[rescue] Sun Kit Needed for EE Student Here

["Javi Mahai <lefa at ucsc.edu>" at ucsc.edu]

On Tue, 02 May 2006 22:04:27 -0400
  Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net> wrote:

> I will let others defend me.  
> 
> The ones who have had caps go bad on cheap PC mobos.  
> 
> The ones who can explain in detail why lots of caps 
>indicate poor
> design.  
> 
> And the ones who know that a U60 does NOT have a 
>relatively high cap
> count.

My early comment was in now way shape or form an "attack" 
ergo no need to be "defended" I was just saying that I had 
never heard "capacitor count" as a quality metric when it 
comes to a computer system board design.

In any case an U2/60 is a relatively slow board, if you 
look at modern high speed kit (even from SUN) you will see 
large capacitor count, because... well, those high speed 
differential traces need some serious decoupling (Look at 
a starfire backplane). But even on an U2's board 
underbelly, you can see plenty of caps (note, capacitors 
do not come only on big cilindric blue packages). I have 
an SGI origin node sitting on my desk, there are plenty of 
caps in it... I would not consider it a sloppily designed 
board by any means...