Recently we had a chance to review Dell's Precision T3600, and we found it impressive. A company that seemed content to be an also-ran in the enterprise desktop space reinvigorated itself with smart new chassis designs to go along with the refreshed hardware from Intel and NVIDIA, and the resulting system proved as easy to service as it was powerful. Dell and HP can both talk up how fast their computers are, but fundamentally they're still working from the same building blocks that Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD provide them.

HP, as the incumbent enterprise vendor, sent us their Z420. From the chassis design perspective it's certainly nowhere near as radical a departure as Dell's revised Precision lineup is, but now we get a chance to set these standards against each other. On top of that, we also get our first look at Intel's octal-core Xeon processors in a desktop workstation environment. Let's see how the new HP offering compares with previously tested workstations.

Back at SIGGRAPH 2011 NVIDIA announced Project Maximus, an interesting technology initiative to allow customers to combine Tesla and Quadro products together in a single workstation and to use their respective strengths. At the time NVIDIA didn’t have a launch date to announce, but as this is a software technology rather than a hardware product, the assumption has always been that it would be a quick turnaround. And a quick turnaround it has been: just over 3 months later NVIDIA is officially launching Project Maximus as NVIDIA Maximus Technology.

When it comes to buying a pre-built desktop for the average consumer or gamer, about the only thing the big box manufacturers really have going for them is price. That hasn't stopped them from doing very well, but oftentimes the end user will be better off going to a boutique like iBuyPower for their desktop and enjoying the generally superior build and component quality along with better customer service.

But for small business and enterprise, it can be a whole different ball game, where powerhouses like Dell and HP produce uniquely designed configurations meant for mass deployment...and have the resources to greatly improve support, to boot. We've seen business class machines from both vendors before, but today we have on hand iBuyPower's Professional Series desktop. Can a smaller boutique outfox the big boys?

We're taking our second excursion into enterprise-class desktop territory with the kind of machine that should be of interest both to IT management and enthusiasts alike: HP's Z210 SFF (small form factor) workstation. Desktop computers are capable of getting smaller and smaller these days, and with the Z210 SFF, HP is hoping to make serious number crunching power available in even the tightest of spaces. It's always interesting to see just how much performance can be crammed into a tiny computer, but did HP have to make any sacrifices to hit this target?

Just over ten months ago, we had a chance to take a look at a very big, reasonably impressive mobile workstation: HP's EliteBook 8740w. It sported HP's DreamColor IPS screen at a glorious 1920x1200 resolution and had fairly beefy hardware under the hood, including the at-the-time fastest mobile workstation GPU, the NVIDIA Quadro 5000M. But since HP unveiled the dramatic redesign of their enterprise notebooks earlier this year, we've been anxiously anticipating the 8740w's refresh. Today we have it, specced to kill with a shiny new DreamColor IPS screen, Sandy Bridge quad-core processor, and an even faster NVIDIA Quadro GPU.

The search for a notebook with a quality screen, at least in the mainstream sector, can often feel like a futile one. Outside of Jarred's recent love affair with the Dell XPS 15 and the respectable Clevo B1530M, most screens we've dealt with have been subpar at best. But make the journey to enterprise-class notebooks and things start to brighten up. On the bench today we have HP's EliteBook 8740w, sporting the vaunted DreamColor IPS notebook screen. The upgrade costs a pretty penny on top of what is already a respectably powerful workstation, so how does the whole package fare?

Today we’re wrapping up our coverage of last month’s NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, including the show’s exhibit hall.  We came to GTC to get a better grasp on just where things are for NVIDIA's still-fledging GPU compute efforts along with the wider industry as a whole, and we didn’t leave disappointed. Besides seeing some interesting demos – including the closest thing you’ll see to a holodeck in 2010 – we had a chance to talk to Adobe, Microsoft, Cyberlink, and others about where they see GPU computing going in the next couple of years. The GPU-centric future as NVIDIA envisioned it may be taking a bit longer than we hoped, but it looks like we may finally be turning the corner on when GPU computing breaks in to more than just the High Performance Computing space.

The Dell Precision M6500 is what we expect from a mobile workstation: high on quality and low on fluff. It’s also very expensive, but the cost of the hardware likely pales in comparison to the software it’s designed to run.