[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Jochen Kunz]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 14:04:08 -0500 (EST)
nate at portents.com wrote:

> Anyone have experience or opinions on the HP C3x00 PA-8700 class
> workstations?  How's the FX10 graphics card perform relative to cards
> these days?
>
> I don't have any HP-UX experience, or a machine dedicated to running
> Linux other than a PC running MythTV on Ubuntu I put together, and I
> was wondering if that class of PA-RISC workstations would be good to
> tinker with... though it looks like they could draw a lot of power
> from the wall, judging by the "805W max power input" rating.  And what
> type of memory is"278-pin 120MHz ECC SDRAM DIMM"?
If you want to see this machine perform you have to stick with HPsUX. As
already mentioned the GFX is supported by HPsUX only. The only other OS
alternative is Linux. No GFX [0] with Linux. The other problem with
Linux is GCC. To my experience GCC produces quite bad and slow PA-RISC
code. So some of the CPU performance is lost due to inefficient
binaries.

It is a nice machine if you can wrap your head around HPsUX.
If you don't like HPsUX look for an other machine.

The memory is very proprietary.

[0] You may put a generic PeeCee PCI VGA into it and use the Linux
kernel framebuffer and X11 server. But that is slow.
--


tsch|_,
       Jochen

Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/