Strap
yourselves in, friends, because Intergraph raises the bar once again
with its new Dual Pentium III Xeon 550-equipped TDZ 2000 GX1 ViZual
workstation. With all that horsepower underneath its seriously scary
purple cowl, the new Xeon Pentium III chips offer some serious bang
for the buck.
If you’re a video editor, you’ll marvel at how quickly everything happens
with this new monster. And, if you’re an After Effects user, the rendering
power of these chips will be of the utmost importance. You won’t be
disappointed with the Xeon architecture, because it offers 512 KB of
full-speed cache providing a noticeable speedup. Adding to that are
the new instructions included within the Pentium III chip, an acronym
within an acronym called SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). Soon to be
supported in lots of apps everywhere, these on-chip routines can significantly
speed up floating point and integer instructions, both crucial when
it comes to pushing tons of pixels. And, if rumors are true, all this
power will play along with Intergraph’s forthcoming HD throughput scheme
about which we’re surely to hear more very soon.
So how does this machine feel compared to other workstations? Put succinctly,
it’s the fastest I’ve ever seen Windows NT scoot! Wow. I have been using
an Intergraph Dual Pentium II 450MHz GL2 for the past six months, and
when I switched to the GX1 with the twin 550 Xeons, there was a startling
speedup. In Premiere, Speed Razor, Photoshop, After Effects and all
the 3D applications I could lay my hands on, everything was positively
snappy.
Inside the GX1, there’s plenty of room for expansion. Expecting to labor
for the better part of an afternoon when I needed to install my SCSI
9 GB drive and an internal Zip drive inside, it turned out to be as
easy as loosening and tightening a few screws. I only have one gripe:
Opening the box could be a whole lot easier. I just despise wrestling
with this thing! Why the two-part opening routine? With the top coming
off first and then the necessity to pull, tug and jostle with the side
door -- it's nearly impossible to open this monster without a hammer
and a screwdriver. As a producer, I don’t really like to get inside
these things, but when I do, I’m really not in the mood for this. Shoot,
folks, after opening a Mac blue-and-white G3 whose door swings out as
easily as a kitchen cabinet, this routine seems like an anachronism.
Just a warning: You’ll probably need to read the instructions. ’Nuff
said.
Once inside, even though the hefty Pentium III Xeon chips and their
mammoth heat sinks take up lots of space, there’s still plenty of room
to maneuver. After installing and plugging in my extra SCSI disk and
the ZIP drive, all I had to do was restart and everything worked perfectly.
There were plenty of power plugs inside and lots of spaces left on the
SCSI chain as well as on the ATAPIi ribbon connector running to the
CD-ROM. There was still room for three more internal disks and four
PCI slots open, too.
Just a warning to the adventurous, though: Don’t even try to goof around
with Windows 98 on this baby. It’s not officially supported by Intergraph
on the GX1, so if you want to play a few games (OK, OK, I confess),
then you’re on your own. A good point about this system is that if you
have any problems with it, there’s a three year parts and one year labor
warranty included with the package. You might also opt for that flat-screen
15-inch monitor pictured above – it’s hard to beat the sharpness of
these wonderful new displays.
All told, this is a system that exemplifies what a workstation should
be. It’s built like a truck, uses only the finest components, includes
the Wildcat 3D graphics Card du Jour and the price is right. It’s going
to be hard for any of the others to catch up to this. Price $8862 without
monitor, includes 256 MB RAM, 9GB SCSI Disk, Wildcat 4000 3D graphics.
Flat Screen Monitor $1399.
Special thanks to Drew Gagliano for his assistance in the preparation
of this review.
Verdict: 9.1 (out of 10)
Charlie White is the Producer of DCC Workstation's sister site, Digital
Video Editing. He can be reached at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com
