Ultra Cheap Ultras From Sun

madHomer writes "I just read that Sun is going to be selling some Ultra 5's for less then $2,000. They did not include specs in the press release. I am very curious what the "base" model is. They say they are not going after the home market, but the developer market. "

Comments

Yuck...

[Ledge Kindred]

I have one of the older SPARC-based Ultra5's already. When Sun first released this line of "new, commodity-based hardware" we all though, "Great! Now we won't get gouged having to buy components from Sun! We can buy off-the-shelf memory and CDROM drives and hard drives and it's got a standard PCI bus so we can buy PCI cards as long as Solaris will use them! No more expensive vendor-only hardware to upgrade it!"

Well guess what? If I want to upgrade anything, I still have to buy components from Sun. The memory is somehow ... "weird" so that standard SIMM don't work in it. Hard drives and CDROM drives need to have a Sun firmware/BIOS on them or the machine won't recognize them. Even though it's a "standard" PCI bus, you still have to buy expansion cards from Sun -- they sell pretty much off-the-shelf brand-name SCSI and Network cards if you want to add them, but again they have Sun firmware/BIOS that is required before the machine will recognize them. Of course the components from Sun are all between 4x and 10x the normal going street price for identical components.

If I hadn't been able to get the machine very cheap (we had them on lease to another company who nearly paid off the purchase price before the lease went off) I wouldn't have bought it at all.

With the press release saying these new machines will run "Windows NT, Windows 95, DOS" I wonder if they've even given up putting a SPARC chip in these things and gone Intel-based clone. If they have, I'll bet you'll still need to get components from Sun. I suspect it's just a braino from the people who did up the press release, though.

Also, the statement that this is "the first Unix workstation to be listed under $2,000" will probably upset the VA Research and Penguin Computing guys. :)

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Not even at $2,000...

[RISCy Business]

...is an Ultra5 worth it. I'm writing this on an Ultra5. Probably one of the $2,000 ones. It's got a 4.3G IDE disk and a 12x IDE CD-ROM. It has a 10/100 'Happy Meal' ethernet card. Onboard sound that is horrendous. No SCSI capabilities without a very specific SCSI card. One serial port that requires a special splitter cable.

With 256M of memory, this Ultra5 is actually *slower* than my IBM ThinkPad 860 running AIX with a 603/166MHz and 64M in it. That's right; it's actually slower. It's running a cheapo Raptor 4M 'framebuffer' which is actually a Permedia2a, specifically, a FireGL 1000 Pro OEM'd twice; once by Diamond, once by this other company.

I can honestly say I have a framerate using Netscape. I have a framerate when I'm typing because the keyboard controller is having difficulties keeping up with my typing (I type at ~110WPM w/78% accuracy) and the movements of my mouse. And this is with 256M, which probably puts it up to the $5,000 mark if you want your memory from Sun.

Honestly, I can't say I've been on a much worse machine. Even my PCs are better than this; at least they have the ability to use a variety of SCSI cards and sound cards; here, you're stuck with one choice and no options. The CD-ROM is problematic, as is the OS. Half the time it refuses to take an audio CD, much less play it.

Don't waste your money. I can honestly say that the DEC Multia is on par with the Ultra5 as far as a development machine; and I own 3 DEC Multias. They have the same problems - no room for disk, proprietary floppy, etc. The difference is that the Multia comes with video onboard, and has IDE and SCSI in it, as well as a decent sound card, NIC, PCMCIA, and you can add expansion capabilities. The Ultra5.. well.. I think I need another Motorola MTX+ '011 before I so much as want an Ultra5. If you must have SPARC, go get a SPARCengine UltraAXi from one of the many VAR/OEMs that Sun rips off royally. Same machine, only you can actually try and work with it.

-RISCy Business | Rabid unix guy, networking guru