Rack me!

[tyggerjai]

So. Anyone have a spare 1 or 2 RU case lying around?
Preferably with PSU?
2RU is probably better - costs more to throw in the colo, but not much, and means I can get a decent CPU & fan in.

Will Pay Cash, and bunnikins can't complain, because it gets hardware out of the house!

sol.
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Comments

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

Does your educational discount extend to staff purchases?

Haven't ever asked, but I doubt it.

And bear in mind we're still probably talking something like $5-7k for a basic V240, which is a fair bit for a personal toy.

(The same money will buy you a dual G5, which is, to be honest, a more appealing toy. IMO, anyway.)

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

I guess the G5 would make a good toy if you liked IDE disc, less memory bandwidth and MacOS X. I think the main problem with trying to use a V240 as a desktop machine would be the additional cost of a decent framebuffer.

Why aren't Apple doing POWER4 machines, anyway?

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The G5 would make a very nice desktop, the V240 is a pretty nice small server. If you need a small server, buy the V240, if you need a nice desktop, buy the G5. Given a vaguely-reasonable IDE implementation it doesn't make a whole lot of difference on a desktop.

(The V240 is almost certainly a lot noisier than the G5, and isn't going to support random hardware like firewire enclosures and USB cameras quite as easily. If you really wanted an UltraSPARC desktop it'd be a poor choice.)

I can only guess at why Apple aren't making a POWER4 system. It may be because there's some difference in the instruction sets between POWER4 and PPC. That would certainly explain it if it were so.

[ltempt.livejournal.com]

I suppose. I think a 280 would make a much nicer desktop machine, and certainly more affordable than Sun's highest end workstation option - the 880z.

The SB2000/SB2500 aren't too bad, but the expansion isn't that amazing - about on par with the average desktop of any architecture.

As for noise, if one wants quiet there are fanless designs. I'll take a big beefy UltraSPARC desktop over a quiet one any day.

The POWER4 architecture is pretty kick-arse - hopefully it'll be available on platforms other than RS/6000 soon.