[rescue] Graphics on a E450

[Stephen Conley]

You could do this to have a true monster of a workstation.  It was my 
'desktop' machine back in the early 2000's for quite a large number of 
years.  Long enough that I had to replace fans in it and went through 
several hard drives for which I was thankful to have a drive cage and 
tons of redundancy :D

Is it a good idea?  I'd say objectively no.  But I was a young guy with 
money to burn, a fascination for multi-processor machines, and little to 
no common sense so there you have it. That said, I wouldn't judge anyone 
who wanted to do it ... like I said in my other post, it's the machine I 
have the fondest memory of.  Nothing I had that came after it had that 
same like 'omg my desktop is a supercomputer' vibe :)

Even if objectively the laptop I'm typing this email on is way more of a 
supercomputer than that E450 ... Ah, hardware just isn't as much fun 
anymore :)


Steve

On 11/2/25 11:58, Dave McGuire via rescue wrote:
> On 11/2/25 11:42, Alan Perry via rescue wrote:
>> I received a decommissioned E450 from work. I don't see a frame 
>> buffer in it, so I guess it ran headless. The E450 falls into a gap 
>> in my experience with Sun (I left the first time in '97 and came back 
>> in '03). What graphics is supported and how does it compare to SS20 
>> graphics? The System Handbook lists PGX, PGX32, PGX64, and Expert3D 
>> but I hadn't heard of any of those before I looked at that list.
>
>   It can definitely be done, but I'd have to wonder why one would want 
> that on a machine that is very clearly a server.  I've worked with a 
> lot of E450s at a lot of sites, but I don't think I've ever seen one 
> with a framebuffer, so clearly I'm not the only person with that opinion.
>
>            -Dave
>