Hi,

>I will make the (possibly erroneous) assumption that you have never
>run on an Ultra5 before.

as we use several of them (running solaris, so far...)
I think I can comment a bit.

>
>Peripheral bus is PCI.
>All the periphery is IDE (reading ain't bad, writes are slow as hell).
>	You could put SCSI there but unless it's got an OBP on it, you
>	won't be able to boot from it.  Sun PCI SCSI ain't cheap.

Quite wrong. You can put a 53C875 or 876 based SCSI Card in, and
it just works. Sun sells these cards too (the Symbios SYM2201, for example),
so they work in OBP and with Solaris' glm driver. I think our driver
will work too.

>CPU speed is 250MHz.

Sun changed the initial U5 (codename darwin) in the newer darwin+ last
year. The newer ones have 270 or 333 or even 400?? MHz. The cache size grew
from 512kB to 2MB.

>CD/ROM is ATAPI (read: slow initial access).
>Default framebuffer appears to be the equivalent of a 1280x1024 cgsix.

The default framebuffer was a ATI Rage II in the older darwin,
and it is a Rage Pro in the newer darwin. (Sun called the first one
PGX24, and the second one PGX32)

>It appears to have a somewhat decent audio card on it.
>
>I wouldn't want one, but your mileage may vary.

>				--*greywolf;

I think with SCSI disks and 2MB cache its a nice desktop machine.
The case is a little bit crappy, just like other systems
built from pc parts.


Greetings,


Simon.