If you're looking to try Solaris/SPARC on the cheap, there are options:
A Sparc20 with dual SM71 (75mhz SuperSparcII). Not a fast machine by today's standards but alot of university department email servers once ran on these. With the right CPU modules, this can become a quad machine but heat dissipation becomes a problem.
(You'll note I didn't mention a Sparc10. Had no end of troubles out of the one I had access to. Left a bad taste in my mouth. Not recommended
)
An Ultra1-200E. The 'E' version has onboard fast ethernet. You can get U1's with slower CPUs for between $100 and $150. Creator graphics aren't bad for 2D work.
Ultra2. I've only had limited experience with one of these guys. It was a dual-300mhz version. Still SCSI-based. Last of the SBus-based SPARCs so alot of people might consider them to be the last "true" SPARC box. They're pretty cheap these days...few hundred $$.
An Ultra5. Don't just blindly go by CPU speed here...Sun did some trickery and castrated the cache on some of the higher-speed CPU modules. This meant, for instance, the 333mhz version was generally faster than the 360mhz version due to its much larger cache. Uses IDE drives...in my experience, disk performance even with 7200rpm drives sucks with these machines...far worse than similar x86-based IDE systems. Onboard video (I believe it's ATI Rage II) isn't that great, either, and since it's in a pizza-box case, there isn't room to install a video card. Still, if you can get a U5-333 for say $250, it's probably not a bad deal.
Ultra10. As I recall, this guy uses the same mainboard as the Ultra5. It's in a mid-tower case and has room for a graphics card. Never used one in person but given it's basically the same hardware as a U5, I suspect disk performance is similarly lousy. I'd also expect the same CPU cache-size warning to apply here but I'm not sure.
Ultra30. These are basically a uniprocessor version of the Ultra60. SCSI-based. I think CPUs maxed out at 300mhz but these are nice boxes. You can get them for under $500 these days with "Elite" graphics. If you shop around you might be able to find one with Creator graphics for under $400.
Ultra60. 2-way SMP box with SCA SCSI backplane. Like the U30, these use real UltraSparcII chips (not the IIi like you find in the U5/10) with larger cache. I had a 2-way 360mhz box and really liked it. My office was probably 10 degrees warmer when this box was running though. Probably a little more than you want to pay but if you might be able to find a 2x360 version for under $1000 these days.
I'm not terribly familiar with the lower-end Blade models so I won't comment on them.
If I were buying a machine just to get familiar with a modern version of Solaris, I'd probably look at an U5 or U30. If I were looking to do some actual work, I'd probably go with the U30 or U60 (actually, I'd look at things like the Blade-1000 but those aren't exactly cheap).
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