[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006, Jochen Kunz wrote:

>> SPARCs have slow consoles,
> Please elaborate. Currently I am watching ebay to get a Sun Blade 1000
> with 750 MHz US III. I wane use it as a general purpose desktiop
> machine. It will replace an Octane R12k 300 MHz with ESSI. I need
> somthing with a faster CPU and moderately accelerated 2D X11.

I have to admit that the systems w/ USB consoles are a lot better, but,
even with the mouse speed-hack, every serial-console Sun I've ever used
felt like it was miles away over the network.  Input is laggy; graphics
are laggy.  The Blade 1500 was the first Sun I'd used that came even
close to approaching the level of snappiness that my 195MHz Octane had
nearly a decade ago--so long as one runs CDE or a tiny window manager;
Sun's GNOME-based thing does an excellent job of bogging down a new
1500.

>> SGIs are loud and expensive and
>> power-hungry and tend to be IRIX-only,
> SGIs expensive? ???
> 300 MHz R12k SI / SE Octanes are down to 100 EUR and 500 / 600 MHz V10
> Fuels are below 500 EUR.

Well, the new ones are very expensive.  I hadn't realized that Fuels had
come down that much in price.  A new IBM POWER-based workstation is
almost affordable (5000 USD or so).  A new SGI MIPS-based workstation
isn't nearly so pocketbook-friendly.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )       Apple MacBook Pro
Elgin, TX            (     Now with Intel Core Duo
USA                   )      Beauty is Skin Deep