HP Compaq nw8000: this mobile workstation enables the creation of professional-level graphics on the road.

For a long time, having a powerful graphics workstation and a portable workstation were two mutually exclusive goals. Workstations tend to be big, bulky, and power hungry, whereas laptops are portable, compact power misers. HP tries to bridge this gap with the HP Compaq nw8000 mobile workstation, a fairly powerful system that provides professional-level OpenGL graphics by way of an ATI FireGL chip.

A portable workstation such as the nw8000 lends itself to all sorts of terrific uses. Visual effects directors can use the machine for on-set previews, editors can cut footage in the field as it is shot, and architects can bring their CAD programs with them to the job site. I'm sure this machine will find plenty of demand in these and other fields requiring a powerful, portable workstation.

The nw8000 is on the large side for a laptop, weighing in at 6.5 pounds. Well constructed, it should stand up to a lot of abuse. Ergonomically, it's thicker in the front than most laptops, making it a little difficult for users to type. The machine offers two pointing devices: a touchpad below the keyboard and a trackpoint in the keyboard. While it is a nice feature for some, I personally never use trackpoint pointers; I would guess this is the case with a majority of graphics professionals. 1 would have preferred a slightly larger touchpad with a side scroll bar, which many newer laptops now sport.

The nw8000 is richly configured when it comes to input/output ports. It has built-in Ethernet, a modem, and an 802.11g card for networking. Connectivity also can be had via standard serial and parallel ports, Fire Wire and USB slots, and a Bluetooth dongle that ships with the machine. As concerns storage, the workstation I tested sported a 60GB 7200 RPM hard drive, a CD-RW/DVD drive, and a whopping 1GB of system RAM.

The system's processor is a power-saving Pentium M, which is clocked at 1.8GHZ. It may sound slow, but the Pentium M has a different architecture than the Pentium 4, enabling it to achieve much better performance at lower clock speeds. The Dhrystone integer test gave a score of 7769MIPS, while the Whetstone floating-point test offered up a score of 2763MFLOPS. Its integer score is great for a single-processor workstation, and also when compared to that of a 2.8GHZ Pentium 4. The floating-point score came up a little short compared to a current Pentium 4 desktop machine. This figure is certainly one of the trade-offs for a mobile ...