HP VECTRA XW User manual

HP Vectra XW

Guide to Optimizing

Performance

Notice

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1996 Hewlett-Packard Company

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

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

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