[rescue] Re: OH YEA??? [was: Re: Ultra?]

[James Lockwood]

On Sat, 3 Aug 2002, Robert Novak wrote:

> I think you'll find that nobody here will rag on the AXi. Search the
> archives for James Lockwood's posts on it--he is one of the most thorough
> and accurate evangelists for it (I bought my first AXi from him) and does
> a good job of pointing out its high points and putting it in perspective
> with other sub-$500 Suns.

Thanks for the credit.  At one time I maintained a farm of over 30 of them
at one point with great success.  They were quite economical compared with
the Ultra 5 when you need a greater than base system configuration.

> Downsides: Less permissive about memory addressing modes than U5/U10 (all
> AXi memory will work in U5/U10, not necessarily vice versa), no onboard
> audio, no UPA frame buffer slots, requires more attention to cooling and
> air circulation, limited to 1GB of still-expensive-in-high-density memory.

It does have a UPA frame buffer slot (vertical U30 form factor).  It's
inline with a PCI slot (the second one down) and using it prevents this
PCI slot from being used.  It officially only supports the
Creator/Creator3D, but I ran an Elite3D M3 in one of mine for nearly two
years and set a near record Blender Blenchmark with this combo (only being
edged out by the Onyxs).

You can't use it in a case that requires a right-angle PCI adapter,
because to my knowledge no UPA64S right angle adapters exist.  I think
that capacitive loading on the bus would make them prohibitive.

The AXi was built by Sun's MicroElectronics division at least in part
because they saw the U5 and U10 as excessively crippled for marketing
reasons.  I suspect that everyone on this list agrees.  Had Sun taken the
AXi, packaged it in a nice chassis and sold it as the Ultra 5 I suspect
that few people would have had problems with it.

> QUAD U2?
>
> Tell me more!

Guessing it's an AXmp-based U2 "superclone".  The AXmp is a _lousy_
design, but it was the only way to get quad desktop yuppiness before the
U80.

-James