[SPARCbook] Buying a SPARCbook 3

[Ken Hansen]

An 85 Mhz CPU would indicate a 3GX, IIRC, and the screen should be an
800x600 TFT screen of 10.4".

800x600 is pretty usable, 640x480 is rough - but workable - remember
most windows managers (like CDE, etc.) use a significant amount of
screen real estate at 640x480.

As for performance, you will be suffering a poorer memory design,
so that will reduce system performance relative to a similar SS/5,
but I think the difference would be less than 10% - the real hit
comes from the framebuffer (not upgradeable on sparcbook) and the
disk (SS5 use ultra SCSI, Sparcbook uses an emulated SCSI-2 (FAST
SCSI) on an IDE drive in many cases).

Is an 85 Mhz SS5 clone usable - certainly, but it is far from the
performance of a P166 laptop that can usually be gotten for about
the same money, IMHO. Of course, the P166 laptop is not nearly as
cool or distictive as the sparcbook. And the keyboard on a
sparcbook 3 is *very* nice (I really like lexmark keyboards)...

HTH,

Ken
n2vip at bellatlantic.net

 
> Hi All,
> 
> I have been offered a SPARCbook 3 of currently unknown model. I know it's
> 85MHz (so that makes it a 3XT?), not sure of screen size/resolution.
> 
> Was the 85MHz SPARCbook 3 available with 9.4" 640x480 or 10.4" 800x600
> screens?
> 
> How usable is a 640x480 screen? Is the performance of the SB3 comparable
> to an equivalent MHz SPARCstation 5?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> 
> Chris Powell.
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