| Polywell has a real winner on their hands |
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When we received this Polywell workstation for review, everyone in the office thought that it looked pretty cool. The nice aluminum case with a carbon fiber trim certainly gives it the appearance of a high-performance item. Yet, we had two other high-end workstations to review and we thought that even though the Polywell looked very cool, it wouldn't be a match for those other machines. How wrong we were!
The big surprise came when I ran the same Softimage XSI benchmarks that I had run on the dual 1.7GHz Xeon workstation that I reviewed previously. I was totally blown away by the results. This single processor unit, clocked at a considerably lower speed, was almost -- and I mean real close -- as fast as the other machine. When I showed the results to the people around the office, no one believed them. There must have been something wrong, we all thought. But I ran the tests over and over and this Polywell workstation kept turning out the same results. In fact, everything that I ran on this machine just plain screamed.
Now, there's either something funny with the math I learned in school or there's something really special about the way this machine is configured and how the Athlon chip and DDR memory work. After all, the tests I was running take full advantage of multiple processors and the dual Xeon had two 1.7GHz chips. So, two times 1.7 versus one time 1.333 equals?... OK, back to kindergarten. Which one is faster, a bicycle or a motorcycle? It doesn't make any sense, does it?
It is common knowledge that the latest generation AMD Athlon chips are very fast. Still, it is not easy to admit that they are that much faster than Intel's Pentium 4s. Luckily I found other independent benchmarks that confirmed the results that I had obtained, rating the 1.333 GHz Athlon chip 84% faster than a 1.5GHz Intel P4 and 97% faster than a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. Add to that the fact that Polywell uses very fast memory and configures their systems extremely well and you have a computer that runs real life applications like a race horse on a few espressos.
Besides raw speed, there's a lot to like about this workstation. First of all, it's very light! So light in fact that it makes you wonder if it ships with a Styrofoam power supply. And this is not a stripped down computer, either. Our review unit came configured with an ATA RAID, two striped 40GB drives, an Ultra-Wide SCSI controller, 512MB of DDR RAM, 133MHz front bus motherboard, network card, modem, Diamond FireGL2 display card,a Zip drive, a DVD Drive and a 16/10/40 CD-R/W drive. I'm sure all that weighs a lot, so the lightweight aluminum case must be making up for it. The case, by the way, has no sharp edges to cut your fingers and has easy to remove side panels. It also houses four fans, which ensure that the unit is kept cool.
Because of the very fast disk array, opening up software and files is extremely fast . Even software installations take place very quickly. You definitely don't waste any time while on this system.
Do I have any complaints? Well, just a few. The drive faceplates have been spray painted silver to match the case. While this could make the computer look very good -- much better than having tan or black drives -- the paint job looks as if it was done in someone's garage with a spray can. Another problem is that our review unit only has 2 empty PCI slots. One of them is so close to the AGP display card that you can only use it for a card that has components mounted on just one side. Quite frankly, I don't see much reason for a workstation grade computer to sacrifice a PCI slot to have a built-in 56K modem. Normally it would be part of a network and would have Internet access through a proxy server or a router.
As for the overall performance, all I can say is that we have been so blown away by the Athlon chip that a colleague of mine and I both have purchased 1.4 GHz Athlon-based systems. Even our Mac purist staffer likes the Athlon and has since been questioning why Apple doesn't abandon the Motorola in favor of AMD.
I have heard from a few software vendors that optimizing their applications for Intel's Pentium 4 processor results in considerable speed gains. Therefore, comparing an optimized application running on a P4 to the same application running on the Atlhon may take away some of the speed difference. On the other hand, I was also told that optimizing an application to run on the Atlhon would produce a similar speed increase. Therefore, it appears that AMD chips would still have an advantage over Intel's in the end. In the practical world, however, we must run the applications that are currently available and, without any optimizations, the Athlon CPU is definitely running circles around the Pentium 4. In fact, I recently found out that a developer of a very high end 3D program, which I shall keep anonymous, is recommending the Athlon as the preferred CPU to run their processor-intensive application.
Polywell has a real winner with their Athlon-based workstation line. The computers are well built, very fast and very affordable. It still amazes me how a single AMD processor clocked considerably slower can be almost as fast as two Intel Xeon processors running a fully multithreaded application. When you consider the price/performance ratio of this setup (about a third of the cost of the dual Xeon system), it becomes clear that AMD-based systems are the way to go if you take your work seriously. Running on Windows 2000 the Athlon-based computers have been rock solid, too. It actually feels funny working with PCs that don't crash. But this is definitely an experience I can get used to very quickly.
If you need a high performance system at a great price, you should definitely consider an AMD-based Polywell.
For the latest pricing and more information, please visit: http://www.polywell.com.
 | Softimage XSI Benchmarks
There's nothing like using a real world application to measure the true performance of a computer. Here are the results: Final Gathering 1280 x 1024 Screen Render: Dual 1.7GHz Xeon: 24 seconds Single 1.333 GHz Athlon Polywell: 25 seconds D1 Resolution Mental Ray Final Render: Dual 1.7GHz Xeon: 20 seconds Single 1.333 GHz Athlon Polywell: 21 seconds |
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