What if I bought a workstation?

[Perd Hapley]

I'm looking at used computers, and I've found an HP xw4300 Workstation.  The "work station" throws me off a bit.  That just means its a high-performance sort of PC, right? 

[charby]

Sometimes it meant high performance computer. Usually you could just add more crap to them, mulitple hard drives, cards up the wazoo, etc.

[mtnbkr]

more or less.  Sometimes it also means no sound, no modem, etc, though the "no sound" part is pretty rare these days.

Chris

[Gewehr98]

Workstations are basically high-end desktop machines, Fistful.

It's what I buy, sell, and use.

They're set up for more hard drives, better cooling, multiple CPUs, easier maintenance, and are just plain beefier all around than machines intended for home use.

They'll have sound and integrated 10/100 Ethernet.

They also weigh more, generate more heat, and may suck more juice depending on the internal power supply.

Servers are where you'll run into trouble, because they may not have accommodations for newer video cards.

[roo_ster]

fistful:

First, listen to G98.  He know whereof he speaks.  Run from "server class" hardware, if you plan to use it as a desktop. 

A desktop is to a F150 as a workstation is to a F250.

Second, I have years of experience using & administering HP's xw4* workstations, going back to 2004.

Closest thing to rocks, reliability-wise, I have yet encountered in the computing world*.  Matter of fact, behind me rest a xw4100 and a xw4200.  Down the hall, is my cluster of 8 xw4100 boxes.  My USMC customer bought several xw4400 boxes a while back.  No problems.  I used to ISSO & admin a couple closed labs with a bunch of them.

Only funny deal is some of them don't like stock gigabit NIC drivers in the linux distros.  Luckily, you can download the right one from HP.

Tell me:
Is that particular xw4300 all SATA, dual core, & 64bit like the xw4400s I have seen?




* Even relative to IBM's workstations.  Build quality of some of the IBM workstations were inconsistent.  Solid in some bits, chintzy in other bits.  Still better than 90% of the hardware out there, though.

[AJ Dual]

You also may need to be careful with buying a workstation, because you may well need an operating system and applications that can take advantage of the extra horsepower. You may need 64-bit Xp or Vista, or multi-processor support etc. And then, the software a home user commonly uses derives no benefit from these things anwyay.

Home software is on the verge of making great use of 64-bit archetecture, heavy RAM, and multiple processors, (these days, multiple cores) but it's just now starting. By the time it's fully mainstream, cheap consumer hardware will have left a used business workstation in the dust.

Also, legacy compatibility with certian business, science, or engineering functions may mean that a more "powerful" workstation might still be slower in some performance aspects as inexpensive commodity consumer PC hardware is. And it may suffer some of the same issues as server hardware, have weird hard disk arrangments, or expansion slots that are proprietary, or not what's popular now for video cards etc.

The analogy is that the surplus Army tank, or Deuce-and-a-half is durable, got tons of torque, and is literaly bombproof, but the cheapest Korean sub-compact new off the lot will have better fuel economy, is allowed on all roads, and in parking structures/shopping malls, has insanely better 0-60, but will crumple like Kleenex in a crash.

[Gewehr98]

And then, the software a home user commonly uses derives no benefit from these things anwyay.

I disagree, AJ.

I'm running XP Pro in this Quad-Xeon (dual hyperthreaded 3.0Ghz Xeon MPs) workstation, and I absolutely refuse to go back to a single-cpu system.  Windows does quite well with processor affinity, even when the applications themselves may only be single-threaded.  Think of it as load-balancing across 2 or 4 processors, especially when multi-tasking ops, even if they're just MS Office and Windows Media Player running in the background. 

That HP XW4300 is suitable for 64-bit Windows, but will also run just fine on 32-Bit Windows XP Pro.  I see a bunch of them now coming off-lease for good prices, and may snag one or three. 

[roo_ster]

FTR, two of the HP xw4400 boxes a customer of mine bought are 64bit hardware running 32bit OS & apps.  One runs WinXP Pro, the other Centos 5.1.

[Perd Hapley]

Here it is.  I'm not buying it, because I just won an auction for a GX620, just now. 

http://cgi.ebay.com/HP-Workstation-XW4300-Pentium-4-3-0GHz-2048MB-40GB_W0QQitemZ250415789867QQcmdZViewItemQQptZDesktop_PCs?hash=item3a4df1b72b&_trksid=p4634.c0.m14.l1262&_trkparms=|301%3A1|293%3A2|294%3A30

And some spec's. 
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12260_div/12260_div.pdf

Apparently, it will run either version of XP.  Thanks for the advice, folks.