Strap yourselves in, friends, because Intergraph raises the bar once again with its new Dual Pentium III Xeon 550-equipped TDZ 2000 GX1 ViZual workstation. With all that horsepower underneath its seriously scary purple cowl, the new Xeon Pentium III chips offer some serious bang for the buck. If you’re an editor, you’ll marvel at how quickly everything happens with this new monster. And, if you’re an After Effects user, the rendering power of these chips will be of the utmost importance. You won’t be disappointed with the Xeon architecture, because it offers 512 KB of full-speed cache providing a noticeable speedup. Adding to that are the new instructions included within the Pentium III chip, an acronym within an acronym called SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions). Soon to be supported in lots of apps everywhere, these on-chip routines can significantly speed up floating point and integer instructions, both crucial when it comes to pushing tons of pixels. And, if rumors are true, all this power will play along with Intergraph’s forthcoming HD throughput scheme about which we’re surely to hear more very soon.

So how does this machine feel compared to other workstations? Put succinctly, it’s the fastest I’ve ever seen Windows NT scoot! Wow. I have been using an Intergraph Dual Pentium II 450MHz GL2 for the past six months, and when I switched to the GX1 with the twin 550 Xeons, there was a startling speedup. In Premiere, Speed Razor, Photoshop, After Effects and all the 3D applications I could lay my hands on, everything was positively snappy.

Inside the GX1, there’s plenty of room for expansion. Expecting to labor for the better part of an afternoon when I needed to install my SCSI 9 GB drive and an internal Zip drive inside, it turned out to be as easy as loosening and tightening a few screws. I only have one gripe: Opening the box could be a whole lot easier. I just despise wrestling with this thing! Why the two-part opening routine? With the top coming off first and then the necessity to pull, tug and jostle with the side door --  it's nearly impossible to open this monster without a hammer and a screwdriver. As a producer, I don’t really like to get inside these things, but when I do, I’m really not in the mood for this. Shoot, folks, after opening a Mac blue-and-white G3 whose door swings out as easily as a kitchen cabinet, this routine seems like an anachronism. Just a warning: You’ll probably need to read the instructions. ’Nuff said.

Once inside, even though the hefty Pentium III Xeon chips and their mammoth heat sinks take up lots of space, there’s still plenty of room to maneuver. After installing and plugging in my extra SCSI disk and the ZIP drive, all I had to do was restart and everything worked perfectly. There were plenty of power plugs inside and lots of spaces left on the SCSI chain as well as on the atapi ribbon connector running to the CD-ROM. There was still room for three more internal disks and four PCI slots open, too. Just a warning to the adventurous, though: Don’t even try to goof around with Windows 98 on this baby. It’s not officially supported by Intergraph  on the GX1, so if you want to play a few games (OK, OK, I confess), then you’re on your own. 

A good point about this system is that if you have any problems with it, there’s a three year parts and one year labor warranty included with the package. You might also opt for that flat-screen 15-inch monitor pictured above – it’s hard to beat the sharpness of these wonderful new displays. All told, this is a system that exemplifies what a workstation should be. It’s built like a truck, uses only the finest components, includes the Wildcat 3D graphics Card du Jour and the price is right. It’s going to be hard for any of the others to catch up to this. 

Price $8862 without monitor, includes 256 MB RAM, 9GB SCSI Disk, Wildcat 4000 3D graphics. Flat Screen Monitor $1399.

Special thanks to Drew Gagliano for his assistance in the preparation of this review.

Verdict: 9.1 (out of 10)

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Intergraph announces a new line of ultra-cool kick-ass workstations.