PocketMatrix

Mmmmmh, Alphas are nice. Digital almost always developed nice stuff, including, of course, the StrongARM.

I was thinking about getting myself an "oddball" Un*x machine to join my rag-tag fleet of machines at some stage too (primarily to use as a firewall). They keep selling SGIs on the German e-Bay.

The Alpha really is a data processing / database workhorse. Look on e-bay and see if people are selling 2nd hand SGIs maybe - they're more "fun", being more graphically oriented.


My only concerns would be:

does it take weird (aka "expensive") memory (it comes with none)

if you want NT, do you have it for the Alpha?


I'd also run Linux/BSD/Un*x on it rather than NT. The machine is "old" if it actually has IDE support, it'll be slow - you'll want a SCSI drive in there if you want any real performance out of the system (and a PCI graphics card).

Cheers,

Refractor

I've always wanted an alpha(I'd spend the money to buy one if the ev8 chips ever came out)

Don't buy this for performance :P Also make sure you can get the discs/memory/monitor/OS(linux is free, the rest are expensive and probably not in production anymore) you will need.

Oh and one thing I heard about linux for alpha was that the kernel lacked FP support(major ouch).