Products: Boxx Technologies 3DBoxx 8440

Whether or not you think workstation purchases should be predicated on benchmarks, at least consider that companies that spend their time ballyhooing the ratings probably care about improving their products as much as possible.

Boxx Technologies is one company that reliably toots its own horn, so you might as well have a look at the 3DBoxx 8440 special-edition workstation. This past December, it set yet another record as the fastest workstation for floating-point performance, according to postings on www.spec.org. Running two quad-core Intel 5400 series processors (the first 45nm-based chips), the rig shines where you might expect it: multithreaded 3D modeling and animation apps in 3D, compositing, and rendering.

These second-generation Intel Xeons run at up to 3.2GHz, and they deliver up to a 25 percent throughput boost over the prior processors. Boxx pairs it with either an Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 or ATI FirePro card.