HP VISUALIZE X-Class User Manual

The world’s fastest Windows NT-based
visualization performance

VISUALIZE X-Class Personal Workstations

HP

The Power to VISUALIZE
Your Solution – Now

Award-winning performance. Hot
graphics systems. Leading edge
technology. Unique manageability.
Great Value. That’s the story of the
HP VISUALIZE X500 and X550
Personal Workstations.

These systems have it all. They give
you the high-end graphics capabilities
of Hewlett-Packard’s market-leading
UNIX 3D workstations – including the
new HP VISUALIZE-fx

6+

graphics
subsystem. HP VISUALIZE Personal
Workstations bring you the superior
performance of single or dual Intel
Pentium III Xeon Processors running
at 500MHz or 550MHz. They support
up to 2 GB of system memory, and they
include many HP innovations for
enhanced reliability and manageability.

Put it all together and you have the
world’s fastest Windows NT-based
graphics performance and the power
to VISUALIZE your solution now.

Engineered for the
Professional Designer

The HP VISUALIZE X500 and X550
Personal Workstations are designed
for the professional user who performs
simulations, virtual prototyping,
complex modeling and high-end
visualization tasks on the
Windows NT operating system.

Whether you’re an engineer, designer,
scientist or creative artist, these
systems are ideal for bringing your
ideas to life quickly and vividly. They
provide the extreme graphics perform­ance and leading edge processing
power you need to work faster and
achieve more in today’s competitive
business environment. HP VISUALIZE
Personal Workstations are the ultimate
design machines.

HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations:
System Power

Available leading edge system features
include single or dual Intel Pentium III
Xeon 500 MHz or 550 MHz processors,
the Intel 440GX chip set, dual Ultra Wide
SCSI channels with single or dual 10K
RPM disk drives. AGP-2X (133 MHz)
support and DMA (Direct Memory
Access) support are standard.

HP Industry Leading Manageability
and Reliability

HP’s innovations build on the robust
system features by adding tools for
increased reliability and manageability.
These include HP FastRAID for
enhanced mass storage performance,
HP TopTools for industry leading net­work based management, HP MaxiLife
for hardware self-diagnosis and invest­ment protection, and HP UltraFlow for
advanced, thermally controlled cooling.

Image courtesy of Alias | Wavefront

Image courtesy of MARC

HP VISUALIZE-fx+Graphics: 3D Power

HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations
put the breakthrough power of HP’s
VISUALIZE-fx

+

graphics subsystems
behind your work. The X-Class systems
are powered by HP’s highest-perform­ance graphics subsystem – the new HP
VISUALIZE-fx

6+

subsystem, as well as

the new HP VISUALIZE-fx

2+

and fx4+and

the available ELSA GLoria Synergy

+

.

Across the board, these highly scalable
subsystems enable you to express your
ideas and gain insight more quickly than
ever before. They have it all: new full­scene anti-aliasing, 2D and 3D texture
mapping, 3D geometry acceleration,
hardware occlusion culling and new
hardware shadow casting.

With breakthrough fx

+

graphics on
your side, you’ll have the power to
VISUALIZE any design you can imagine.

HP Maximum Application
Performance and Quality

HP adds increased value to
VISUALIZE-fx

+

graphics with
industry leading driver technology.
For enhanced application performance
and quality, HP works closely with
leading independent software vendors
to tune applications for the highest
performance on HP systems. This
cooperative work helps ensure that
the applications you count on will
deliver their best performance on
HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations.

Interoperability in the Windows
NT/UNIX Environment

You can count on HP to give you
systems that work in a heterogeneous
Windows NT-UNIX environment.
HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations
are bundled with tools to enable
integration into UNIX environments,
including NFS and trial software for
X Window and UNIX command utilities.

Image courtesy of SDRC

feature what you get benefit how it helps you advantage how it’s unique

Provides excellent application performance for
the largest, most complex visualization tasks

Provides excellent application performance for
larger, complex visualization tasks

Provides excellent application performance for
small to mid-size visualization tasks

Particularly useful for industrial styling applications
where surface detail is crucial to the design process

Delivers up to 2X performance with visualization
applications

Provides soft shadows, motion blur and image
processing

Creates photo-realistic shadows and allows
object self-shadowing

Increased photo-realism, visual analysis,
simulation and animation performance

Delivers the industry’s fastest graphics
performance on Windows NT with 6 PA-RISC
geometry engines

Delivers exceptional graphics performance with
4 PA-RISC geometry engines

Delivers exceptional graphics performance with
2 PA-RISC geometry engines

Enhances image quality by eliminating jagged
edges in the full scene, allows for more accurate
display of very small features

Improves rendering performance by eliminating
the drawing of hidden objects

Advanced feature previously available only on
UNIX graphics super-workstations

As with hardware accumulation, plus a feature
that is offered exclusively by HP for Windows­based workstations

Allows for the added functionality of hardware
shadow casting and hardware accumulation buffer

fx6+graphics subsystem

fx4+graphics subsystem

fx2+graphics subsystem

Full-scene anti-aliasing

Occlusion culling

Hardware accumulation buffer

Hardware shadow casting

Optional texture mapping engine

HP VISUALIZE

Graphics

HP VISUALIZE

Personal

Workstation

Systems

Puts increased power and efficiency behind
demanding applications

Enhances application performance, supports work
with large models and 3D animation rendering

