A couple of observations: 1. It almost never seems to be worthwile to upgrade an older system, buying an entirely new system generally costs very little more (or sometimes less) and everything is better and faster. 2. Computer manufacturers mark up memory significantly, there are good third party sources for memory that will charge you a fraction of what the manufacturer will. 3. If, as you say, you have old price quotes, the prices probably have decreased significantly since you got them (depends on how old they are, and may not be true for IBM).
If you have the option of changing systems it is probably worth looking around. My personal recommendation would be to look closely at Sun workstations, in particular the Ultra 10. Even at list price the Ultra 10's are competitive against Linux and NT workstations, since you're at a university (at least your email address is) you probably can get an even better deal. The graphics (in particular the Elite3D cards) are priced very reasonably and have very good performance. mark >Thank you Suhaib and everybody else answering my questions. > >Now I pull out old price estimates for IBM systems for prices of memory >and graphic adaptors. > >I found that > >* GXT3000P, manufacturer recomended graphic card for data explorer, costs > $6500. > >* Upgrade main merory from 258MB (what we have now) to 1GB costs $8600 > >* I am not sure about how much video memory do I have now, but I guess > this upgrade also is expensive. > >My question now is then > >(1) if I were to upgrade this IBM system, where should our money >go? Video card? Video memory? Main memory? > >(2) More importantly, is this price tag worth it? Products for Intel >machine, such as nVida and 3Dlabs recommended in response to my earlier >posts, seems to cost a couple of hundreds of dollars. Even we throw in a >bunch of memory, both main and graphic, shouldn't make price more than >$5000, I suppose. Do any of you have experience in both Intel/linux >system and RS6000/AIX system and have some opinion?
