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Wednesday December 2, 2009 3:49 PM AEST
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DESKTOP INDUSTRY

by Staff Writers  on Jan 1, 1900
Tags: DESKTOP | INDUSTRY
This month the Labs team decided to take a snapshot of the high-end visual and 3D workstation state of play.When you think workstations, a few things immediately spring to mind: dual processors, loads
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This month the Labs team decided to take a snapshot of the high-end visual and 3D workstation state of play.When you think workstations, a few things immediately spring to mind: dual processors, loads of high-bandwidth memory, professional graphics cards specifically designed for OpenGL 3D rendering tasks as opposed to game performance, premium quality components and peripherals and raw processing power.

Workstations distinguish themselves from the run of the mill PC - even PCs assembled to satisfy the most power hungry gamer - by the fact that they are purpose built machines, designed to tackle heavy-duty processing tasks such as high-end 2D and 3D modelling and animation for movies, games, engineering, science and medicine. As part of the roundup, the Labs team wanted to look at the performance of dual-processor machines across different platforms.To that end, we asked Xenon to submit to the Labs a machine featuring the latest Intel 2.2GHz Pentium 4 Xeon CPU in a dual processor configuration, and matched it against the dual Athlon MP 1800+ system that we requested from IPS.

We then added to the mix an Apple G4 PowerMac with dual 800MHz G4 CPUs. Finally, we threw in what is often regarded as the archetypal example of a computer of the workstation ilk, an SGI workstation appropriately named the SGI Fuel Visual Workstation. Although the Fuel is not a dual CPU workstation, its highly specialised nature more than warranted its inclusion in this Labs.

Of course, each of these machines has been designed for different purposes: you would not necessarily employ the G4 PowerMac to scientifically model the effects of prototype cancer drugs in the field of Bioinformatics, nor would you employ the SGI to do a little page layout in QuarkXpress.

Each machine is considered on its own merits, though where possible the Labs team did conduct some cross-comparison testing, especially with the Xenon and IPS machines. So, to get the low down on the current workstation platforms that are available today, read on...

LABS MANAGER: Ashok Zaman
This article appeared in the April, 2002 issue of PC Authority.


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