Kayak XW

This fast PC workstation just got faster

HP's Kayak workstations are already some of the fastest workstationsavailable for Windows NT. With dual on-board 40MBps Ultra Wide SCSI controllers,HP's FastRAID controller running two 10,000rpm hard disks, and record-breakinguse of Intel's 533MHz Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) with HP's Visualize fx4OpenGL 3-D graphics card, these systems don't lack speed. However, with theintroduction of Intel's 400MHz Pentium II processor and BX chipset supporting a100MHz system bus, the fast Kayak just got faster.

Accompanying the beefed-up processing power, the latest Kayak workstationssport a modified front panel. HP replaced the cumbersome and often sticky powerand reset buttons with horizontal buttons that actually work. HP also added thenew HP MaxiLife LCD, which lets administrators access the system even when it'soff. The MaxiLife display provides diagnostic information about the machine, andlets you see the steps the machine is processing while booting.

Like its predecessors, the newest Kayak provides tool-free access to systemcomponents, HP's UltraFlow temperature-regulated cooling system, integrated 16-bit full-duplex audio, two Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, two serial ports, and one MIDI port. Four DIMM slots support up to 1GB of Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM--the system I tested had one 128MB DIMM); one AGP; two PCI slots; one PCI/ISA combination slot (one or the other); one RAID port extended PCI slot for hardware-accelerated RAID; and one ISA slot. My one gripe with the Kayak is that once you add the Visualize fx4 graphicscard, the FastRAID card, and an Ethernet card, only one PCI and one ISA slotremain open.

Performance Tests
The Kayak family includes the XW for high-end 3-D graphics, the XU forhigh-performance 2-D graphics, and the entry-level XA. To test the XW's 3-Dgraphics performance, I ran three viewsets from the Viewperf benchmark (for moreinformation about Viewperf, see http://www.specbench.org). The CDRSViewset score was 137.513, the Data Explorer (DX) score was 19.949, and theLightscape score was 1.745. These scores aren't significantly higher than thoseI achieved on a dual 333MHz Kayak, which isn't surprising when you consider thatthe graphics card, not the CPU, processes OpenGL graphics. Still, I broke everypublished record that I know of for NT workstations and the Viewperf CDRSperformance metric.

I also wanted to know how much faster the system performs with the 400MHzPentium II processor and the 100MHz system bus. To find out, I ran AIMTechnology's workstation benchmark tests using Pragma's TelnetD remoteconnectivity software. The AIM workstation test is multithreaded and comprises73 system and subsystem tests, producing a comprehensive analysis of systemperformance. (For more information about AIM Technology, seehttp://www.aim.com.)

With a Matrox Millennium II 4MB PCI graphics card and a 400MHz Pentium IIprocessor on my test Kayak, the AIM WNT Peak Performance score was 736application jobs per minute. The AIM WNT Sustained Performance score, whichreflects the number of applications the system can execute without unacceptablyhindering performance, was 247.6 application jobs per minute. This score issignificant when compared with the 231.6 sustained score that I achieved on aKayak with two 333MHz Pentium II processors. Because the AIM tests aremultithreaded (i.e., use dual processors) and the single-processor 400MHzPentium II system scored 6.6 percent faster than its dual-processor sibling, Iassumed the sustained performance boost came from the expanded 100MHz systembus.

When I compared the AIM scores from a single-processor 400MHz Kayak tothose of a single-processor 300MHz Pentium II system with the 66MHz system bus,the faster processor and larger system bus performed 27 percent faster. Fittedwith two 400MHz Pentium II processors, the Kayak XW received a 1197.3 WNT PeakPerformance score and a 270.1 WNT Sustained Performance score. When I comparedthese scores with a peak score of 888.8 and a sustained score of 221 for a dual333MHz Kayak with a 66MHz system bus, the newer Kayak showed 25 percent and 18percent improvement, respectively. So the answer to the question, "Will Isee better performance with a 400MHz CPU and 100MHz system bus?" isyes.