« Xworks X20i-64 reviewed in 3D World magazine's special 100th issue (Scores 9/10) »
3/01/2008

Xworks X20i-64 workstation has been reviewed in the 100th anniversery issue of 3D World magazine, scoring 9/10!

"Xworks has managed to produce the X20i-64 at almost a thousand pounds less than some similarly performing peers. "

VERDICT

PROS
• Great CPU configuration
• Genrous RAM
• Excellent grahpics performance

CONS
• Potentially immature ATI drivers

RANGE OF FEATURES      9
VALUE FOR MONEY        9
OVERALL                           9

Read the whole review here.

« PC Zone magazines "Buyers Guide" recommended X8 to remain their PC of choice for all games reviews in 2008 »
1/12/2007

The Xworks X8i-C2D is to continue as PC Zone magazines "PC of Choice" for all of their games reviews. Having provided them for the past 2 years, we're pleased to announce our relationship will continue for the forseeable future.

« Xworks X8i-C2D reviewed in MCAD magazine - October 2007 »
30/10/2007

The Xworks X8i-C2D is aimed squarely at mid-range CAD users who need high levels of compute power, but whose 3D demands are not quite so exceptional. Under single threaded applications the machine’s Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 is possibly the fastest CPU on the market at the moment with a front side bus of 1,333MHz and a clock speed of 3GHz. And when coupled with the brand new Intel DP35DPM, which incorporates the new generation P35 chipset, it delivers some of the fastest computational scores we’ve seen for our SolidWorks STEP import test. The two CPU cores of the Core 2 Duo E6850 will offer enough flexibility for most designers and engineers, though if you’re looking for a true multi-tasking machine, for serious analysis or rendering work, then a Quad Core machine should really be on your shopping list.

ATI’s brand new FireGL V5600 should keep your 3D models running smoothly in virtually all CAD applications. However, because this card is so new, it has not yet been certified for Inventor 2008 and this is illustrated by the poor scores in OpenGL mode. We expect this to jump up over the next few months, but with the card’s excellent performance in DirectX mode there is little cause for concern, even in the short term.

There’s nearly 400GB of storage inside the X8i-C2D and this is made up of a fast (10,000RPM) Western Digital Drive for OS and applications, and a 320GB 7,200RPM drive for storage. Many CAD users may find this excessive, particularly if you’re working in a networked PDM environment, but this can easily be taken off the specification at time of purchase.

It’s good to see XWorks has finally opted for a better quality chassis [In the opinion of MCAD magazine] than the one it used to ship with its Core 2 Duo machines. When you’re spending £1,000+ on a workstation you expect the quality of the components to be reflected in the quality of the case. The new Antec P180B is not only solid in construction, but with its simple lines and matt black finish it actually looks quite stylish. 

If I had to find fault with the X8i-C2D it would be that it only ships with 2GB RAM, not the 4GB that you would usually expect from a machine of this specification, but I really would be scraping the bottom of the barrel there. All in all Xworks has produced another excellent machine, which should more than satisfy the requirements of any mid-range CAD user out there.


« Xworks X8i-C2D Workstation awarded 9.2/10 by ComputerandVideoGames (CVG) »
9/01/2007

Xworks X8i-C2D has recently been chosen as CVG's "Games review" PC on the back of it's outstanding 9.2/10 in their review... read on :-


We've long cast envious glances over at our colleagues on PC Zone. Why? Well it's not because of their good looks, stellar charm and pearly white teeth (although they're obviously all major factors). No, rather it's the great hulking beast of a games PC which sits ominously in the corner of their office section, which takes every graphically and CPU intensive modern PC game they can throw at it before spitting them out in flawless polygons of perfection.

"Time to get in on a bit of that action," we thought, so a quick call to those nice people up at XWorks and soon a shiny black box of its own was speeding our way in the form of the X8i-C2D, which you can see pictured above. Okay, so a PC case isn't going to be raising your gaming pulse anytime soon, but naturally when the box arrived we unwrapped it as quickly as possible and were soon field testing it with an array of high end PC titles.

Okay, so we're not so quite so hung up on pure tech specs, but rather its gaming performance which floats our boat, however a quick glance at the payload on your right will quickly confirm to you that this is the high end games-playing PC that you've always dreamed of, but one which could quite possibly bring tears to your bank manager's eyes.

