HP Z420 Workstation Review: Competition Heats Up
by Dustin Sklavos on May 21, 2012 12:00 AM ESTWorkstation Performance
While our more desktop-centric application and Futuremark testing suite proved the HP Z420 with accompanying Intel Xeon E5-2687W was able to walk away with the crown in most tests, it's going to be in our workstation suite where we expect to see the greatest differences.
Interestingly, SPECviewperf 11 isn't particularly responsive to the E5-2687W, sometimes favoring the graphics performance of the HP EliteBook 8760w and its substantially faster GPU. From the looks of things, if any of the software in the SPECviewperf 11 suite is software in your workflow, the octal-core chip just isn't going to be worth the expense. Upgrading to the Quadro 5000 on the other hand should help in these tests. We also have results from a desktop with a GTX 580 in here to really demonstrate just how much difference a workstation card can make in these professional applications.
On the other hand, the extra cores allow the Z420 to really run away from the pack in SPECapc Lightwave 3D. If time is money, the E5-2687W can shave roughly two minutes off of your running time in most of these tasks--or put another way, compared to a fast hex-core CPU, the E5-2687W is still about 15% faster. Lightwave scales exceptionally well with access to additional cores.
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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?