DESIGNED FOR WORK, not play, the HP Z230 Tower Workstation (go.pcworld.com/z230tower) is not sexy, and you pay dearly to have the company assemble the components, but it is well designed and eminently powerful and practical.
Our test configuration, priced at $2700, came with a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Xeon e3-1245 v3 CPU and 16GB of DDR3/1600 ECC (error-correcting code) memory. Since only two of the four DIMM slots are occupied, you can easily double the memory to 32GB.
The Z230 Tower provides plenty of breathing space, including one internal 2.5-inch bay, two internal 3.5-inch bays (one of which is occupied by a 1TB, 10,000-rpm WD Velociraptor hard drive mounted in a 2.5-inch adapter), one slim external optical-drive bay (occupied by a DVD burner), and two external 5.25-inch half-height bays (which make…
