To be honest. I'm not really a big fan of the A605 or the R600, instead I recommend forgetting about the R600 / A605 and going for the Toshiba Tecra M-10 that you can get with OpenSolaris pre-installed here:
http://www.shopopensolaris.com/suntoshiba/home.htm The $1,399 for a Core2 T9400 Tecra M10 with 4 gigabytes of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive is a sweet deal! The Nvidia card gives you a blazing fast OpenSolaris 3d compiz desktop and it comes with support from Sun AND buying it MAKES A STATEMENT because it shows hardware vendors that there are people out there who actually care about UNIX (Solaris) and that Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux aren't the only desktop operating systems out there that should be sold pre-installed on laptops- i.e. if you're one of those people like me who is upset that CISCO isn't making anyconnect VPN clients for Solaris x86, then you should probably buy a a Juniper router / firewall and a Solaris x86 pre-installed laptop out of protest ;-) My justification for hating on the R600 is that it's too small, it costs quite a bit of quid, and I think the performance of OpenSolaris as a desktop OS on Nvidia Quadro equipped machines is much, much better than it is on desktop and laptop computers that have Intel or ATI cards (Intel graphics performance on OpenSolaris was pretty weak last time I checked compared to the blazing torrent of 3d awesomeness that is the current Solaris nvidia driver). I know Intel is doing a great job helping out with OpenSolaris, Linux and BSD kernel development right now, but did they ever write decent Solaris 3d acceleration drivers for their Intel graphics cards? I never could get Compiz working with Solaris on an Intel Graphics Card. Enabling it always froze the machine up, and I suspect other kinds of intense 3d acceleration would do the same thing, so that's something to think about when you're buying your A605 or R600... doing intense 3d graphics work might just kill the box. Plus with me as a 64-bit OpenSolaris power user running hundreds of zones plus ZFS plus a few virtual box virtual machines all at the same time on my desktop.... trust me. I'm going to need ALL 4 gigabyes of RAM that comes with the fully loaded Tecra M10 T9500. 3 gigabytes just won't cut it for me trying to run distributed computing frameworks like Hadoop or CouchDB or Eucalyptus spread across dozens or even hundreds of zones on my development laptop. What about the money? Well, I honestly didn't have the money for the M10 as I am crunched for cash right now with college tuition and things coming up, so I had to borrow money from my girlfriend's mom to pay for it. But seriously it's worth it just to have something that comes with UNIX pre-installed on it, has killer Nvidia drivers, and is guaranteed by Sun to work ok with their OS. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
