Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 14:21:19 -0400 From: Thor Lancelot Simon <tls@rek.tjls.com> To: "Koscielny, Wally" <Wally.Koscielny@gs.com> Cc: freebsd-alpha@freebsd.org Subject: Re: many cheap PC164 boards -- gret for NetBSD (fwd) Message-ID: <19990414142119.C21197@rek.tjls.com> In-Reply-To: <BF1A000F1B4CD211B69C00104BCB07312ACC66@gsny24e.et.gs.com>; from Koscielny, Wally on Wed, Apr 14, 1999 at 02:02:40PM -0400 References: <BF1A000F1B4CD211B69C00104BCB07312ACC66@gsny24e.et.gs.com>
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On Wed, Apr 14, 1999 at 02:02:40PM -0400, Koscielny, Wally wrote: > They only have one 164LX+533 left for $800 which I bought. The salesman said > that they get shipments of 25 and next shipment should be due soon. He will > contact me when they get the shipment. > > BTW_What is the retail value of these boards+chips (both the PC164+500 and > PC164+533) My vendor tells me that if you put the 533Mhz part on a PC164 board, it will only run at 500MHz. So that's something to be aware of. I have limited experience in replacing the oscillators on these boards (to *down* clock them, in my case, so I could recover from a nasty firmware flash utility bug by using the SROM debugger, which doesn't autobaud right at higher clock rates) and while it's probably not too hard, I think you'd have significant trouble getting the oscillator you need to do it, I got a few leftover samples from a research lab, but minimum orders for the parts are usually in the thousands. (Hm, that was for a PC64, actually -- but somehow I suspect it'd be similar for the PC164, though I've never tried it.) FWIW, nb01.netbsd.org was formerly a personal machine of mine, and was for a time the office fileserver, development build box, and firewall (we had a power hit that ruined *all* these separate machines, so I dragged the Alpha in from home to replace several high-end PPro boxes :-) at an employer of mine, where it ran for about four months before we could replace it. That was almost two years ago, but that box (a 433MHz PC164 from Microway) cost me about $2500 bare. I'm not sure there *is* a "retail value" of these boards now, since they're no longer made (and the Samsung equivalents that are still in production won't run SRM, so you can't get the UNIX PALcode to run NetBSD on them) but I would probably have bought one at $800-$1000 and thought I'd got a decent deal, if I hadn't managed to set up the bulk order. Thor To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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