Color SPARCstation 1+ fast enough without GX?

[Bill Mitchell]

I've got some color 3/60s that I'd like to upgrade to 4/65s.  The primary
use of the 4/65s would be for development of a large X-based, windowed
application.  For the most part, the graphics used by the application are
very modest: a few simple graphs.  We do lots of stuff with X, but we
don't do any zoom and pan, we don't have any wireframes, we don't have any
polygons, and so forth.

I think that graphics-wise, our system must be in the least demanding
class of X applications.  I expressed all this to our Sun representative,
but suprisingly to me, he recommends very strongly that we go for the GX
model.  Tacking $2500 onto the price of the upgrade for the GX makes the
upgrade much less attractive.

So, the question: Is a color GX-less 4/65 a good idea or a bad idea?  Do
you have GX-less 4/60s or 4/65s?  What sort of applications do you find
them to be adequate for?  For what are they inadequate?  Would you care to
hazard a comparison versus some other workstation (mono or color)?

I've briefly used a GX-less color 4/60 and it seemed entirely adequate to
me, but I'm concerned by Sun's party-line, which seems to say "don't touch
a GX-less color 4/6X".

We'd probably be using X11R4, or possibly, Open Windows.  I'll post a
summary if I get any good responses.

Thanks in advance.

Bill Mitchell				whm at sunquest.com
Sunquest Information Systems		sunquest!whm at arizona.edu
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