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Subject: Re: Hardware for computer chess

Author: Ryan B.

Date: 17:09:40 06/08/03

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On June 08, 2003 at 17:27:48, Tom Kerrigan wrote:

>On June 08, 2003 at 00:52:54, Ryan B. wrote:
>
>>What programs and what price range you looking at?  I'm sure crafty would run
>>great on a Sun Blade 150 and the price is rather reasonable.
>>http://store.sun.com/catalog/doc/BrowsePage.jhtml?catid=85825   If your looking
>>for the best price to performance ratio I think AMD is the front-runner.  But
>>I?m not much of a fan for Intels high-end prices on low-end hardware, just my
>>opinion though.
>
>Problem being, the Sun Blade 150 is a pile of shit.
>
>Seriously, a 650MHz US-IIi?
>
>It gets 283 on the Crafty SPEC test. A 500MHz Athlon can beat that score. It's
>mind-blowing that Sun is charging $1395 for a computer that would get its ass
>whooped by a PC from, like, 4 years ago.
>
>Just for fun, I went to newegg and priced a system with similar specs to the Sun
>Blade 150. Unfortunately, they don't sell parts that are old enough, so I had to
>go with a DVD drive (instead of just CD), a processor that's more than twice as
>fast (1.1GHz Athlon), and an AGP graphics card with 3D acceleration (vs. a 2D
>PCI card). The total price came to $253.
>
>So if you go with a PC, you get a system that's twice as fast for 1/5th the
>price. Price/performance advantage of 10x... hmm...
>
>-Tom

If you are concerned with price/performance ratio you can get a 386 system for
$1.  http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2733773366&category=3742
 However if you prefer using a better OS, having a better programming
environment, and using quality hardware Sun isn't so bad a choice.  For a cheep
second computer to run PC/windows programs I think AMD is a practical choice of
hardware.  Also I sincerely hope you do not believe that an Athlon 500 is really
faster than a Blade 150 computer.  Benchmarks do not always show real world
performance.  For example according to some benchmarks my amiga 4000 is faster
than my Pentium 100.  This is not realistic.  Also my Duron 800 scores better on
CPU and gpu benchmarks than my G4 450 Mac.  In real world tests using PhotoShop
and PovRay the Mac beats the Duron 800 almost every time.  Did you happen to
notice in my first post I asked, What programs and what price range you looking
at?  He could prefer running Window, Mac OS, or even Amiga Workbench for all I
know.  The sun was just a suggestion and personal platform preference from me.
In the end it's all in what your most comfortable with, but if you want real
world performance I don't think a PC will be best in any tasks other than simple
math, and impressive benchmarking.

Ryan



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