Bonjour.
My motherboard has died on my desktop.
I want to buy a new desktop.
At the moment it is a three way tie between:
* A second hand G5 ~ $1000.
* A brand new Sun Workstation ~ $1300.
* Build my own ~ $1000.
I care about installing OpenBSD as a priority.
I want Windows XP for the odd game and whatnot.
AFAIAA, I can boot a G5 into XP with Boot Camp ® and it looks like it will work with OpenBSD. The hardware is average (a 2GHz single core processor) and way over priced which is why it's second hand ...
Sun have a scheme ATM where I can trial an Ultra 24 Workstation for sixty days and then purchase it for 20% discount.
The hardware is brand new, current, reasonably powerful.
Unfortunately the only configurations available are not my preferred choice.
As my budget is severely limited (I recently bought a router and I broke my teevee card) the only choice is the cheapest Quad Core processor instead of the more expensive Dual Core.
Can someone enlighten me as to the ins and outs of Quad on OpenBSD?
AFAIUI, dual works. I don't see anything about quad. Further, I have only ever bought and run single cores ...
Sun claims these machines run XP fine. As it is COTS Intel stuff I strongly suspect OpenBSD will work fine. I would have sixty days to find out anyway ...
http://au.sun.com/products/desktop/ultra24/index.jsp
Building my own is a much more attractive economic proposition.
For a thousand dollars I can build a killer box.
This means that I have to choose parts, build, etcetera.
One sad part of this is that the computer shops available to me only sell whiz-bang stuff. It is hard to buy moderate spec' video cards, motherboards with PCI, etcetera.
Looking for thoughts.
Also curious if anyone has used the Sun Try and Buy.
Regardless, someone might get some benefit from it.
http://www.sun.com/tryandbuy/
Best wishes.