>From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (flawed jai) >Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 02:22:44 -0800 (PST)
>gee, the MAGMA company's generous christmas pushover sentimentality just >bring tears to my eyes. such heartfelt charity and generosity. > > >excuse my disdain, but does it really seem to you--or me--or the >reasonable person--that a mass produced metal box with a 300 watt power >supply in it, and 4 or 7 or 13 PCI slots [sneering snipped] ought to >be slapped > with a price tag of 1200 or 1500 or 2000 dollars? >how much could it really cost to make these things?? where is the real >expense? The box, of course, is pretty cheap, though the back plane is a little different than your common ATX enclosure. Still, normal PC case prices would apply. But even at wholesale, you can spend from almost nothing to hundreds of dollars on teh case depending on whose box you buy. And they may be using something a little nicer in the way of power supplies. Perhaps something similar to the PC Power & Cooling supplies. The PC boards are more difficult to say without knowing how many layers they have and what quantities they are selling. Magma probably deals in fairly small quantities and I'm sure the board has at least four layers and maybe six. For a PC motherboard sized board in quantities possibly as small as 1000 at a time, it could easily be costing them $50 per board, just for the board. The PCI slot connectors are about $1.50 in large quantities retail. Probably less than $1.00 each bought direct from AMP in 10,000 lots or some such. A 4 slot board has one PCI-PCI Bridge chip on it. A 7 slot board has two. A 13 slot board probably has four. PCI-PCI Bridge chips come in a wide variety, but a 33MHz, 32 bit chip (PCI slots run up to 66 MHz, 64 bits these days) probably costs in the neighborhood of $10 each depending on the quantity. Small quantities of about ten or so cost about $15 - $20 each. However, I'm not sure that Magma is using someone else's mass produced PCI-PCI Bridge. Anyone know? If they design their own chip and have it built that runs to some very expensive sunk costs. >now, the PCI host card, the unit that connects the motherboard in the >main computer --NOW THAT I COULD SEE charging a hundred or 200 > dollars for . but an additional thousand? for the box, power >supply and slots?? Nope, teh PCI host card is just a printed circuit board with a gold-fingered edge connector, a back plane bolted to it and a cable connector soldered on. There's a PCI-PCI Bridge on the card, I believe, but I don't think there's anything special about it. Again, unless that PPB is a custom job for Magma. Still, you could probably use a chip from Intel, Hint, Pericom, or TI to do the same job. So materials for a 7 slot board are about (plus or minus 100%): PCI Chassis Board: $50 Host Card Board: $10 4 X PPB chips $40 ??? Depending on chip used 7 X PCI slots $7 Enclosure $50 Could be $10 - $150 Power Supply $50 Assorted hardware $5 Backplane on host card, stand offs, power connectors Custom Cable $50 Assorted components $3 resistors and caps scattered about the board Which yields a materials cost in the neighborhood of $265. That does not include assembling the thing (soldering components to the board, e.g., testing, packaging it and warehousing and internal shipping. Then add in the normal overhead, plus support for a high-end product and divide the cost of the engineering staff amongst a fairly small volume operation, and I think you'd be hard pressed to run such a company successfully. If you could get the volume up, it's a whole different story, but how many folks really want another box under their desk? And to bring this more on topic, has anyone actually, successfully used one of these in an x500 or x600 machine? I will be very surprised if the answer is yes, because Apple's PCI implementation in those machines is very flawed where hierarchies of PCI-PCI Bridge chips are concerned--which anyone with a Umax S900 has experienced first hand. Jeff Walther -- PCI-PowerMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Sonnet & PowerLogix Upgrades - start at $169 | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> PCI-PowerMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/pci-powermacs.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/pci-powermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
