All I did was remove the XVR-1000, and viola, the power usage went way
down. What an energy waster that board is. I use an xvr-500, and get
pretty good performance, on par with the xvr-1000. And I'm saving at
least 60W.

My next goal is to get a PCI video card to work with Linux on this
machine. I did buy a ATI Rage XL, which shows up as "3D Rage" with
the atyfb module, but unfortunately it makes Linux crash/reboot.
Looks like the probe routines are failing, saying there is 512kSGRAM,
and something like "xclk out of range". I did try

gentoo atyfb:init,nobios

but that didn't help. It must be a slight variant of the Rage XL,
which is handled by the Mach64 driver. It reports it as "Mach 64
GR". Tried moving it around to various slots to no avail.

So my goal is to have a dual-boot Solaris/Linux-Sparc, which is
doable, because I have 2 FC drives, and I can do "boot disk1" or "boot
disk2" at the openboot prompt. That's why an xvr-1000 wouldn't do me
any good anyways. I want to remove all unnecessary cards from this
machine to save electricity.

DMM

* hackr_d@yahoo.com:
> All I did was remove the XVR-1000, and viola, the power usage went way
> down. What an energy waster that board is. I use an xvr-500, and get
> pretty good performance, on par with the xvr-1000. And I'm saving at
> least 60W.

How measured? You should be aware that most cheaper energy meters are
just plain crap when it comes to measure anything else than pure
inductive or pure capacitive loads.

The difference between the XVR-500 and the XVR-1000 in power consumption
is hardly 60W, especially when not running any 3D applications.

> My next goal is to get a PCI video card to work with Linux on this
> machine. I did buy a ATI Rage XL, which shows up as "3D Rage" with
> the atyfb module, but unfortunately it makes Linux crash/reboot.
> Looks like the probe routines are failing, saying there is 512kSGRAM,
> and something like "xclk out of range". I did try

The ATI Rage series was (and still is) plain crap. There are much better
GPUs out there which are supported by Linux, too.

> So my goal is to have a dual-boot Solaris/Linux-Sparc, which is
> doable, because I have 2 FC drives, and I can do "boot disk1" or "boot
> disk2" at the openboot prompt. That's why an xvr-1000 wouldn't do me
> any good anyways. I want to remove all unnecessary cards from this
> machine to save electricity.

Sorry, but this sounds riddiculous to me. If energy consumption is a
concern a Blade 2000 without any power save features, with outdated gfx
cards and an inefficient 660W PSU is probably one of the worst choices
for saving energy. Any somewhat modern x86 system is much more
efficient, uses less power and provides a much higher performance than
your SB2000.

Benjamin

On Nov 5, 1:27*am, Benjamin Gawert wrote:
> * hack...@yahoo.com:

> > So my goal is to have a dual-boot Solaris/Linux-Sparc, which is
> > doable, because I have 2 FC drives, and I can do "boot disk1" or "boot
> > disk2" at the openboot prompt. *That's why an xvr-1000 wouldn't do me
> > any good anyways. *I want to remove all unnecessary cards from this
> > machine to save electricity.
>
> Sorry, but this sounds riddiculous to me. If energy consumption is a
> concern a Blade 2000 without any power save features, with outdated gfx
> cards and an inefficient 660W PSU is probably one of the worst choices
> for saving energy. Any somewhat modern x86 system is much more
> efficient, uses less power and provides a much higher performance than
> your SB2000.

That's one direction I was looking to be heading in the future. Maybe
something like any Antec case that has the Earthwatts. I saw these
cheap no-name cases on Ebay. They look to be sold under Broadway com
corp or some such, 939 Black. It's the one with the "mega side
fan!". They look flimsy as heck, but I was thinking about using
something cheap like an ECS 7050 (motherboard) anyways. I've already
stripped a screw hole on one of my PCI slot covers on the back of my
Blade, so I don't really care about steel thickness. Even those thick
steel cases seem to get banged all out of shape over the years, so why
not? I've read some bad things about the Okia 550W power supplies
too, but some were saying they aren't too bad. They've got Sleeve-
bearing fans, but IMO choice of bearings doesn't really matter too
much with those little fans. I've read about some that have had
excellent luck with sleeve-bearing fans. I've had a lot of more
expensive ball-bearing fans made by Antec that went bad in a few
years.

DMM