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Pondering a Pentium Purchase? The Pentium 4 processor workstations from @Xi, Dell, HP, Polywell, and Tri CAD/CAM Systems boost workstation performance, offering AGP 8x graphics, hyperthreading, an 80OMHz front side bus, and DDR 400 memory as staples.
This year's crop of Pentium 4's all contain new technologies, especially on their motherboards. The biggest difference is the combination of the new processor speed (3GHz) and the front-side bus (now 80OMHz). Compared to the benchmark scores from our last workstation review ("The Highs and Lows of Workstations," CADENCE, October 2002, pp. 16-23), these single-processor systems are 40 percent faster on average than the dual processor workstations in that review. Table 1 shows how well the systems reviewed here work with Auto-CAD and SolidWorks.
But that's not the only thing changing on this new generation of motherboards. Other changes include a switch away from RAMBUS memory-all five systems tested use DDR-400 RAM. Though all of these workstations also support Serial ATA hard drives, for testing consistancy we looked at them configured with parallel ATA drives because not all vendors are currently offering the Serial drives.
Three out of the five workstations (@Xi, Dell, HP) were shipped to me with Intel's performance-enhancing Hyperthreading turned off. Designed to enhance the performance of a single-processor system by letting it run multiple program threads separately, Hyperthreading is known to slow down some applications. It soon became clear that the SPECapc SolidWorks benchmark is one of these applications, so I turned the feature off on the other two workstations to make sure everything was on an even keel.
Ease of Use
Faster is nice, but it isn't everything when it comes to a well-rounded package. A workstation sold in the 21st Century should look and act like it-offering capabilities and ease of operation significantly better than what we saw in the last millennium. One component of this should have been the Device Bay standard for modular, swappable hard drives, optical drives, and other peripherals. But with support for it finally completed in Windows 2000 and then suddenly removed in Windows XP, this technology has unfortunately fallen by the wayside. The coming switch to Serial ATA, however, presents an opportunity to acheive the most important benefit Device Bay has to offer-the ability to...