Provides hard disk space and performance need­ed to work on large models and multiple designs

Supports integration and interoperability
between UNIX and Windows NT systems

Advanced administration and management
of system components and settings

Increases reliability and provides hardware
self-diagnosis

Keeps components cool, increases reliability,
decreases total cost of ownership

Provides superior computing performance with
Intel’s 70 new processor instructions

Facilitates seamless designing, modeling and/or
rendering of large, complex visualization tasks

Ultra Wide SCSI’s high data throughput and
36GB of storage mean greater productivity

Optimizes cross-platform workflow and use
of tools on both operating systems

Provides industry leading remote and local
net-based management and diagnostics

Integrated with TopTools for remote
administration and monitoring

Advanced cooling system with four thermally
controlled fans

Single or Dual Intel Pentium III Xeon
Processors: 500MHz or 550MHz

Scalability to 2 GB system memory

HP FastRAID and mass storage expand­ability: up to 36 GB internal disk

NFS software: for UNIX connectivity, trial
X-Window emulation and UNIX commands

HP TopTools

HP MaxiLife

HP UltraFlow

The world’s fastest

Windows NT-based

visualization

performance

x

Class

Package

• Expandable mid-tower package

• HP Multifunction Ergonomic Keyboard with programmable
application shortcut buttons

• HP 3-Button Mouse

• Support for two 10K RPM Ultra Wide SCSI hard disk drives

• HP UltraFlow cooling system for optimal PC Workstation cooling

• HP MaxiLife system diagnostics with front-panel LCD message display

Processor

• Single or dual Intel Pentium III Xeon 500MHz and 550MHz processors:

- Intel 440GX AGP chipset

- 100MHz front side bus (FSB) system bus

• Support for Intel Multiprocessor Specification (MPS) 1.1
for dual-processor technology

Processor Cache

• 32K non-blocking level 1 cache and 512K or 1MB non-blocking
level 2 cache for fast access to priority data

- Operates at full system speed (100MHz)

Graphics Subsystems

• VISUALIZE-fx6++: The industry’s fastest graphics performance on
Windows NT using six dedicated floating-point processors based
on PA-RISC technology

• VISUALIZE-fx4++: World-class geometry engines using four dedicated
floating-point processors based on PA-RISC technology

• VISUALIZE-fx2++: World-class geometry engines using two dedicated
floating-point processors based on PA-RISC technology

• 18 MB SGRAM frame and Z buffer memory – on fx

+

graphics

subsystems only

• ELSA GLoria Synergy+graphics subsystem with 8 MB SGRAM

Texture Acceleration and Memory Option

• 1-2 Dedicated texture acceleration processor(s)*

• 16-32 MB SDRAM dedicated texture memory*

• Point-sampled, bilinear, and trilinear MIP mapping

• 3D texture mapping

• Shadow texture mapping

System Memory

• 128 MB DIMM, 256 MB DIMM and 512 MB DIMM 100MHz ECC
synchronous dynamic RAM (SDRAM) DIMM

• Expandable to 2 GB through four DIMM slots

• Error checking and correcting (ECC) for detection and correction
of 1-bit errors and detection of 2-bit errors

Hard Disk Storage

• 9.0 GB 10K Ultra Wide SCSI

• 18.0 GB 10K Ultra Wide SCSI

Hard disk controller

• Dual, integrated, independent PCI Ultra Wide SCSI controllers with
support for internal and external SCSI peripherals

• Optional HP FastRAID

- Disk caching and hardware striping solution based on
Adaptec’s RAIDport technology

- Boosts disk I/O performance up to 80%

Removable Media

• Integrated 1.44 MB floppy disk drive

• PCI Bus Master Ultra ATA/33 interfaces for up to
two internal IDE devices

• 32X CD-ROM Drive

• DVD Drive

• CD-R/RW Drive

• ZIP IDE Drive

Operating system

• HP-supported operating system: Windows NT

®

Workstation 4.0

Networking and I/O

• 10/100 Ethernet LAN interface with 32-bit auto-sensing
HP NightDirector and LAN remote power on/off

• Two USB ports

• One 25 pin parallel port

• Two 9 pin serial ports

* fx

2+

/fx4+: 1 accelerator, 16 MB texture memory

fx6+: 2 accelerators, 32 MB texture SDRAM

technical specifications

x

Class

The latest information about HP VISUALIZE Workstation products is
available on the World Wide Web at

http://www.hp.com/visualize

.

Information in this document is subject to change
without notice.

Copyright 1999 Hewlett-Packard Co.
Printed in the USA
5968-4832E

UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, licensed exclusively
through X/Open Company Limited. Windows and Windows NT are U.S. registered trademarks
of Microsoft Corporation. Intel and Pentium are registered trademarks and Pentium III Xeon is
a trademark of Intel Corporation. XWindow, Adaptec, and NSF are all registered trademarks.

Cover screen image courtesy of PTC. Inside screen image courtesy of SoftImage.