The HP Z800 Workstation Featuring New Intel Xeon Processor-Review Coming Soon

I just got back from the launch event for HP’s new Z-series workstations, rubbing elbows with the international press (seriously–I dined with journalists from Turkey and the Netherlands on Thursday night.) We were lucky enough to get a Z800 for some pre-release testing–that machine is sitting behind me in this photo.

The new workstations feature significant performance gains compared to the machines they replace in HP’s lineup, thanks to Intel’s new Xeon processors. The new processors include internal memory controllers (taking a page from Intel’s Core i7 processor and pretty much all of AMD’s processors), adding to their performance. Our machine was decked out with two different 15K rpm SAS boot drives (one with Windows XP 64-bit and one with Windows Vista Business 64-bit, which we could swap as desired,) a 1TB SATA data drive and an NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 video card. The systems are well-built with many thoughtful design features. I won’t tell you what all of them are right now because I want all of you to read the review (hee hee.)

The new workstations command a premium price, but the way HP sees it, the typical user will be able to do so much more work in so much less time that the machines will pay for themselves quickly–in many fields (hey, it’s not just video editors who need speed) HP estimates that a typical Z-series workstation will pay for itself in about a month when taking things like salaries into account.

I need to run a few more tests on the machine but the review should be ready quite soon–keep your eyes peeled.