The Intel D975XBX2 Mainboard is certainly a tried and tested favourite from Zone's Buyer's Guide and once it's paired with the Intel Core Duo E6700 there's really no need to tweak anything (especially as its cooled by the copper-plated Zalman). It goes like shit off a shovel and we love it but there's options galore to overclock if you so want, not that there's much of a need.

Still, moving onto the graphical splendours, the GeForce 8800GTX (which was released back in November to much acclaim) plugged into the mainboard has allowed us to lord it all over our Zone colleagues as they struggled along with their mere GeForce 7950GX2 (only kidding fellas). The 8800GTX's fully DirectX10 compatible too, so when Vista and all it's goodies hit later this year, you'll be able to get some absolutely blistering visuals on DX10 games like Crysis. The addition of two Gigs worth of fast DDR-2 800MHz RAM might seem a bit excessive, but then that's what this PC is all about - and with high end games like Battlefield 2142 gobbling up system resources, those two gigs can really make a difference. The onboard audio from Zone's version has also been replaced by a Creative X-Fi which delivers crisp, smooth sounds with none of the lag they experienced.

But for us really it's all about the performance with some of today's high end PC titles and we've fed the X8i-C2D with some top quality fare to give it a proper work out. Rainbow Six Vegas is one of the most demanding modern FPS's, but this machine had it running smooth and sweet as a nut and the bright lights and neon glare of Vegas looked simply awesome. Next up was Creative Assembly's Medieval II: Total War and with thousands of individual medieval warriors sauntering across the battlefield, you might expect some slowdown and lag. However, the X81 gobbled it up and spat it out, with you able to zoom in and enjoy the individual man-to-man combat which makes this the strategy general of choice. It looked so lovely that at one point, when we sat back to admire our handiwork and the sheen on the medieval warriors' armour, we were almost totally surprised by a French counter attack. Almost.

Our final playtest involved a wander around the wonders of Turbine's new MMO Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. While the rest of the CVG team were monkeying around with draw distances and graphical settings to get a smooth look and feel on their bog standard office PCs, we were boldly striding around JRR Tolkien's fantasy world with all settings turned to max and the epic world brought magnificently to life. By the end we were sitting in the corner stroking the X8i's case and muttering, "Our precious, ooour precioooous".

Downsides? Well, of course all this high end PC loveliness comes at a price and in this case that price is £1495 (or £1756.63 Inc. VAT), but for what you're getting, that's actually pretty damn reasonable for a machine that's going to last you years.

If you've got some cash to burn and want to invest in a ninja level PC gaming rig, then the X-81 has all the right credentials and then some. In fact, we liked the X-8i so much, we're going to keep it and make it our review and test machine for all forthcoming PC games that come CVG's way over the next few months - making it our PC of choice for 2007. We haven't told Xworks yet of course, but they live a long way away and if anyone asks, you haven't seen us, right?

** You can configure your own Xworks' X8i-C2D or C2Q (Quad-Core) through our online configurator here **

« X8i-C2D scores 90% in PC Zone, 4/5 in DIGIT and becomes CVG's "PC of Choice" for 2007! »
11/12/2006


[PC Zone Review :-]

Xworks Interactive no longer needs and introduction, so I'll get straight to the point and say that the X8i-C2D is the Conroe rig I would build, given someone else's credit card.

The motherboard is an old favourite from the Buyer's Guide (PC Zone). It has virtually no overclocking features to speak of, making the E6700 an ideal partner for it: the only real reason to have the Core 2 Extreme is it's unlocked multiplier, and since the Intel board can't exploit that feature, there's little point spending the extra.

The GX2 (NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2) would be a weak point in any other configuration, but when it's allowed to stretch its legs - it's a card which only makes sense when helped along by an assertive processor - and you're playing a game for which there's an accompanying SLI profile, the results are stunning.

The X8i-C2D's memory might seem a litte overkill, but you just have to look at recent Battlefield releases to see that 2GB isn't just for database servers - it can deliver tangible benefits to gamers as well.

The primary drive is a fast Western (Western Digital 10,000rpm 'Raptor') and is the perfect home for Windows. The 500GB secondary drive is a useful repository for your games, MP3s, movies and unspecified crap from the Internet.

