Color SPARCstation 1+ fast enough without GX?

[Larry Wake]

In article <8813 at brazos.Rice.edu> sunquest!whm at uunet.uu.net (Bill Mitchell) writes:
>
>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)?

Well, I hate to blow someone's sale, but...I have a GX-less 4/60 on my
desk, upon which I'm running OW2.0 beta.  Graphics performance is
certainly adequate for anything I do on a day to day basis.  I'd recommend
at least 12 Meg of memory if you're doing lots o' color stuff.

I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that Sun's party line is "don't
touch a GX-less system"; my own personal line is "The GX is a great
product; if you can afford it, go for it."  A color SS1 is good.  A color
SS1 GX sizzles.  Mayhaps the rep's enthusiasm for the product caused him
to push the GX harder than you wanted to hear about.

(PS: One thing the GX improves that you might not have considered is text
scrolling performance.  Compare cmdtool or xterm windows on GX and GX-less
systems and see if the difference is enough for you to care about.)

Larry Wake, Sun Microsystems (larry.wake at west.sun.com)