HP launches water-cooled Opteron systems

Dubbed the xw9400/CT, this machine features an Nvidia nForce Professional 3600+3050 chipset, two Sockets 1207 for AMD Santa Rosa of today and tomorrow's Barcelona CPUs.

Specs are pretty impressive, with default configuration featuring two dual-core Opteron 2220s (2.8GHz core-clock), 4-32GB of system memory, multitude of hard drives in RAID5 configuration and Nvidia Quadro in SLI mode, for ultimate performance in CAD/CAM/CFD applications, but the system is available with Quadro SDI boards as well.

HP opted for water-cooling system manufactured by Hitachi, and this system is no slouch. It is declared to remove 140 Watts per socket, thus being perfectly capable of cooling down both present and future Opterons - but the main advantage of this system is its silence. Hitachi picked a high-performing, yet almost noiseless fan (3-10dB) which is something that we would like to see on every water-cooling system out there.

Overall noise coming from the computer is 28dB, since fast-spinning hard drives, power supply and graphics cards with fans add noise. But still, this is one quiet, yet extremely powerful workstation. When Barcelona arrives in May, this system will continue to be a sought-after workstation for Hollywood, HD broadcast and CAD/CAM/CAE. µ