On 9 Jun 2012, at 17:21, Rob Jarratt wrote: That *is* cheap, but wrong continent :-( I will look around for these now. Regards Rob There's one rx2600 on Ebay right now, check item #200773544925. That's as cheap as it gets. Damn, I need one of those server front-panels ;) Almost all Itanium machines can run VMS. See http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/hw_supportchart.html I didn't realise it was that widespread, although most of those are later model Integrity servers that came *after* the rx2600, and so are likely outside the Hobbyist ballpark. Maybe I was confusing the framebuffer support or something. If you are feeling RICH there's always eBay #170855134495 - Nice lump of hardware for that money but you;d need a SAS 2.5" disk which would cost nearly as much as the server :P The workstation models are unfortunately rare. ... and when you find zx6000s they usually have FireGL4 cards in like the one I just ripped out of mine. No VMS support for those and HP-UX support is limited only to the specific distribution supplied with the zx2000/6000 workstations :( Radeon 7000 and 7500 cards for Itanium are rarer than the machines! Sometimes you might find one on Ebay. The advantage of the workstation models are that the fans are more quiet than the server models have. You can tell if a machine has the zx6000 fans, visually, because they are only half depth compared to the rx2600 server fans (so only fill the front half of the hot-swap fan bay). As Kari says, the zx6000 fans are much quieter, probably not so droning as server fans either. My zx6000 is quite amicable to sit next to with 1x 15krpm 73GB disk, however I yanked a CPU out ogf mine so it only has one CPU turbo-fan running which cuts the noise down quite a bit. Just some food for thought... My zx6000 came orgiinally configured with 24GB of RAM and 2x 1.3GHz CPUs and a FireGL4 graphics card. The original purpose? It was a CAD station for Honda Formula 1 at Bracknell :) I think Mark Wickens has one (but his has all the outer skins still, mine doesn't) fropm the same place and so does Dan Williams. for machines that date back to 2003... that's a lot of spec! -- Mark Benson http://DECtec.info Twitter: @DECtecInfo HECnet: STAR69::MARK Online Resource & Mailing List for DEC Enthusiasts.