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Dell is rolling out a pair of workstations that will incorporate Intels new line of 45-nanometer microprocessors.
The Dell Precision T5400 and T7400 workstation are available immediately and both will use Intels new quad-core Xeon 5400 processors, which were part of the chip makers Penryn family of chips that launched earlier this month. In January, Dell will offer the same two workstation models with the new dual-core Xeon 5200 series processors as well.
Like most other PC vendors, Dell is moving in step with Intel and its processor roadmap. Just before the official Nov. 12 Penryn launch, both Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo announced new workstation models that will use either the dual-core or quad-core Xeon processors. However, Dell is looking to bring its workstation to the market first, while the HP and Lenovo workstations will not be available until either December or January.
The Precision T5400, which starts at $1,589, and the T7400, which starts at $1,649, each support two Intel processors. The main difference between the two is that the T7400 supports the faster quad-core Xeon X5482 processor, which has a clock speed of 3.2GHz, 12MB of L2 cache, and a 1600MHz front-side bus, and works within a 150-watt thermal envelope.
The Dell workstations offer some of the same configurations as the HP and Lenovo systems, including Intels 5400 chip set and 32GB of RAM with each model. Dells workstations offer a choice of either SATA (Serial ATA) or SAS (serial-attached SCSI) hard disk drives, although the T7400 offers up to 5TB of data capacity, while the T5400 offers up to 3TB.
The Dell workstations also offer a pair of second-generation PCI x16 slots.
One difference between the Dell workstations and those from HP and Lenovo is that the T5400 and the T7400 each offers the option of a Nividia Quadro FX 5600 graphics card, while the workstations from HP and Lenovo currently offer the Nvidia Quadro FX 4600 graphics card.
The Dell workstations support Microsoft Windows XP and Vista as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.