Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

The HP Z800

Posted by Robert Dow and Jon Peddie on June 25th 2009 | Comments Closed |
Categories: Hardware Review
Tags: workstation hp

ERRATUM: The Z800 does not support hot swap disks. This capability requires a server OS. We are unable to support this on our client OS architecture.

When we wrote about the Parallels Workstation Extreme software (Workstation graphics difficulties fixed, p.13, Volume 9, Number 9, April 27, 2009) we were anxious to see it in action. Due to a lot of travel and various other obstacles (such as learning the ins and outs of Linux) it has taken us until now to get the results. We also had to learn a little more about Linux.

HP says the family of HP Z800 Workstations is the culmination of more than 20 HP design innovations—including a self-checking power supply. It uses the new Intel Xeon quad core processor with a clock up to 3.2 GHz.

The interior of the Z line offers a modular design, and components slide neatly into place in a cable-free environment which makes upgrading and servicing really easy.

On the outside, the Z line features a streamlined brushed-aluminum exterior inspired by automotive and industrial design leader BMW Group Designworks­USA. The disk drives (lower right in the picture) slide out [edit]. The power supply is on top and isolated so it doesn’t heat the system. HP thoughtfully designed the exterior with handles fore and aft on top of the case, sorely needed considering it weighs in at a whopping 52lbs—which clearly puts the Z800 in the super heavyweight division of
workstations.

The Z800 we tested had a W5580 Xeon 3.20GHz processor, 24 GB of 1.3 GHz DDR3 ECC RAM, a 15,000 RPM 450 GB HDD, and dual Nvidia Quadro FX5800 AIBs with 4 GB each of GDDR3 RAM. This is your basic beast of a machine.

U.S. pricing starts at $1,999 for the HP Z800 Workstation, the unit we tested sells for $33,757—that’s about as serious as you can get—but remember, it’s basically two machines in one, and maxed out on all parameters.

The software

In late March this year, Parallels unveiled their Workstation 4.0 Extreme, claiming it to be the first virtualization solution for the Intel workstation platform to provide native computing and graphics power for multi-user operation on visualization and complex problems.

Parallels’ claim was a user could have two OSs running on one machine simultaneously and realize almost identical graphics performance with either OS. Of course, we had to verify these claims for ourselves. Testing is never easy especially when looking for a fair test that has a version for differing OSs.

We used Windows Vista 64-bit as the host OS, and Red Hat Linux EL5364 as the virtual OS running in Parallels extreme for the operating systems.

The tests

We decided to use Unigine as our graphic benchmark. Unigine (http://unigine.com/features/) is an open source cross-platform real-time 3D engine, it offers photorealistic 3D rendering for interactive virtual worlds (games and virtual reality systems), and has a built in benchmark, which we appreciate.

We ran Unigine in each OS separately to establish the base line for the tests to see how well the benchmarks would run in a virtualization system with Linux as the guest.

Unigine generates a “score” as well as Frames per Second average. The results are shown in Figure 3.

The difference in the demo benchmark scores, expressed in percentage, between the single operation and the virtual operation is shown in Figure 4.

The FPS for Unigine are shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6.

The difference in the demo fps scores, expressed in percentage, between the single operation and the virtual operation is shown in Figure 7.

The Unigine tests were impressive with the Virtual Linux scoring very well and even outscoring the Vista host in some simultaneous tests. We have not been able to explain the Linux guest outscoring the Host in some of the tests, of course we ran the tests multiple times with the Linux guest outscoring the Host consistently in the 1680x1050 simultaneous tests—this could be the difference in OS overhead between Vista and Linux. Alternatively, it could be overhead associated with Parallels Virtualizing OSs.

Overall, the HP Z800 is an excellent machine and the Parallels software works seamlessly. We half expected to see some performance drag or crashing of the host when enabling the Extreme software but to our pleasant surprise we saw none of that. The 3D performance one gets from the Virtual Linux is nothing short of remarkable especially when you consider the user has nothing more than a moderate drop in performance when the system is running 2 OSs and multiple applications at the same time.

We couldn’t get a score out of View­perf on the Vista 64 system. In speaking with various folks trying to get help, we were told Viewperf “has issues” with Vista 64. However, we did get Viewperf to run on the Linux OS and give us some scores.