[dundee] Opinions on the Sun Ultra 24 Box - Good bang-per-buck?

[Rick Moynihan]

Hey, everyone.

My development machine (at work) is getting a little bit long in
the-tooth (being a modest 4 year old machine), and I'm considering
upgrading.

I was just wondering on whether anyone had any opinions on the
bang-per-buck of the Sun Ultra 24 box?

http://uk.sun.com/catalog/?n-state=http://catalog.sun.com/productinfo.xml?site%3dUNITEDKGB%26catalogue%3dFC%26segment%3dFC_R%26item%3dFC_SC_CAT%26group%3d2005%26fid%3d5090%26id%3d15078%26partnerid%3dunitedkingdomcontext~~~G!06D635ED06CD!WBPkexcnEpBE33lB~standard~ws-nocache~~@http://syndicator.sun-catalogue.com/ukunited/unitedkingdomcontext

At about £1300 for an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme Processor it seems
pretty decent, but I've not really been following hardware over the
past year?  I don't mind paying slightly over the odds for Sun kit, as
experience has shown it to be many times more reliable than anything
else I've seen.

The machine will primarily be used as a desktop workstation, for
software development.

So, I want something that is:

0) Runs Linux.
1) Bloody quick at compiling (mostly Java apps)
2) Got enough oomph to occaisionally support virtualisation of Windows
XP (mainly for Software testing)
3) Got enough oomph to support a couple of virtual Linux servers
running simultaneously (again for testing).
3) Is multi-core - (as we've written some pretty thread intensive software)
4) Is also great for web-browsing and good for more typical desktop workloads.
5) Can easily handle dual-head monitors 1280x1024 (it'd also be nice
to support higher resolutions in the future)

The spec is:

Sun Ultra 24 Workstation,
1 Intel Core2 Quad Extreme QX6850 3.0 GHz,
2 GB Memory,
1 x 250 GB SATA Disk Drive,
NVS290 Graphics,
1 DVD-Dual,
1 x 10/100/1000 BaseT Ethernet Port,
2 x 1394 Firewire, Audio, 6 USB2.0 Ports, 2 Full-Length PCI Slots, 4
PCI Express slots,
Solaris Licence, Solaris 10 Operating System and Sun Development Tools
Preinstalled, RoHS-6 Compliant

I can imagine I'll be primarily running Ubuntu (which has also been
certified by Canonical on this machine), and perhaps occaisionally
Windows.  I'd probably leave Solaris 10 on, incase I ever fancy
testing under it (and perhaps using dtrace! :-) )

Concerns.

1) Is the graphics card any good?  I don't care for games, but I hate
seeing screen updates!  And how does it compare to the Nvidia Quadro
FX 370???
2) Is 2gig adequate for typical use + some background virtualisation
(of pretty minimal machines) + Netbeans & java development?  I suspect
it'd easily handle it, but that 4gig would be better...
3) Is quad extreme noticably better than the intel core 2 quad?

Thanks again,

R.