Greetings,
I just got myself a new box dedicated to blender 3D. After weeks of posts and screwing around.
I finally got something that I feel good with.
I landed an old (but new to me) SGI Indigo2 Dual headed MaxImpact/SolidImpact, R10K 195Mhz, 640Mb RAM and two SGI monitors Blender Machine. I just install a 9gig scsi drive about to add two 4gig scsi drive and its rocking a external DVD scsi Drive. All for $300. The box rocks in Mesh work and rendering but somewhat suffers is highend texturing but I have an SGI o2 that when loaded with 1gig of RAM dedicate up to 900mb to Texture work. Right now my o2 has 256 RAM.
Are there any SGI users still in the Blender world??? There was a time when it was loaded with SGI heads.
Funny my name is PowermacG4 but I’m SGI geared. So far 3 SGI boxes on Mac and 3 Sun boxes. Windows box finally died (Hardware related)
The Maximpact has only 4mb physical of texture ram on the gfx card. above that texture swapping
with main memory can be somewhat slow. The UMA architecture of O2 allows texture memory the size
of main memory without additional penalty. $300 was a good deal.
I doubt it.
not unsuprising, i had one die this weekend. go figure.
It was a real good deal. Good thing I have the IRIX media for it.
I look forward to alot of learning and work with it.
Only issues I have with the Indigo2 is heat but it keeps running. Cool basement should help it out.
I’m suprise I haven’t got hit with a bunch of replies from PC users claiming that their PCs will smoke my SGI box. I boldly posted 195Mhz.
I wonder how Lightwave 3D 5.6 will run on it? I do have access to a Dual 250Mhz Octane MXE. That box will rock blender, if Blender support Dual Processors.
Seem like the SGI o2 can hold its own. I watched the making of Fight Club on DVD and they did their 3D work on an SGI o2 running Softimage 3D. It felt kind of good to see your workstation being used to make movies.
Yeah, people act like older machines get slower with age, when in fact only people expectations got higher. anything is an improvement after what we had 30 or so years ago.
/me turns green with envy :x
Regarding pc speeds, there is more to a fast system that the processor clock speed!
Are we going to see a photograph of this beast?
–
Brian
give me a few days to get the tables together. I will post some pics of my basement lab.
the only sgi user i can think of is… macke. so i guess you could say there are no sgi users that I know of, there may be some.
i’m an sgi user (one sits next to my pc and opposite my archimedes - bless . . . ) but only have irix 6.2 (curses! no subsurfs which cramps my style). i have to admit i find rendering surprisingly quick on it, and i love the fact i never use it for anything else, so blender running full screen all the time is kinda neat. the monitor rocks too.
Ok, you reeled me in, now I need to learn something. I went to Tom’s hardware guide and got some links etc… but I still don’t have a clear understanding of the difference in hardware. Obviously, the sgi is specialized… for graphics? and what? What makes the monitors different. I’m very curious to learn about this, do you know of any links?
I thought previously that it was an operating system, hee hee hee, I now see I’m pretty ignorant on another subject, LOL.
Thanks for any info, your new system sounds cool, and, after seeing the cost of dem tings, I think you probably did get an awsome deal 
Ingie
Its wierd, I’m pretty sure a update PC will smoke my Indigo2. But the Indigo2 was made back in 96, 97 time zone. the recent Geforce Card are finally capable of doing what SGI machines has alway done. But the Old SGI boxes do rule in the low cost area. You could get an old SGI for around $500 and less with a 20inch monitor on Ebay. Its hardcore OpenGl world. Its pretty hard to find a solid PC for unde $500 that could hold a candle to a SGI in 3D making. I’m not big on the tech specs yet but soon I will. The draw back to buying a SGI is not having IRIX media to do installs or buying SCSI drives and external CDROM scsi Drives.
It also comes down to just loving different boxes. At heart I’m a Mac users really a UNIX head.
the following link is a ol’blender head that use sgi:
http://www.cartsys.com/blenderology/home.html
Cool site to break down SGI (must read before buy)
http://www.futuretech.vuurwerk.nl/sgi.html
http://www.orcawerks.com/sgi/
store that sales SGI:
http://www.reputable.com/
plus www.dejanews.com is full of sgi info
It will be cool to form a group based around SGI for the reason that hardware is fading away (that way we could keep stuff in reach). They are still good boxes and Blender rock on them but in the age of 2.4GHz cpus, I think the 195Mhz 64bit boxes will die. Plus you get a cool box and the coolest 3D app run on it for free. Still can get Maya or Softimage for it but that cost $$$
It panicked and commited suicide when it saw all the non-windows machines on the network. 
I use the following to benchmark my machines.
It took my SGI o2 180Mhz R5K around 2minutes and 30 seconds to background render it.
It tok my PowerMac 933 31seconds to background render it. the following is from my 195Mhz SGI Indigo2. Which is not to bad for a computer made in 1996 and for $300. Render in forground comes out about the same. Who have to old Benchmark file. I remember Linux boxes ruling the show. SGI were kind of behind though.
$ blender -b basement2.blend -f 1
Saved: /render/0001 Time: 01:20.26 (3.53)
Blender quit
http://www.cartsys.com/blenderology/blends/basement2.blend.gz
Wow, I’ve been reading about an hour, and don’t know where I’ve been, LOL. I love surfing like that. Well, I’m completely confused, but intrigued. Thanks for all the info, only one last question…. The www.dejanews.com site drops me off at google forums. Do you know which one I should check out? Or is it a miss?
Anyway, I love hardware, made 5 systems here at home, gave one to my nephew, and upgrade them all the time too. So this is totally interesting, although I doubt I’ll try it, It must feel like you have an older supercomputer in your house, no? LOL.
Well, thanks again for turning me on to this info! And, have tons of fun playing with Blender in a new world
Love Ingie
it’s called usenet. the groups of interest are: comp.sys.sgi.*
such as:comp.sys.sgi.misc or comp.sys.sgi.hardware
These are workstations. SGI makes supercomputers. They’re the Origin, and Onyx series.
Imagine running blender on a Onyx or Origin. Origins are some big boys.
We must remember that nVidia got is history from SGI and the Geforce comes from SGI workstations graphic set-ups. There was a big court case between SGI and nVidia. Since nVidia was made up of formal SGI employees.
I dig the SGI workstations. If Sun Microsystems put more time in the graphics on their workstations then it will be nice to have a Sun. Sun boxes with their low-watt usage will be good for render-farms. SGI workstation suck at watt usage. 600 watts for Indigo2 and o2 and 800 watts for Octanes these are not 24/7 boxes in my house. Now thats a Box a SGI Octane, you could get a decked out one for $2000, low-end one for $500. I see the one advantage of using a UNIX/Linux system is when you have a Render job that might take days to weeks to do. I won’t chance my luck on a Windows box running that long doing that work.
If anyone got specs on Geforce card and SGI graphics set-up.
i dont think youd get much performance gain on a origin/onyx as they are just big parallel machines, which i dont think blender can make use of (although using reality engine opengl support must be alright). i once saw a onyx on ebay for £500 but you had to sort shipping yourself. i do like the onyx video options though (HDTV from way back . . )
of course you would be able to run many renders at once without much performance hit.
which is nice