[SunRescue] Q: Regarding Sun Educator promo Ultra 5 system

[James Lockwood]

On Wed, 19 Apr 2000, Ken Hansen wrote:

>     My question really is about the speed of the non-SBUS arch.
> machines, since this is a "pc-style" SPARC box. The CPU is fast
> (360 Mhz?) it has 128 Meg RAM and an 8 Gig IDE drive and
> comes with a 17" monitor and I forget the framebuffer specs. Could
> I do better with $1200 - 1300 in the used market?

PCI, even in the 32-bit/33MHz version is generally faster than SBus.  The
chief problem right now is driver support.  If you need functions that
commodity PCI cards can supply (SCSI, video and soon USB) then cheap PCI
cards are a big win.  Things like extra serial ports and cheap ethernet
cards are more difficult to come by than they are in SBus versions.

The 360MHz version is fairly fast but is hampered a bit by a small L2
cache (256KB).  It will definately feel much faster than the other
machines you have listed.

For a full system including RAM, drive and monitor you would have a
difficult time doing better.  The only thing that might qualify would be
an Ultra 1E with Creator3D, this would give up some CPU speed in exchange
for faster graphics performance and onboard FW SCSI.  I'd still lean
towards the 5, though.

> Thoughts?

I'd personally sell everything other than the SS10 and use it to serve
things that you don't want to put on the Ultra.  It can be handy having an
extra system like that floating around, and if you want to build a
multihomed firewall in the future you'll find SBus ethernet cards to be
much cheaper than Sun-supported PCI ones.

-James