【NEC】Express 5800/56Wa and 58Wa

In June 1998, NEC began selling two models, the Express 5800/56Wa and the Express 5800/58Wa, under its Express 5800/50 series of workstations that ran Microsoft’s Windows NT Workstation operating system. The Express 5800/56Wa could run on either one or two Intel Pentium II Xeon processors (400 MHz) and offered the world’s fastest 3D graphics rendering performance thanks to the newly developed TE3A 3D graphics accelerator. The Express 5800/58Wa could run on up to four Pentium II Xeon processors (400 MHz).

The two models were designed to give a comfortable 3D graphics environment for professional CAD/CAM work in automotive or machinery manufacturing, computer graphics, and 3D content creation. When equipped with the Pentium II Xeon processor (400 MHz), Intel’s 440GX AGPset workstation chipset, and NEC’s TE3A 3D graphics accelerator, the Express 5800/56Wa scored 125 on OpenGL’s Viewperf CDRS-03 performance benchmark test. This score was about 1.6 times faster than previous models and made the Express 5800/56Wa one of the world’s fastest rendering workstations running Windows NT Workstation 4.0. When equipped NEC’s TE3AL 3D graphics accelerator, the Express 5800/56Wa scored 80 on the same test.

With scalability up to four processors, the Express 5800/58Wa provided multiprocessing suitable for CAD for electronics, analytic simulations, and other fields requiring high-speed computations. These models are listed here under PC servers because the Express 5800 series included both PC servers and PC workstations.