HP Z420 Workstation Review: Competition Heats Up
by Dustin Sklavos on May 21, 2012 12:00 AM ESTApplication and Futuremark Performance
It stands to reason PCMark is going to have a field day with the fast SSD used for the system drive and the eight-core, sixteen-thread Intel Xeon that's powering our HP Z420 review unit. What should be particularly interesting, however, will be our CPU-isolated benchmarks.
The Z420 runs away with PCMark while even the 3DMarks see a slight boost from the extra CPU performance on tap. It's just enough to put the Z420 ahead of the T3600 in every chart. For comparison's sake, it's worth noting that boutique gaming desktops with consumer-class SSDs (tuned more for performance than reliability) pretty much start at where the Z420 lines up in PCMark, while even a 768MB GeForce GTX 460 offers a better gaming experience than the Quadro 4000. Bottom line: this is not a gaming system.
In single-threaded tasks the E5-2687W is certainly respectable, but the instant the extra cores can be leveraged it tears past the other test systems. It takes a 4.6GHz i7-3960X to even match or beat the Z420's E5-2687W (as tested here), but the fact that a hexa-core chip can beat an octal-core chip in these tasks is telling. The E5-2687W is probably going to be the fastest workstation chip you can find and the Z420 demonstrates that, but enthusiasts who've periodically looked at enterprise-class hardware are going to want to steer clear, as even modern video encoding tasks may not be adequately threaded to keep the E5-2687W working at full tilt.
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Grandpa - Monday, May 21, 2012 - link
From a company that touts itself as INVENT comes a computer like all the others. When I first saw this review I thought I was looking at a PC from 1996. Just seems like they should be able to do better by now.pelle2012 - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 - link
Wouldnt the Z420 perform better than the t3600, when configured with full memory (64GB)?The HP one would have 2 x 8GB on each channel, compared to 1 x 16GB on the Dell one.
ghost6007 - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 - link
Who unearthed this from the 1990's garbage dump?The innards can be all powerful and the performance can be scorching but the design! The design would probably relegate this to be used a god dammed footstool in a modern office.
yashooa - Monday, July 16, 2012 - link
Some of you act as if you are about to attend the ball and the Z420 is your party dress.I have both the T3600 and the Z420 in my lab in identical configurations and I will take the additional memory capacity and bandwidth over aesthetics.
Plus HP has offered the Z420 to us at a substantially lower price than Dell has with the T3600.
Not only have they undercut Dell on the price they have installed more RAM as well.
Most of our tech savvy users know that the T3500 had 6 DIMMS and T3600 only has 4 and when you use 24GB of RAM as a standard it can a lot more expensive when you have half as many DIMM slots to populate. We have to use ECC in this platform (we used non-ECC in the T3500) so when you have to buy 8GB DIMMs instead of 4GB DIMMs the cost goes up dramatically. We then have justify the cost increase to the business and the justification of "well it has a prettier case than the HP" just doesn't cut it.
Cheers...
paeratyo - Monday, March 30, 2015 - link
I am now looking for this HPZ420. Anybody suggest me where can i get it?