At 12:49 Uhr -0400 11.10.2002, webmaster@datazap.net wrote:
>Although I am not a mac guy, I have a lots of parts for the quadra 650
>including two 10baseT ethernet cards, and an adaptor to use a pc monitor,
>keyboard, and mouse. So, there would be nothing that I would need to buy
>for the mac. On the down side the mac is terribly slow, and now that I
>have a quadra (this mac will not support 2 NICs) hooked to the cable modem
>it only downloads at about 14K per sec. (this is under mac OS). Plus, this
>computer is really ticking me off, because it should be able to bus much
>more than that.
>
>As for the Sparc Classic, it will cost me $110 to get a quad 10baseT
>ethernet card. And it will need a bigger hard drive and more memory. Plus
>it does not have a floppy drive. I must admit that I never used a sun
>before and I am a little bit nervous about playing with the openPROM.

From a mac68k person...

o My Quadra 700 @ 33 Mhz is considerably slower than my SS2. I hear that a
Classic (sun4m on diet) is slightly faster than the latter.

o The sbus is more capable than the nubus; the Q650 is a dmaless machine,
which shows in SCSI performance.

o Nubus ethernet cards usually come with the NS8390 - there are probably
faster chips around. The Quadra onboard controller is a newer SMC chip.

o I've gotten ~16 KBytes/sec from a Macintosh IIci (68030@25 MHz) as a
pppoe router with ipfilter and (userland) rp-pppoe. The Q650 (which can be
clock-chipped to 40MHz) can do much better; I'd expect full ADSL speed with
in-kernel pppoe.

o The lunchbox Suns are noisy compared to the Macintoshes (Papst fan or
not), and they do easily overheat.

o Compared to older Macs, the Q650 construction is fairly PCish.

o You don't need a screen and kbd for the Sun - it can be fully run with
serial console. The Mac, too, but some things still have to be done in
MacOS with screen, mouse & kbd.


Summary: If performance is important, go with the Sun. On the other hand,
depending on your needs, the Q650 might do just fine - the old Quadras are
pretty reliable machines.

HTH,
	hauke


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