HP VECTRA XW User manual

HP Vectra XW
Guide to Optimizing
Performance

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Guide to Optimizing
Performance
A guide to the performance benefits of your HP Vectra XW Personal
Workstation.

iv English
The Performance Benefits of Your HP Vectra XW
Your Hewlett-Packard Personal Workstation makes use of a number of
features to provide you with the highest performance. The
configuration of your Personal Workstation has been optimized by HP
to make the best use of these features for 3D graphics and animation
applications.
The performance of your Personal Workstation will depend on the
applications you use. For example, different software applications
require different amounts of memory and will produce files of different
sizes. Best performance is obtained by balancing your system’s
configuration with the requirements of your software.
To provide versatility in your system’s configuration, Hewlett-Packard
offers a number of performance-enhancing accessories. Some of these
are upgrades that allow you to increase the performance of your
Personal Workstation in one particular area. Other accessories add to
your system’s existing capabilities.
This guide describes the high-performance features of your Personal
Workstation and how you can obtain maximum benefit from them. This
will help you to optimize the performance of your HP Vectra XW for
your specific use.
This guide is presented in two chapters:
•Your Personal Workstation’s performance features
Describes the new features used by your system, with suggestions on
how to optimize their performance.
•Technical reference
Gives general technical reference information, with emphasis on the
new features used by the HP Vectra XW Personal Workstation.
NOTE The Pentium™Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with 32-bit applications.

Contents
English v
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Your Personal Workstation’s Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Performance Topics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Your System’s Processor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Advantages of Dual Processor Configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Matching Memory Capacity to Your Requirements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Benefits of 32-bit Applications. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
Installing Fast Peripherals on the PCI Bus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Increasing the Speed Limit With Ultra SCSI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Disk Striping. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Making the Most of Your System’s IDE Channels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
More 3D Graphics Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3D Graphic Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3D Graphics Adapter Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
OpenGL Acceleration. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Your System’s Audio Resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
HP PCI Integrated 10/100BT LAN Interface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Performance Topic/Configuration Cross-Reference. . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

vi English
2 Technical Reference
Architectural Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44
The Intel Pentium Pro Processor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Characteristics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Superpipeline Architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Integrated Cache Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Higher Clock Speeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
The Pentium Pro Local Bus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Main Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Data Integrity. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Memory Upgrade Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Technical Characteristics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

1
Your Personal Workstation’s
Performance Features
This chapter describes the new features of your HP Vectra XW
Personal Workstation and how these features can bring optimized
performance to your 3D graphics or animation application.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview
2English
Overview
Your HP Vectra XW Personal Workstation provides a number of
features that bring unprecedented levels of performance to your
desktop applications. Some of these features offer you their full
performance benefits immediately, without needing to be adjusted in
any way. Other features must be configured according to your use
before their full benefit can be realized.
This chapter explains these new features so that you can better
understand the performance benefits they offer. Where a feature is
configurable or can be upgraded, detailed descriptions are given to
help you understand the options available to you.
The following features of your Personal Workstation are described in
this chapter:
•Intel Pentium™Pro processor
•Dual processing capability
•Flexible memory configuration
•Advanced operating system support
•PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus
•Support for Ultra SCSI devices
•High performance IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) mass storage
•Advanced 3D graphics capabilities
•High quality, stereo audio recording and playback
•Fast and adaptable networking.

English 3
1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Overview
Your Personal Workstation’s Configuration
The configuration of your Personal Workstation has been optimized by
HP for general use. However, the performance of your system can be
further improved by changing this configuration to match the
requirements of your applications.
You can change the configuration of your Personal Workstation in three
ways:
❒Adjust the parameters of the existing configuration through the
BIOS Setup program
❒Install accessories
❒Change the configuration parameters of your software to make the
best use of your system’s features.
NOTE The Pentium Pro processor installed in your system provides the best
performance when used with Windows NT and 32-bit applications.
Performance Topics
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
❒Your System’s processor
❒Advantages of dual processor configurations
❒Matching memory capacity to your requirements
❒Benefits of 32-bit applications
❒Installing fast peripherals on the PCI bus
❒Increasing the speed limit with Ultra SCSI
❒Making the most of your IDE channels
❒More 3D graphics performance
❒Your System’s audio resources
❒HP PCI integrated 10/100BT LAN interface.

1 Your Personal Workstation’s Performance Features
Your System’s Processor
4English
Your System’s Processor
The key to the power of your HP Vectra XW is the high-performance
processor its uses: the Intel Pentium Pro. The capabilities of this
processor are sufficient to handle any 3D-graphic or multi-media
application you may use.
The Processor’s Clocks Everything your system’s processor does is synchronized to a regular
pulse known as the processor clock. The speed of this clock defines the
speed at which your processor performs its work.
The 200 MHz Pentium Pro processor uses a system board clock source
of 66 MHz. All operations on the local bus (such as data transfers with
memory) are synchronized to this clock. Other devices in the system
also use this clock to generate their own clock signals; for example, the
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus controller divides this
clock in half to produce the 33 MHz PCI clock.
For its own internal operation, the Pentium Pro processor multiplies
the clock source to obtain a faster, internal clock. It is the frequency of
this internal clock that defines your processor’s speed. The 200 MHz
processor in your Vectra XW uses the 66 MHz clock source and
multiplies this by 3 to produce its own 200 MHz internal clock.
PCI bus - 33 MHz Processor’s local bus - 66 MHz
Pentium Pro processor - 200 MHz