Product Reviews

Intel's Xeon has been under threat over the past year. With the release of the Opteron about 18 months ago, AMD finally had a credible server and workstation platform, and its performance was highly competitive. As we revealed in our technology preview last month, Intel has taken the threat of an AMD processor with a 64-bit upgrade path seriously, and added Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T) to its Xeon range.

Armari's Magnetar Xi is our first look at this new Xeon incarnation in a shipping system and, as we've come to expect from Armari, it's a neatly designed beast. It's housed in a black Supermicro SC733T-450 chassis, another Armari trademark. Despite being a relatively compact case, it still manages to pack plenty inside. Behind a solid, lockable plastic door lies a 120mm fan intake, plus four hot-swap bays for SATA drives. Our review unit came populated with two 250GB Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 SATA drives with 8MB cache. These were configured as a mirror RAID using the on-board Adaptec SATA chipset, ensuring that if one drive fails, you won't lose your data.

The Supermicro chassis also sports a front 3.5in bay and two front 5.25in bays, but they're all taken up. Armari has taken the sensible move of supplying Mitsumi's 7-in-1 media card reader and floppy, so the drive has a regular daily application. The 5.25in bays are taken up by an EIDE Iomega REV drive and a Sony DRU-700A dual-layer DVD writer, covering almost every removable storage scenario.

But it's what's inside that's most revolutionary. The motherboard is essentially the same one we previewed last month - Supermicro's X6D8E-G2 - with the addition of an SCSI controller. This is based on Intel's new 'Tumwater' chipset, formally known as E7525. Aside from support for the new EM64T Xeon, this also adds DDR2 memory capability and PCI Express. It's a dual-processor board, with no less than eight DIMM slots. In our review system, 2GB of DDR2-400 Registered ECC modules is split over two sticks, but there's support for up to 16GB using 2GB modules. It's also equipped with twin top-of-the-range 3.6GHz Xeons - the fastest currently available. Aside from EM64T, these now have an 800MHz FSB, bringing them bang up to date with the latest Pentium 4s.

The motherboard has two PCI Express slots, with a 32-bit PCI slot nestling in between. However,

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only one of the PCI Express slots is the full 16x variety - the other is large enough to accommodate a 16-lane device, but only runs at 4x speed. Armari informed us that this would still enable dual PCI Express graphics cards in SLI mode, but with some performance implications. Beneath these slots are three 64-bit PCI-X slots, two running at 100MHz and one at 133MHz.

Armari has only populated the 16x PCI Express slot, but its contents are pretty noteworthy - a PNY Quadro FX 3400 graphics card. This uses the NV45 GPU, essentially an NV40 with a PCI Express bridge - in other words, the Quadro workstation variant of the GeForce 6800. But the 3400 has some key new features. Rotated Grid anti-aliasing improves image quality, as does High Precision Dynamic Range Imaging, which uses 16-bit and 32-bit floating point per colour component rather than the traditional 8-bit and 16-bit.

The hardware-accelerated Pixel Read-Back can exceed 1GB/sec, thanks in part to PCI Express being bi-directional. This allows far more complex textural interactivity with the 3D scene, such as dynamic water animation. The Dual-Link DVI ports can also be grouped for higher resolutions.

To test out the Armari's performance, we eschewed the regular PC Pro 2D benchmarks and instead called upon more workstation-oriented tests. For comparison, we used a workstation sporting twin 3.06GHz Xeons with 1MB of L3 cache and 1GB of Corsair XMS PC3200 memory.

First we encoded a 541MB DV video using Canopus ProCoder 2, simultaneously both to MPEG2 and DivX to make use of the dual processors and Hyper-Threading. The 3.06GHz Xeon took 365 seconds, but on the Armari this dropped incredibly to 262 seconds - nearly 30 per cent faster. We then called upon our standard LightWave 3D render, which calculates a single frame from the movie Lost In Space. We used four threads, again to take advantage of Hyper-Threading. On the 3.06GHz Xeon this took 490 seconds, but it only dropped to 460 seconds on the Armari - an improvement of just six per cent. It's still the fastest time we've seen, but not as much as you'd expect for the sheer speed of the processor clock.

In the continuing absence of 64-bit apps, we decided against loading 64-bit Windows XP. The public beta available from Microsoft will not run on EM64T Xeons, but a version available through the Microsoft Developer Network now reportedly does. We'll have to wait a little longer for compatible apps to arrive before assessing performance compared to AMD64 processors in 64-bit mode.

As we discussed in our technology preview last month, however, the new Xeon's 64-bit capability is primarily future-proofing. For now, it's simply a state-of-the-art 32-bit workstation processor. As for the Magnetar Xi, Armari has put together another no-holds-barred power system, ideal for video editing, encoding or 3D animation work. It's expensive, but offers uncompromising performance.