[SunRescue] IPX or Classics

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, hassani youssouf&toko suzuki wrote:
> >>I have been offered to choose between an IPX and a classic same ram and hdd capacity which one should I choose this is the question ( I would like to install solaris 7.0 or suse linux on it )
> 
>   Well, the classic is a fair bit faster, but has a slower framebuffer...cg3
> vs. cg6 in the IPX.  Same resolution and color depth, use the same monitors etc
> etc, but the cg6 has a processor and is quite a bit faster while the cg3 relies
> on the host sparc to do all the bit-banging work.
> 
>   Since you can get an sbus cg6 for $50-75 or so nowadays and slap it into an
> sbus slot if you find the cg3 video too slow, or even run it dual-headed, I'd
> say the classic is a better buy overall.

In addition, the classic has a faster memory bus (seperate from the sbus)
and Fast SCSI onboard (10MB/sec compared with 5MB/sec of the IPX).  Sun
has also stated that the support for the old sun4c machines will probably
be going away in the next release of Solaris, so if you want this machine
around to have a cheap Solaris box to play with I'd recommend the classic.
With enough RAM, Solaris is entirely usable.

-James