Dual-Core Duel: Intel Xeon vs. Opteron

Product Review: Page (1) of 1 - 11/01/06

Dual-Core Duel: Intel Xeon vs. Opteron HP xw8400 Intel Xeon workstation takes on its Opteron-packing brother By Charlie White

Now it's time for a brother-against-brother battle between the latest dual-core Intel Xeon and AMD Opteron processors. HP's highest-end workstations are available with either Opterons or Xeons inside, and this review concentrates on the HP xw8400 workstation ($5793 as tested) equipped with two dual-core 3GHz Intel Xeon 5160 processors. After our previous review of an HP xw9400 Workstation with two dual-core Opteron 2220SE 2.8GHz chips and 4GB of RAM, we wanted to see how that workstation's performance stacked up against this similarly-equipped Xeon-packing product.

The outward appearance of the HP xw8400 Workstation is quite similar to that of its Opteron-equipped brother, where both are certainly all-business. No siree, there are no fancy colors, chrome, brushed aluminum finishes or any other accoutrements such as that here. While these workstations aren't ugly, it's evident that their superficial design is not really the point of their existence. These are instruments of raw power, and are ready to be crammed with terabytes of disk space, world-class graphics cards and only the fastest processors.

Just like all other HP workstations, I'm impressed with the ease of opening up the machine and working on it. Its case door opens with ease; the chassis is completely tool-free, letting can add and remove components without a screwdriver, and there's plenty of room and adequate ventilation throughout. There's not much to say about this workstation that I haven't already written before (see this review, and this one, too), and since I usually place my production workstations in a server closet on a separate floor, the fact that this one is slightly noisier than its xw9400 brandmate and certainly louder than all of its Dell competitors doesn't make that much difference to me -- but it might to you.

Expandability is an important factor for those who will end up using this over-$5,000 behemoth. You can install five internal SATA or SAS hard disk drives inside, and you can also stoke it with 8GB of ECC registered 4-channel DDR 667MHz fully-buffered DIMMS (that's RAM for the rest of us). There's also a 1394 port and enough USB ports to make it so you probably won't even need a USB hub. There's also an integrated six-channel SATA 3Gb/s controller with RAID 0, 1, 10 or 5 capability. In our configuration we had two 80GB disks configured for RAID 0.

After taking beauty shots of the beast, we wanted to get down to business and start running our ever-expanding set of benchmarks. We're testing these machines for the benefit of content creators, especially those who run Adobe After Effects. That's why we don't concentrate much on graphics cards here, and a huge array of cards are available from HP anyway, so those who regularly use the power of the GPU will be able to choose their weapon of choice. Suffice to say that the NVidia Quadro FX3500 256MB PCIe card added an extra $896 to this configuration over the cheapest graphics card offered by HP, the NVidia Quadro NVS 128MB card.

We started out with our regular raft of Adobe After Effects benchmarks, with one exception: long-time readers might notice that we've done away with our first benchmark that was entitled "Animation." This test used to be difficult for Macs and PCs to execute when we first began using it four years ago, but now, all the workstations have become so fast that they were all able slice through this test in two seconds or less. I've deemed it no longer useful and have sent it off to its retirement with my thanks.

Running the other After Effects benchmarks was an eye-opening experience, where these processors that were formerly code-named "Woodcrest" thoroughly schooled all the other workstations we've tested here. The only surprise was that these dual Xeon processors weren't able to thoroughly defeat all the other workstations in every single one of our benchmarks. For instance, the most surprising performance when comparing all that have come before was that of Dell's Precision 390 Workstation running a single Intel Core 2 Extreme processor, a dual-core 2.93GHz chip that was able to beat this mighty dual-core dual-processor 3GHz Woodcrest machine. Plus, it accomplished that intermittent victory with just 2GB of RAM instead of the 4GB installed in this Woodcrest machine. That machine might still be the value leader after all is said and done.

But still, looking at the numbers, you'll see that in the longer tests such as the TotalBenchmark comp 2, which uses the widest variety of After Effects filters and operations, the Woodcrest processors clean house with all the others, and nearly double the speed of the single Intel Core 2 Extreme workstation in some cases. Its speed on the mostly vector-based Mac-favorite Nightflight After Effects comp was more than double that of the Core 2 Extreme, and it was 66% faster than the dual Opteron box. See the benchmarks for yourself:

Results in minutes: seconds Boldface indicates winner.	Dell Precision Workstation 380, single Intel Dual Core Pentium EE 3.2GHz processor, 2GB DDR2 RAM	Dell Precision Workstation 390, Single Intel Core 2 Extreme 2.93GHz, 2GB DDR2 533MHz NECC RAM	HP xw9400 Workstation, two dual-core Opteron 2220SE processors at 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM, running Windows XP x64	HP xw8400 Workstation, two dual-core Xeon 5160(Woodcrest) processors at 3GHz, 4GB RAM, running Windows XP x64
1. After Effects: Video Composite	:38	:20	:39	:23
2. After Effects: Data Project	1:12	:40	:54	:38
3. After Effects: Gambler	:19	:10	:23	:19
4. After Effects: Source Shapes	2:29	1:21	1:40	1:07
5. After Effects: Virtual Set	1:53	1:13	1:20	:59
Maxon CineBench Rendering (CB-CPU score -- higher is better)	715 (2.06 multiprocessor speedup)	903 (1.86x multiprocessor speedup)	1554 (3.04x multiprocessor speedup)	1558 (3.07 multiprocessor speedup)
TotalBenchmark comp 1	87 sec.	50 sec.	:52 sec.	:48 sec.
TotalBenchmark comp 2	992 sec.	781 sec.	637 sec.	482 sec.
Night Flight	35:01 (2101 seconds)	50:04 (3604 sec.)	30:07 (1807 sec.)	21:10 (1270 sec.)
Hard Disk Speed	Read 121MB/sec. Write 97MB/sec.	Read 178MB/sec. Write 160MB/sec.	Read 159MB/.sec. Write 163MB/sec	Read 114MB/.sec. Write 81MB/sec
3DMark 2006		SM: 1672 HDR: 1653 CPU: 2551	SM: 1655 HDR: 1635 CPU: 3697	SM: 1655 HDR: 1637 CPU: 4653
PCMark		7247	8144	9303

Summing up, this dual-core Intel Xeon workstation from HP is much faster than its Opteron-packing brandmate by more than 10% on all the tests we ran. In this heady world of high-end workstations, you'll spend more than $5,000, but you'll get blazing speed and plenty of expandability. Might as well get the fastest one you can find, and this one would be it ? it's the fastest we've ever tested here the Midwest Test Facility. We like this HP xw8400 Workstation, and recommend it highly. 9.1 out of 10 stars.

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