[OT] Pegasos PPC

[Tim Seufert]

On Mar 19, 2004, at 7:27 PM, Norberto Quintanar wrote:

> I know this will sound blasphemous to some but I was never really a
> big Mac fan as I learned my way around computers.  Oregon trail and
> Lemonade stand didn't do it for me

But those weren't Mac programs.  :)  (They were Apple II, or at least 
Oregon Trail was.  Hardcore Apple II guys tend to hate the Mac because 
Apple let the II line die in favor of the Mac.)

> To try and wrap this up, has anyone bought a Pegasos PPC
> - http://www.pegasosppc.com/ they basically make PPC machines rather
> cheap I might add http://www.ultraspec.us/pegasos.htm
>
> So has anyone on the list bought one of these?  They appear to be PPC
> scorchers at a reasonable price.  Even a fully loaded custom box is
> $1500.US.

I can't seem to find anyplace where it says what speed CPU you're 
getting when you buy at Ultraspec.  Just "G3" or "G4", no clock speed 
spec.  Odd.  The Pegasos site says the G4 is 1 Ghz so that's the max 
I'd count on getting.

The CPU card appears to have no mechanical retention -- it looks like 
nothing but friction holds it in its socket.  This is not a good thing, 
though it probably won't matter for most users of the board.  The ATX 
case they use is a piece of crap.  I've seen that model in Fry's 
Electronics, they're flimsy and cheaply built.

But the real problem is this: you can buy a brand new 1.25 GHz G4 from 
Apple for $1300, or a dual 1.25 for $1600.  The single 1.25 is likely 
to perform a lot better than the Pegasos: obviously, it's clocked 25% 
faster, but it also has a faster FSB (166 MHz vs 133 MHz), and Apple 
uses the 745x G4 CPU with 1MB of L3 cache while Pegasos uses the 744x 
variant of the G4 which has no support for L3 cache at all.  (The dual 
1.25 Mac has 2MB L3 per CPU.)

So unless you're dead set against buying Mac hardware, I don't see the 
value in the G4 version of Pegasos.  *MAYBE* in the G3, since Apple 
doesn't make desktop G3 hardware any more, or any G3 hardware for that 
matter, but even the G3 version doesn't seem cheap enough to be a good 
value to me.