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Until recently, workstation meant a pricey power system that graced the desk of an engineer, a graphics designer, or a professional video editor. But astute PC shoppers who see workstations following conventional desktop PCs down past the $1000 barrier are asking: Should I buy a workstation instead?

The answer: Get one only if you run industrial-strength programs that need high-end graphics and performance, and if you're willing to pay extra for fail-safe reliability. Workstations remain special-purpose systems that contain souped-up hardware and undergo extensive testing, which costs a premium. But with that premium down to a few hundred bucks, the choice really depends on your needs.

It's easy to find affordable, introductory workstations that run Windows. Both Dell and Hewlett-Packard market Windows XP-based workstations starting at under $1000 and stretching to about $3500; IBM's offerings cost only a few hundred dollars more. Midrange ($3000 to $10,000) and high-end units typically have bigger cases than PCs, more memory and PCI slots, and more drive bays, making frequent upgrades easy.

Power, Redundancy

Most workstations have error-checking and -correcting memory that won't drop the occasional bit--a flaw unnoticeable in fast-moving games but disastrous when calculating jet aircraft tolerances. These units have larger power supplies and better, quieter fans to avoid overheating.

Even some entry-level workstations support dual CPUs, but they need multithreaded software to benefit from them. Adobe Photoshop is multithreaded, but few games are. Microsoft Office's dual-CPU support makes background operations faster and stabler.

Workstations often contain two SCSI or Serial ATA hard drives zipping along at up to 15,000 rpm, and RAID striping to split data between the drives to jack up performance.

New PC components are going right into workstations. The first units of DDR2 memory run at 533 MHz (as with both workstations we tested) but can reach 1 GHz, outpacing the older, 400-MHz DDR. Workstations put the PCI Express bus to good use, as well; Advanced Micro Devices says its Hyper Transport Technology performs similarly.

Workstation graphics cards usually run faster and have more memory than PC boards, and support OpenGL, which adds realistic 3D rendering and is used by dozens of games. NVidia's Quadro FX 4400 is popular; 3Dlabs, ATI, and Matrox also offer professional-class cards.

None of these technologies is unique to workstations. What truly demarcates a workstation from an ordinary PC is added testing to ensure that demanding apps run smoothly. For solid reliability, workstation makers seek certification from software vendors. Workstations also run special speed-tweaking utilities.

Vendors say even the new low-end models go to users with special reliability and performance needs. For example, Wall Street types crunch huge spreadsheets and use multiple real-time displays. "We tune for these kinds of applications," says Joe Curley, Dell's senior manager for the Precision line of workstations.

HP also promotes to "prosumers," notably game enthusiasts who want the class of machines the games were designed on. Vendors report interest from serious amateur video editors, who seek graphics capabilities and reliability.

To see how Windows workstations compare with PCs, PC World tested the new Dell Precision Workstation 370 and HP Workstation Xw4200. The Dell posted the second-highest score ever on WorldBench 5, our revamped suite of real-world application tests. The Dell's score of 112 slightly outdid the HP's 107 (still a top-five mark), perhaps due to its slightly quicker 3.6-GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor (the HP's P4 runs at 3.4 GHz).

Both showed their speed in our WinZip compression test. The HP unit's NVidia Quadro NVS PCI-E graphics board proved less well-suited to our graphics test; the Dell's workstation graphics card and extra video memory (256MB to the HP's 64MB) did much better. As expected, both workstations earned average scores on our Office and audio tests.

Are there any PC applications a workstation isn't good for? Not really, say the experts. The only drawback is price: For all their new affordability, workstations still cost more. "For every [price] drop you see in workstations, there's usually a deeper drop in PCs," says Lloyd Cohen, IDC's director of worldwide market analysis.