[geeks] Opinions on the HP C3x00?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 nate at portents.com wrote:

> Anyone have experience or opinions on the HP C3x00 PA-8700 class
> workstations?

They're fast and heavy.  Also rather loud when the fans spin up.

> I don't have any HP-UX experience, or a machine dedicated to running
> Linux other than a PC running MythTV on Ubuntu I put together, and I
> was wondering if that class of PA-RISC workstations would be good to
> tinker with... though it looks like they could draw a lot of power
> from the wall, judging by the "805W max power input" rating.

They do pull a lot when they're full of cards and under a load, but I
doubt they pull anywhere near 805W with just a framebuffer and disk
under moderate loads.

Be aware that 64-bitness isn't well-exploited on hppa on Linux.  Also be
aware that BSD doesn't run on hppa very well yet (none at all on the
PA8700 systems, as far as I know), so your only options are Linux and
PHUX.

I had some strange problems booting Debian on a C3600 that I made notes
about which I can no-longer find.  Suffice it to say that it was a
common and well-known problem that was easily worked-around, but
frustrating nonetheless.

I would suspect (but am by no means certain) that any exotic video
hardware will be thoroughly unsupported on any OS other then PHUX.  If
you're looking for a good Unix workstation, I feel your pain.  SPARCs
have slow consoles, SGIs are loud and expensive and power-hungry and
tend to be IRIX-only, IBMs are loud and expensive.  IBMs and HPs look to
be among the best performers, but you can really only get decent
workstation performance out of them if you run AIX[0] or PHUX,
respectively.

I finally gave up and bought a Mac, which serves me very well.  It's
quite a shame that the new ones are mere PCs w/ digital restrictions
management built into the hardware.

> And what type of memory is "278-pin 120MHz ECC SDRAM DIMM"?

I think that describes the memory in question very well.  What more
would you want to know?


[0] Not that running AIX is a Bad Thing, but if you want to run Linux,
     you can wave bye-bye to any snazzy framebuffer or wicked-fast I/O
     cards.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke     )       Apple MacBook Pro
Elgin, TX            (     Now with Intel Core Duo
USA                   )      Beauty is Skin Deep