HP xw9300: Hewlett-Packard debuts top-of-the-line system with advanced components.(Workstation)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)

Hewlett-Packard has been in the workstation market for decades. Its merger with Compaq a few years ago left the company with two lines of professional workstations. Last year, HP combined the lines and introduced a series of graphics workstations that were redesigned from the ground up. The new machines' speed, reliability, and quiet operation have made them popular in many studios and design facilities. HP adds to this line with the introduction of the xw9300, an Opteron-based system based on Nvidia's nForce Professional chipset.

The xw9300, HP's top-end workstation, promises excellent graphics performance. Its support for two PCI Express slots enable users to double the graphics power with the addition of a second graphics card.

The xw9300's enclosure is the same as that of the xw8200 workstation. A mid-tower design, the machine is fairly compact and, when tilted sideways, can fit into a standard 19-inch rack. The front panel is mostly black, with a large grille for airflow, three full-width slots for DVD drives, and FireWire, USB, and audio ports. The back of the system offers Sony PlayStation 2, keyboard, and mouse connectors, as well as four USB, Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, audio, and a single serial port. Noticeably missing is a parallel port; with most printers using USB today, it shouldn't be a problem.

Popping open a latch on the side reveals the workstation's innards. The cables are nicely arranged, and there's plenty of room for expansion. The internal drive rack offers room for three drives (in addition to those accessible from the front). The internal drives are angled so that it's easy to add drives without having to move cables around. The motherboard holds two 2.4GHZ Opteron 250 processors, along with eight memory slots, SATA-2, and a dual SCSI disk interface. The included drive is a 74GB 10,000RPM Western Digital Raptor, which should provide very fast response. The power supply has a capacity of 750 watts, more than most people will ever need.

The xw9300 is the first workstation I've seen with the Nvidia nForce chipset, a new chipset likely to be widely adopted by most system vendors and motherboard manufacturers that use AMD CPUs. The hottest feature of this chipset is support for two full PCI Express x16 slots. It means you can fill these slots with two high-end graphics cards to get a fairly large performance boost. Last year, Nvidia announced its SLI technology, which enables two graphics cards to communicate and share ...