HP rolled out its flagship workstation today, the Z800, and it brings swank styling by BMW DesignWorksUSA inside and out, along with fire-breathing components throughout. Packing two of the latest Intel Xeon 5500 series quad-core processors, otherwise known as Nehalem, its innards are so pretty, it's a shame you have to keep its brushed-aluminum door closed.

That all sounds impressive, but how does it run in the real world? We've had the highest-end Z800 in our hands for the past month, poking and prodding it, running benchmarks, and generally admiring its good looks and blistering performance. After you've take our gallery tour below, click Continue for the full picture on what HP claims is the "ultimate in power and expandability."

The Z800 is not for everybody. Aimed at high-end animators, rocket scientists, oil and gas explorers and nuclear weapons simulators, these workstations are the darlings of those who would like to stuff 196GB of RAM inside, along with two $3180 NVIDIA Quadro FX 5800 graphics cards and six solid-state drives. You could easily drop $12K-$15K loading this baby up with RAM, hard drives and graphics cards.

The case is as user-serviceable as you can get. Check out our video, where we disassemble most of the Z800 in under a minute. The drives are in drawers and "blind connect" as you slide them in; the power supply also slides out and connects in the same way. Those BMW-designed cowlings keep the ventilation going in the right places but snap off in an instant, and no, you don't need a single tool but your own two hands to take the whole thing apart, with no cut fingers along the way. And, we really like those integrated handles, making the Z800 stackable and easy to carry.

It's unbelievably fast. Last year's HP king of the hill, the xw8600 workstation running Intel Xeon "Harpertown" processors (W5460, 3.16GHz) was fast. But this z800 with its pair of Intel's fastest quad-core "Nehalem" W5580 processors running at 3.2GHz blows its doors off. We measured a Cinebench (a favorite benchmark of pro graphics and rendering jockeys) number of 28,364, a 51.5% increase over the 8-core xw8600 packing a pair of last year's fastest quad-core workstation chips. That's a lot of speed to pick up in a year. In fact, it matches the speed of a $100 million supercomputer from 15 years ago. (Compare your machine with this Z800 using Cinebench; download the free benchmark here.)

It's a lot faster than typical consumer PCs. In this benchmark test, look at the kind of speed we're talking about. The Z800's graphics, disks, processors and everything else hit stratospheric levels, muscling aside a garden-variety Core 2 Duo box. It's like a Ferrari versus an ox cart. By the way, if you'd like to compare your PC with this one, download the free trial of Passmark's Performance Test 7.0. If you'd like to compare your test to many of ours, search "Classified" in the results screen, and you'll see the dozens of configurations we tested with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Its processors are remarkable. These two Nehalem W5580 chips both have 4 cores, with each core capable of a new kind of hyperthreading — so the processors appear as 16 graphs in the Windows performance monitor. Among other enhancements, the chips have Intel's new "Turbo Boost," automatically overclocking each core when it senses lightly threaded operations in the other cores.

There's more on the way. The Z800 will soon have the option of liquid cooling, making the already whisper-quiet box nearly silent, and there will also be solid-state drives (SSD) available (we tested four of them here). Now, the noisiest part of the Z800 is its hard drives, and not only will the SSDs be completely silent, they'll be faster than the 400MB/sec speeds we measured in various array configurations.

They're priced right. These behemoths ain't cheap, but they cost the same as their predecessors, and they're 18% faster, according to the benchmarks we ran. HP says the Z800 pricing "starts at" $1999, but pshaw — that's just the jumping-off point before you start slathering on the RAM, drives, workstation-class graphics, and faster processors. Our test workstation has 12GB of RAM, a 146GB 15,000rpm SAS drive, 1TB SATA drive, and a 1.5GB NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 graphics card, with a price of $10,787.

HP Z-Series Workstations