Dual Core workstations face off

SHARKY EXTREME has a small article here about the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 Processor running on its website. As usual, loads of benchmark and photos including the Intel D955XBK motherboard with the brand new 955XE.

Its sister website Hardwarecentral has reviewed the Winbook W235 which is a rather slim and light laptop and appears to strike the right balance both iin terms of price and weight. It is based on a Pm 725 and sports a 14-inch 1280x768 panel. You can try playing Q3 Arena but nothing more. Eric also has a column on the heated battle opposing ATI and nVidia on the integrated AMD chipsets. Noise of a 2006 X700 capable core chipset from ATI should make everyone happy.

Epox's board the EP-9NPA+ Ultra motherboard has had a slightly difficult time when compared to the existing competition at Hardwarezone.com. The board is average everywhere which bodes badly when the rest of the competition excels in pretty much everything.

AMDzone provided me with a link to yet another X2 4200+ review, this time in the form of a complete system. Desktoppipeline explores the Cyberpower Ultra Workstation 3000. Note that for once, they use another Benchmark suite, the COSBI Opensourcemark from Van Smith. They compared it to a Pentium 4 640 o'clocked at 3.6Ghz. And BTW, before I forget, AMDzone had tested the Venice 3500+ and the Venice 3200+ processors two weeks ago; links on their websites.

DMN forums - Digital Media Net - has two reviews of Dual core processors based Workstations. The first one is the new Dell Precision 380 which comes with two PEE 840 chip and 2GB of DDR2 memory, a FireGL 3100 graphic card and two 80GB SATA 10KRPM RAID 0 HDD. Breeze through video-oriented applications like Cinebench and After effect. The good side though is that it is much cheaper than a Dual Xeon for example at less than $3500.

The second model they tested is the Alienware MJ-12 7550A workstation which had a Dual Core Opteron 475 with a Quadro FX 4400., a Tyan Motherboard and one GB of RAM and two 120GB HDD. More pricey than the Dell Workstation but also less performing in some tests. Tests carried out of AE, Adobe Premiere and Maxon Cinebench. µ