Re: DS20L

[Maurice Hilarius <maurice harddata com>]

With regards to your message at 07:23 AM 5/30/02, Rich Payne. Where you stated:
> > They got stuck with a ton of these and the parts.
> > API built them and they wouldn't sell.
>
> Interesting the you seem to know exactly what API sold.
Only quoting what API sales people and other dealers said..
And based on our own results too, naturally.
One of the big sticking points when CS20 came out is that the were 
initially offered with NO warranty.
> And they still won't sell.
> > And they still overheat..
>
> Sigh.....I think I can say, with some safety, that I (as well as a few
> of my former co-workers) have seen and used more
> of these things (CS20) than most people on this list, and I can state that
> there was no overheating problem with these. In fact the 833MHz version
> was overcooled as the case was designed to also use 667MHz CPUs which ran
> hotter (EV67 vs. EV68).

I have set these up to run customer benchmarks twice now.
Once a long time ago, and once just two weeks ago.
Both times, when room temperature rose to about 25C after a few hours I had 
stalled machines.
On the last go I ended up putting a room fan in front to blow over them, 
and it "fixed" the problem.
I think that in a 20C air-conditioned room they will be fine, but at 25C 
they get "iffy".

> There are several people on this list that worked very hard on the CS20
> project and I for one can say that I don't appreciate people making false
> statements about it. Was it perfect? No, of course not, no product is
> perfect, they all have their faults, but in the case of the CS20, over
> heating was not one of them.


I understand a lot of work went in to these.
The tooling for some of the metal pieces alone must have cost quite a 
chunk. and the power supply probably was a ton of work to design for this.
The Linux bootloader was also obviously a big job.

I also believe that they could have been a big success, if they were 
marketed properly.
But when they were released they were a bear to configure, were offered 
with no warranty, were offered at a 15% price premium over the cost of 
fully configuring a UP2000+ based machine, and could not run TRU64.
We consistently saw customer disapproval, from people who were still buying 
UP2000+ based machines.


With our best regards,

Maurice W. Hilarius       Telephone: 01-780-456-9771
Hard Data Ltd.               FAX:       01-780-456-9772
11060 - 166 Avenue        mailto:maurice@harddata.com
Edmonton, AB, Canada      http://www.harddata.com/
   T5X 1Y3

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