[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sat, 7 Mar 2009, Joshua Boyd wrote:

> I would venture to suggest that the Ultra 30 is good and quiet.  The
> ultra 80s are fairy noisy, but a lot of PCs are just as bad.  A SB1000
> or newer (1500, 2000, 2500) would be a heck of  a lot faster, but I
> don't know anything about noise levels.  They are meant to be
> workstations though.

SB1000 systems are -not- quiet.  They're not Octane-loud or pSeries-loud,
but they have a definite drone to them.

SB1500 systems are acceptably quiet, but they are not very reliable.
Specifically, there was a power supply recall (catches fire), and the
replacement supplies (or at least the ones we got) crap out with
disturbingly short lifetimes.  Oh, and the replacements are discontinued
and are almost-but-not-exactly-quite ATX.  SB1500 systems are almost cheap
enough that you can buy them and toss them out when the PSU dies on you,
though.  Memory for them, though, is not cheap, and there was one specific
OBP update (I forget the details) that disables the use of most
third-party memory modules because of stricter requirements on what the
SPD has to spew out.

The SB2500s I've used are nice systems.  I've not seen them for cheap,
though.  Maybe there's a correlation.

For what it's worth, the Sun Blade 1500 was what convinced $ork to kill
SPARCs on the desktop for engineers, which was how things ran almost since
the company was founded.  It really is that bad when you beat up on it.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "They don't have the right to read a book out loud."
Elgin, TX         (                  --Paul Aiken
USA               (                    Executive Director, Authors Guild