HP/DEC/Compaq

I am hoping some of you knowledgeable HP guys can shed some light on something...

I see HP B2600 Workstations selling for $2,500++ on eBay.

The newer model C3700 sells for $400.

What gives? Why is the B2600 worth so much more when all the specs I've compared shows the C3700 is more powerful and they both share the same expansion cards??

These figures are worthless, both are completely overpriced. I bought my c8000 (which is WAY better than a C3700) some time ago for something like 25€ + shipping. Everything above 50-100€ is just utopian, except there's something very special about this particular machine. You'll always find idiots on ebay (mostly commercial sellers), who radically overestimate the value of their merchandise.

The C8000 is really the PA-RISC workstation to own. I have sort of a nostalgic attachment for the C3750, but only because I used to administer one. I have two loaded C8000s and I think between them I paid barely $200.

I suppose people like the B2600 form factor, but $2.5k is just stupid.

Make sure to only look at ebay listings that actually sold when checking prices... If a listing ends with no buyer, then it doesn't count!

Someone just offered me $1,200 to purchase my B2600 . I went onto eBay to check prices and saw they were going for twice that. One of the eBay sellers has 10 machines available and 3 sold @ $2,559. There must be a market for that particular machine for some reason.

I am thinking of taking the $1,200 offer and getting a loaded C8000 as suggested.

The cheapest C8000 I saw on eBay was still $500++ but you get Dual 1GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM.

Actually I only look for auctions on ebay and ignore the "buy it now" offers, because they are all completely overpriced (they are okay for small accessories, but I never saw a whole machine at a reasonable price). You probably have to wait some time to find the machine you are looking for*, but in the end, you'll pay the actual market price.

* simply because auctions find a buyer pretty much all the time, even if it's for 1,50$, in contrast to utopian buy now offers, that get posted again and again for a year or so

Indeed. There must be some piece of (expensive) software that's only "certified" on that hardware.


Be patient and keep watching. I got a C8000 off eBay for $100 (CAD) last summer from a Montreal-area seller. Dual-core 1.1GHz (with a second socket for a second dual-core CPU), 16GB RAM, 146GB SCSI HDD. The seller asked if I wanted any more than the one I bought at auction. He had two others that he couldn't sell. But that was 8 months ago, so they're probably gone by now.

Thanks for all the input. I will search out a C8000 and see if I can sell/trade this B2600.

On a polish auction service allegro.pl there were three C8000 ranging from $80 to $200 (depending of completeness - the high-specs one had two CPUs, FireGL X1 and two disks populated, the $80 one had no disks, one CPU and was running headless).

Oftentimes when there's something really odd like that it's because something is certified to run on a certain specific piece of hardware and it won't run on anything else (think O2+ and medical imaging machines, and there's something that runs on AlphaStation 21164s as well). Unlikely, but also possible, are certain control things that require certain I/O busses (think PDP-11 and VAX for industrial process control w/ custom QBus I/O or custom VME h/w on something).

Not that all instances of machine X are worth that, the dealers just have guaranteed working models that they can get to someone when they need it and with support for that much (and then there are the other people who either are delusional and hope to get lucky selling something "as-is" and with no support for the same price because they think that's what it's worth).

Can't tell you what the deal is with the B2600, but off the cuff it looks like that came with FX5 graphics. At that time HP was trying to show that they could equal SGI in raw performance (though they didn't have all the software and library backends that SGI offered), so it's very possible that some medical (or other big-money) device manufacturer used "HP's most affordable PA-RISC workstation" on their device.

Don't hesitate - take the offer. For that price you can get WAY better stuff for at home. And yes, C8000s are brilliant or zx6000, if you want to go the UX 11.31/Itanium way...

I am working out the shipping with the buyer. If the deal goes through I will check into the ZX6000 vs C8000 and see which HP model I will add to the collection.

I agree with some of the postings that there must be a specific piece of software written specifically for some industry that is certified on this particular model. I cant think of a better explanation.

Juste one personnal precision about the B2600.

They were used on some Zeiss 3D Measurement machine (early 2000 era). No 3D stuff, only 2D control software and programmation of the device.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmjGEnepDJA

http://www.che-metrology.co.uk/images/Zeiss%20PMC%20850%203.GIF

We mesure all the finished part at work with this type of machine (automotive) and It was controled by an HP B2600 on HP UX. Later, they were also using C8000 (until 2006 if I remember correctly). Now,everything was ported to Windows PC workstation.

I can just says that Zeiss price are very high, and if you want some spare parts for the B2600 or a remplacement machine, it was just crazy.... That's why the price of the PC upgrade was way lower if they take the B2600....