There are significant benefits to buying a workstation-class PC. First up, there's the general standard of manufacture. The whole unit in this case was wonderfully constructed, and internally it's by far the neatest, most presentable PC we've seen in many years.
Cables are all neatly clipped to the sides or trimmed to exactly the right length, and the water cooler is especially well presented. It's utterly understated, and probably the smallest example we've seen: a 120mm radiator sits between two similarly sized fans, and a few thin black pipes lead from it to the pair of conical black CPU modules.
There's very much an air of hard work and efficiency about the internals, bar a seemingly extraneous Southbridge fan which blows air perpendicular to where you'd assume it should go.
If you're spending the equivalent of half a car on a tiny bundle of electronics, it had better perform well. And you're in luck; the Clovertown strand of Xeon processors has been performing admirably in workstation and server-class machines since its release in late 2006.
The Xeon is constructed in fundamentally the same manner as Intel's current crop of consumer-level quad-core chips. A pair of dual-core Xeon dies sit side by side on a single chip, communicating with each other by a shared front side bus. Xeon, like the Core 2 range, is due an update to a proper quad-core die, as well as the 1333MHz FSB that could be its saving grace, sooner rather than later.
Undeterred by advancing technologies, we checked out Armari's processing monster using a pair of the latest generation of Clovertown chips, each running four cores at a blistering 3.0GHZ.
Our tests show that these chips significantly outgun the theoretically similar QX6800 in terms of sheer number-crunching potential.
This is a likely result both of Armari's inclusion of 4GB RAM, and the 16MB Level 2 cache on offer to the processor pair, although it's important to point out that you can't quite buy these chips just yet; Armari will sell this machine sporting the current generation of 2.66GHz chips until the 3GHz line is officially released somewhere around July.
Graphics pros will be happy to see the latest Nvidia Quadro card included to deal with 3D applications. With a memory bandwidth of nearly 50GB/s, the Quadro really shines when it's pushed hard. It's passable in gaming, but it's really for pro work.