The only weak point is onboard audio: stuttering is evident in Half-Life 2, so if you're still stuck playing oldies, you may be disappointed to find your game not supporting hardware acceleration. You'll need to muck about with DirectX settings to enable this feature.

The Final Word (by Xworks) :- The motherboard has been replaced by the Intel D975XBX2 board which is an overclockers dream. The audio issue(s) are addressed in recent driver releases and the graphics card has been replaced by the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 series, to provide industry first DirectX 10 support.

90%

[DIGIT Review :-]

It may look like a dull grey box, but the X8i-C2D is built from powerful components. It can’t quite take on the might of the four cores inside the Mac Pro and Magnetar QS, but it’s right at the front of the dual-core crowd.

Only the Magnetar QS is faster than the X8i-C2D in After Effects. Xworks’ workstation was only a few seconds ahead of Evesham’s Acumen Core, which also has a 2.67GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 processor – though both are noticeably faster than models with slower chips.

However, with 4GB of RAM and two hard drives, the X8i-C2D is the winner in our Photoshop tests – with the full 3GB of RAM available to Photoshop helped by a 400GB scratch/media disk. The 74GB system drive isn’t as spacious as some, but it’s a 10,000rpm model, which gives a real boost to your applications.

The inclusion of ATI’s FireGL V5200 graphics card is an unusual choice for a £1,550 workstation. The X8i-C2D would have been a better workstation for graphics pros had Xworks plumped for a lower-powered graphics card – or a gamer one – and added a quad-core processor.
The V5200 puts this workstation in first place in the Cinebench real-time OpenGL graphics test, though only users working with heavy-duty 3D well reap the benefits.

The X8i-C2D’s only real flaw is the chassis. Looks aside, it suffers from slightly noisy drives and is oddly arranged inside, with the drive bays shunted together. It’s the Magnetar QS’s inclusion of a quad-core processor, though, that keeps this model from the top slot.

Winner of :- Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Aftereffects and Maxon Cinebench Benchmarks.

The Xworks X8i-C2D has also been choosen by CVG Magazine to be it's "Review PC of Choice" for 2007... All game reviews will be performed on the X8 to ensure the reviewers see the and feel the games as they are meant to be played.

** You can configure your own Xworks' X8i-C2D or C2Q (Quad-Core) through our online configurator here **

« Xworks X20a-64 becomes a Double award winner! »
26/06/2006

Xworks X20a-64 workstation has just won the 3D World "Group Test" and been awarded DIGIT Magazine's "Best Buy".

[DIGIT Review :-]

At first glance, the X20a-64 looks the same as Armari’s Gravistar XR – which is hardly surprising considering that they both use very similar Supermicro Chassis – but Xworks workstation has slightly better-chosen components that help push it into first place in our tests.

The two dual-core Opteron 280 processors aren’t as fast as the 285 chips used in the Gravistar XR, but the difference in our LightWave test rendering and graphics-processing test was less than you’d think. AMD’s top-notch processor boosted Armari’s workstation by less than 10 percent over the X20a-63, which isn’t much considering the X20a-64’s better graphics card and drive arrangement.

The FireGL 7300 is the most powerful graphics card included by any of the of system builders in our tests. It’s essentially the same card as the 7200, but with 512MB of RAM instead of 256MB. This is why, although the X20a-64’s Cinebench results were nothing to shout about, its results in SPECviewperf were the best by far.

[3D World Review :-]

Xworks focuses specifically on the workstation market, so we expected to find a finely honed machine and weren’t disappointed.

From the Supermicro motherboard and chassis to the high-end core components, this unit smacks of professionalism. The X20a is based around a pair of 2.4GHz dual-core Opteron 280s, second only in  processing power to the Boxx’s 285s.

Graphics are taken care of by ATI’s FireGL V7300 with 512MB of GDDR3 memory. This incorporates 16 Pixel Shader pipelines, Shader Model 3 support, and both HD component and stereoscopic output. The two Dual-Link DVI connections support resolutions up to 3,840x2,400 apiece with compatible displays. The V7300 includes ATI’s Avivo technology, which enables HDR rendering up to 16-bit per RGB colour channel on a 10-bit precision pipeline.

