HP Visualize J5000 Workstation

I bought this workstation for small database server usage for about $250 (You can find one for even lower price on eBay). Originally such computer pricing began after $20,000 in 1998 (based on current Internet resources).

This computer is based on PA-RISC architecture and mostly used for CAD design and graphics.

It has two PA-8500 processors that are running on 440MHZ.

HP PA-8*00 are 64bit RISC processors that have a lot of L1 cache on the chip.

My version of processor has 1.5M L1 cache and about 140 million transistors.

J5000 has 8 memory slots and supports 120MHZ ECC SDRAM memory modules of 256M, 512M, and 1G size.

My system has 3.5G RAM.

Casing is very well designed, it has two circuit boards, one is CPU board with memory modules and another one is a board for peripheral devices (it has SCSI ports, PCI and PCI-X slots, serial and parallel ports, sound and etc.).

System has very good ventilation system and a lot of space inside for heat spreading, also there are very massive heat sinks on processors and chipset.

Most of RISC systems usually have no IDE, but this one has special IDE port for CDROM, it is very good solution, because SCSI CDROM drive is much more expensive and harder to get.

Hard drives are SCSI 2 with 80pin hot swap connectors.

You might think that 440MHZ CPU is very slow for today, but NASA is using such systems for shuttle designs, that means this processor is a very good performer.

HP PA systems usually are running HP-Ux - very solid Unix, but there are available free Linux/Unix ports too (for example NetBSD, Debian, Gentoo).

The problem with free ports, that these operating systems are still not fully supporting all PA systems, it has graphic card problem issue, that Visualize FX* cards will not work with GUI.

HP J5000 has a big brother - HP J7000 with four CPUs. Also there is a later verion with PA-8600 CPUs that are faster (marked as J*600 "*" stands for 5 and 7).

My J5000 was used in previous life as server, so it has no graphic card at all (usually it comes with Visualize FX4). That means all display output goes to serial console and I can control it only with terminal.

This system is not easy to set up, most of software you have to compile,

and install manually.

It is not easy to use, especially for people who came from PC world, also you will probably have no GUI on Linux/Unix with most of graphic cards (For now the solution is HP-Ux 11.0).

In the summary, it is really very good system, however I would not recommend it for most of people, because it is only for very specific uses, it can't run Windows and most of PC software. This machine runs only on Unix/Linux.