Leaflet

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Then they’ll be painting textures in Photoshop and
dropping motion tests into Premiere. Then they’ll be
playing a DVD movie for reference. That used to be a
tall order for any Workstation, but it goes smoothly
with the HP xw9400.”
Astonishing performance keeps them in class
McCampbell recognizes the advantages of HP’s
partnerships with AMD, NVIDIA and others in
producing high-performance, stable Workstations. “The
Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor is extremely
important because of the way it accesses memory,” he
says. “Each processor has its own memory. There is no
bottleneck on accessing memory, and that’s extremely
important in animation applications.
“The faster and more capable the hardware is, the
more creative latitude the artist has. With the HP
xw9400 Workstation, our students can try a lot more
creative ideas in a shorter span of time and therefore
have a more powerful learning experience.”
Jim McCampbell, Department Head, Computer
Animation, Ringling College of Art and Design,
Sarasota, Fla.
“The combination of the dual AMD processors and
the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 graphics card in the HP
xw9400 Workstation gives us a very smooth solution,”
he continues. “Everything calculates very quickly, and
we don’t have to deal with any screen refresh
problems. What HP has done is take a sensational
platform and make it astonishing. The HP xw9400
Workstation is an aesthetically pleasing machine and
it’s so quiet that you don’t even notice it when you’re
working on it. It’s transparent to the artist, which is just
the way it should be.”
The blend of Workstation speed, quietness and quality
also accomplishes something that Pegah doesn’t think
would be possible with lesser hardware: It attracts
students to the animation lab to do their after-class
projects. That’s important, says McCampbell. “When
students work on projects on their home PC, they work
in a vacuum, and that removes the opportunity to
network with other students and to be inspired by the
work on the screen of the person sitting next to them.
We win as an institution because those students will
learn more and go further than their counterparts who
do projects at home and just come to class when they
have to.”
Reliability means easier IT management
“We are very excited about the new xw9400
Workstations from HP, in particular their compelling
performance, reliability and user interface capabilities.
With the rock solid Dual Core AMD Opteron
foundation, HP xw9400 makes an already
sensational platform astonishing. The HP xw9400
family of solutions represents a leap forward, which
will enable a new generation of phenomenal
animation projects. With a massive amount of
computing power at its core and its memory access
protocol, this new computing environment is the most
exciting modern system we have seen in recent
memory,” Pegah says. “Ringling has an IT staff of 22
Primary applications
Student use in art and design school with sophisticated computer
animation course offerings
Primary hardware
• HP xw9400 Workstation with Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2218
processor
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• HP LP3065 30-inch diagonal widescreen LCD monitor
Primary software
•Maya
• Shake
• Painter
• BodyPaint 3D
• RenderMan
• Adobe Photoshop
• Premiere
• Encore
Customer solution at a glance
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