruction. Power is provided by a 440-watt power supply, which should handle most expansions fairly easily. Two whisper-quiet fans on the back of the case provide cooling and make this one of the quietest machines I've ever reviewed. This feature combined with its small size make the xw6200 suitable for desktop use. A majority of workstations on the market today have to be tucked under a desk because of size or noise considerations.

The motherboard came configured with dual 3.4GHZ Xeon processors supporting Intel's new EM64 technology, which enables 64-bit applications to run on the machine. This trait will be very important as Linux and Windows move to 64-bit over the next few years. Memory consisted of 2CB of fast ECC RAM. The motherboard supports four standard PCI slots, one 16x PCI Express slot for graphics and another 4x PCIe slot. The motherboard also contains connections for two Serial ATA cables, as ...