[rescue] Speaking of not being able to get newish workstations at PC prices... my TCF haul

[Andrew Weiss]

TCF was a lot of fun.  It was great meeting everyone: Caleb, Bob,
Linc, and Lionel.  Caleb's doggy rocks.

There wasn't too much I was interested in buying, and one of the items
I was interested in buying got bought before I could bring back the
money to grab it.  A beautiful black IBM G260 tube.

Sigh... but

I did get a verrah nice HP9000/785/B2000 workstation.  I tried booting
the OS it has on the hard drive and while it gets stuck at the LAN
initialization (I didn't plug it into my network), it's stupid fast.

It's a 400 Mhz PA-RISC (8500) with 1.5MB cache, 256 MB RAM, and a 9GB
Ultra LVD disk drive.  It has a 32X CD-ROM and built in 24MB PXE frame
buffer.  Two 64-bit and two 32-bit PCI slots.  Sleek Grey and Blue
case.  Price $250.00

Only bad point is I need a USB keyboard for it now.

I also grabbed Nancy a Radeon 9600XT AGP 4/8X 128MB DDR card to
replace her GeForce 2MX 440 64MB card.

It took some voodoo to get it to run at 4X... it always wanted to run
at 2X via SMARTGART... but the trick is to disable AGP writes and
reads... restart at 4X... then re-enable them... and restart.  The
system will then disable AGP write but leave read enabled which won't
disable AGP Texture acceleration in DirectX.

I have one of those boards that was made early in the 4X spec
period... it is AGP 2.0 rather than 3.0.

Andrew
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