New finds, RFI

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Fri Dec 12 21:07:09 2003

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003, Patrick Finnegan wrote:

> > What card? I recently got in an HP Kayak XW workstation with an HP
> > Visualize fx6 that originally listed for $40,000(!) It takes up the
> > AGP slot and the adjacent PCI slot. It runs as hot as the Sun (and
> > consumes amazing amounts of energy).
> >
> > They run on eBay for $75-$100 these days.
>
> It's an fx4.

That listed for $26,205 in October 1997 (congratulations: you own a piece
of hardware that cost as much as your car did, but lost way more value).

It's still one bad-assed video card, but again, the problem is that they
consume megawatts of power (ok, not literally, but you get the idea). I
ran my server for a few minutes and then went to pull the card and it
nearly burned my hand. Those heat sinks need a couple fans.

By the way, (OT) the BIOS on my HP Kayak XW apparently got zapped. I'm
trying to run the emergency flash procedure (you set a swicth on the
motherboard and then it boots off the floppy, loading the flash program
and running it) but it's not working for me. The computer definitely
loads the program off the floppy but then hangs. I don't hear the beeps
I'm supposed to. I verified that the disk has no errors.

Anyone have any experience with this? I'd hate this server to go to the
scrap heap as it's mighty nice (on-board ultra-wide SCSI RAID controller,
512MB RAM, dual Pentium-II Xeon 450, diagnostic front panel LCD display).

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
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Received on Fri Dec 12 2003 - 21:07:09 GMT

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