The X20a came as a dual-boot system, with both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP installed. Xworks has supplied a trio of hard disks: two 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor 150s and a 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16. However, no RAID confi guration is employed, with the two Raptors used separately to host the two different  operating systems, while the 500GB drive takes care of general data storage.

But since SATA RAID is available on the motherboard, other configurations are possible if you don’t need dual-boot. The Xworks put in a very respectable performance in our benchmarks. Cinebench rendering was a particular highlight, with the X20a coming second only to the Boxx.

However, the FireGL graphics card provided different strengths to the Nvidia Quadro FX-based workstations.

Hardware OpenGL lighting with Cinebench wasn’t among them, but ATI is particularly adept at 3ds Max, Lightscape and Maya, as evidenced by the SPECviewperf scores. The ensight-01 score was also quite reasonable.

This is clearly a system well-suited to 3D animation, unless you’re using Cinema 4D. Although the Boxx was faster, it’s the overall balance of components that counted in Xworks’ favour. The X20a was almost as fast for rendering, and the upgrade to 285s will cost just £250.

There’s extra performance to be had from running this system in full 64-bit mode, too.

Considering that this is also the cheapest workstation on test, the X20a managed to surpass Boxx’s top performance to win our primary affections. This is a great all-round workstation, equally suited to modelling or rendering.

VERDICT

PROS
• Second-fastest processors
• Fast ATI FireGL graphics
• Good value

CONS
• No fault-tolerance
• Short basic warranty

RANGE OF FEATURES      8
VALUE FOR MONEY        9
OVERALL                           9


How Xworks stole the pie

At the risk of sounding wishy-washy, we have to say that the level of systems submitted was reassuringly high. All vendors supplied basically similar specifi cations centred around different models from the same dual-core AMD Opteron family. All but one included 4GB of RAM, so the only other major differentiation in core components was whether ATI or Nvidia high-end graphics were chosen.

Nevertheless, we got a good spread of results. What became clear from our testing was that, although it’s hard to call between Nvidia’s and ATI’s top-of-the-range options, both have their strengths. To illustrate this, we ran a large suite of tests. Most important among these was the industry-standard SPECviewperf 8.1. This graphics-oriented test runs eight separate benchmarks based on real-world applications such as 3ds Max, Maya or Pro/Engineer, so simulates performance across the gamut of 3D content creation, from animation to CAD to scientifi c simulation. Nvidia’s Quadro FX excels in the catia-01 test based on Dassault Systemes’ CATIA V5R12 CAD application. It’s also
marginally better with the Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks and Unigraphics test – again CAD/CAM software.

FireGL’s strengths lie more in 3D animation, with the best results in the 3ds Max and Maya tests, though the Quadro FX cards weren’t far behind with the latter. It’s worth noting that SPECviewperf is a pure performance benchmark intended to be run without presets for specific applications.

We also ran Maxon’s Cinebench. As well as testing OpenGL performance, giving us another perspective on graphics power, this also executes a render in both single and multithreaded modes, giving a good indication of how fast the workstations will be when called upon to play a part in your render farm.

To round off our tests, we also ran the latest Futuremark 3DMark06 gaming benchmark. Although this didn’t feature greatly in our final decision as to the winner, 3D workstations sometimes do have to double as impromptu DirectX testing rigs for games  developers, so we’ve provided this information to show that all of this issue’s workstations will be perfectly adequate for performing this kind of duty.

However, one area where the workstations were all very different was in the storage supplied. Every single unit included a 16x dual-layer DVD-RW, but hard disk set-ups varied greatly. Unfortunately, this was one area which let applications such as 3ds Max, Maya or Pro/Engineer, so simulates performance across the gamut of 3D content creation, from animation to CAD to scientific  simulation.

The ATI the Boxx down. Although it was the fastest system overall, and a 500GB dual-disk RAID 0 array was provided for working data, the 80GB boot disk was slightly weedy. You can specify larger disks at the time of purchase, but switching this to a fast 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor will bump the price up by nearly £200; and other, cheaper systems came with two or three of those. This was where the Xworks’ model prevailed. Xworks only charges £250 for the next grade up in Opterons, which would provide similar performance to the Boxx for about £350 less. So, the X20a’s premium collection of hard disks makes for better value, making it our overall winner.

** You can configure your own Xworks' X20a-64 (Dual-Core) through our online configurator here **