Palo Alto, CA — Hewlett-Packard Company has unveiled HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations, a new family of high-performance, Windows NT-based systems featuring Intel’s new Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon processors.

These new systems are targeted at the growing segment of technical and creative customers who require a value-added, build-to-order sales model; the most advanced graphics technologies; and leadership 3-D application performance in a Windows NT environment. By combining these solutions with the powerful UNIX system HP VISUALIZE workstation line and the high-performance, volume-leading Windows NT-based HP Kayak PC Workstation family, HP offers customers a breadth of leading workstation solutions that is unmatched in the industry.

Available immediately with a U.S. list price starting at $3,225, HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations will be manufactured by HP under a “build-to-order” fulfillment model that allows customers to select their exact configuration and price point, and have their systems delivered direct from HP. Systems will be sold directly by HP’s technical-workstation sales force and through a network of certified HP resellers demonstrating solution-selling expertise in key technical and creative markets, such as mechanical-design automation and digital-content creation.

Based on HP’s award-winning HP VISUALIZE fx graphics architecture, HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations achieve leading application performance. Like HP Kayak PC Workstations, they also add optimal system management and reliability through innovative HP-engineered technologies, such as HP TopTools, HP MaxiLife and HP UltraFlow. No other workstation vendor can deliver more powerful, manageable and dependable workstation solutions.

“By adding HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations to the industry’s broadest, highest-performing workstation portfolio, HP has seized the opportunity to serve the most demanding 3-D users in the Windows NT workstation market,” said Patty Azzarello, worldwide marketing manager of HP’s Workstation Systems Division. “With HP VISUALIZE Personal Workstations, HP establishes a new standard in workstation graphics and application performance, while meeting customer demand for rapid, direct delivery and overall value.”

The HP VISUALIZE P450 and P500 Personal Workstations deliver affordable, advanced processing power and graphics performance to engineers, designers, scientists and artists who interact with large models in complex workflow environments. The HP VISUALIZE X500 and X550 Personal Workstations are designed for advanced professional users who perform simulations, virtual prototyping, complex modeling and high-end visualization tasks and who demand leading-edge graphics performance and processing power.

The new HP VISUALIZE-fx+ graphics subsystems incorporate advanced graphics technology originally designed for HP VISUALIZE UNIX workstations and are tuned for leadership performance on mission-critical technical applications. For example, an HP VISUALIZE X500 with fx4+ graphics is twice as fast as Silicon Graphics’ 320 Visual workstation and 1.8 times faster than Dell’s 610 Precision GMX2000 workstation on the Indy3D-MCAD 150 benchmark and 1.5 times faster than these same competitive systems on the Indy3D-Animation benchmark.