We had the luxury of spending a few weeks with this monster and were nothing short of impressed. The HP xw6600 Workstation is an Intel-based workstation class computer from Hewlett-Packard packed full of high performance features.

With one or two quad-core Intel® Xeon® 5400-series processors supporting 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems, this system can offer up to eight cores of extreme processing power and a massive 32 GB of DDR-2 RAM for the most demanding DAW tasks.

In addition to the raw power offered by up to 8 processing cores, this beast can be loaded with 10,000 RPM SAS drivers for lightning fast drive performance. Great when running large sampling projects or recording more than 24 tracks simultaneously. Plenty of free PCI and PCIe slots as well as a clutter-free case makes expansion a breeze when its time to add more inputs and outputs or powered plug-ins.

Powerful performance aside this is also one of the quietest cases in its class making it indispensible in critical listening environments. Cooling is handled in an a very elegant fashion with dual fans on the back of the case and one atop the memory in addition the CPU and power supply fans.