1. Who Needs A Mobile Workstation?

HP's Compaq NW8240 Mobile Graphics Workstation Wins Our Editor's Choice Award.

Whether you're about to embark on a career as an architect or automotive designer, or already are one, a mobile workstation can make you life easier by letting you take your work on the road. But, do you need a mobile workstation or can a less costly business notebook with a fast graphics chip do the job? In many cases that business notebook will suffice. However, remember that more expensive workstations are certified for a wide range of common CAD and digital content creation applications, so you can be sure that they will run efficiently.

Also, workstation vendors tend to provide professional level support, which of course impacts the price. So, most people don't complain about the high acquisition costs associated with mobile workstations. Since devices of this kind are meant for professionals to enable the creation of value, the hardware investment costs play a rather subordinate role - they are amortized in a relatively short period of time.

Finally, while they use the same graphics processors as garden-variety 3D gaming notebooks, mobile workstation graphics processors are tuned using special BIOS code for higher performance in OpenGL. Thus, a "genuine" workstation is faster and makes you more productive than a plain-vanilla graphics capable business notebook or even a gaming notebook.

The Compaq nx8240 features an ATi Mobility FireGL V5000 graphics processor, which is based on the ATi Mobility Radeon X700. However, the combination of this graphics processor with a fast CPU moves the nx8240 toward mobile workstation status. The most proficient calculations would be worth nothing if finely detailed lines were not visible on the screen. Therefore, HP offers the NW8240 with a very high-resolution 15.4" display. Though 1920x1200 pixels are of little use for a text processing application like Word, designers will quickly appreciate the extremely fine representations it permits. The following screenshot provides an effective example of just how detailed the display can be on such a high-resolution screen.

This close-up view shows how detailed the display can be on a WUXGA+ screen. Click on the image to enlarge it.

To uncover the differences between a workstation and a standard laptop or notebook computer in daily operation, we compared HP's mobile workstation with a number of business and consumer mobile computers using office application oriented benchmarks. This was followed by a direct comparison with the current desktop ATI and Nvidia OpenGL graphics cards.

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