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If you're looking for a high-end workstation, you'll want to keep its purpose firmly in mind. These systems are specced out in configurations to meet a specific job, so before you go shopping, be sure to determine what's important for your needs.
For this review, we were interested in workstations that could handle typical Web development tasks in a LAN environment. We were especially interested in how well a workstation could handle standard image manipulation tasks, as well as its ability to read and transfer large images across the network. We also wanted to see how well the workstations handled Web-ready video and audio files.
We requested machines with well-rounded component capabilities in all areas. Speed, network citizenship and 2-D graphics manipulation were the most important considerations.
We reviewed Compaq's SP700 Professional Workstation and Gateway 2000's E5250. The dual 500-MHz Pentium III-based Compaq we tested was a preproduction unit, so at times its performance was a bit spotty. The dual 450-MHz Pentium II-based Gateway was a shipping unit.
To test the systems' graphics handling, we used Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop 5.0 and MGI Software Corp.'s VideoWave video editing software.
Compaq SP700
Compaq's SP700 Professional Workstation arrived in a rack- mountable, minitower chassis with a stabilizing base. Inside, we found dual 500-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors, a 4-GB Ultra Wide SCSI Smart 10,000-rpm hard drive, 512 MB of SDRAM, and an Ultra Wide SCSI 2 controller.
Other essentials that we found in this system included an embedded 10/100 Intel Wake On LAN (WOL) UTP network card, a 32-speed IDE CD- ROM drive, an Iomega Zip drive and a floppy disk drive.
We were pleased to see that Compaq provided two USB ports and a cable to plug in multimedia and storage devices. Compaq did not skimp on monitor quality either, sending us a Sony Trinitron (Compaq P110) monitor with...