[SunRescue] Offerings

[James Lockwood]

On Fri, 13 Aug 1999, Barry Fujii wrote:

> on a more sun related note, has anyone built a ultrasparc using teh AXI
> motherboards? they are OEM style parts, but they have built in ethernet,
> scsi, and video. the best part is that they are ATX sized boards so chassis
> are easy to come by.

Yes, I've built several (and have one at home).  The boards are nice, and
have dual onboard UW SCSI, 10/100 ethernet, dual serial, parallel, and
both PS/2 and Sun kb/mouse ports.  6 PCI slots on 2 completely seperate
busses gives you great bandwidth and expandability, and the UPA slot can
take a Creator or Elite3D series card to give you blazingly fast graphics
performance.  Up to 1GB RAM (8 DIMM slots used in pairs).

They do not come with onboard video, however.  If you want to take the
cheap way out, some ATI Mach64 boards will work.  Sun's PGX32 is the next
step up, it's expensive ($300 or so) but gives you simultaneous 8-bit and
24-bit visuals at up to 1280x1024.  Above this are the UPA framebuffers,
very fast but pricy new.  There is also no onboard audio but this is
easily remedied by an Ensoniq-based PCI card.

The boards are the logical extreme of a design based on the Ultra IIi
series of processors (as used in the Ultra 5/10).

The advantage to the ATX form factor is that cases are easy to come by.
The disadvantage is that _good_ cases are hard to find.  You need a lot of
air circulation to cool the CPU properly, older models at least do not
have a fan on the CPU module.  I still have not found a case that I am
satisfied with, with the possible exception of $300/ea rackmount cases.

-James