SGI: hinv

Bringing this thing home from the freight terminal in my pickup truck caused some eye-rolling by my wife, but fortunately I had already rearranged the computer room to make space for it. It's in pretty good physical shape. Someone had apparently tried to force the DG5-2 board in at an angle and bent a few pins on the midplane, but I was able to straighten those with a probe tip from my logic analyzer and some patience.

It's a modest configuration but a lot of the fun will be in upgrading the machine!

Good looking machine, man!

Black Cardinal wrote: Bringing this thing home from the freight terminal in my pickup truck caused some eye-rolling by my wife

Ha, been there as well. That machine is in great shape. Nice find! Seems as though the east coast if flush with O2k desksides, would love to have one of these.

Very nice looking Deskside - congratulations.

On the odd chance you don't already know <and just ok sound quality meets your needs>, there's a DC power jack on the back of the IO6G to power a set of Octane speakers <a Tezro has the same set up too>.

Thanks! For fun, here's another picture, in a similar vein as a previous one ( http://forums.nekochan.net/download/file.php?id=2820967&mode=view ) I posted in my other hinv thread. My oldest son wanted to pose with the "big computer," too. Now he's almost 4 (he was 2-1/2 in the previous one).

He's been bugging me to finish getting it set up with its own monitor and keyboard so we can play 2-person tank games (bz, bzflag) over the LAN.

Nice snug setup and a good looking machine. The purple Indigo2 next to it seems to bring out the plum in the Onyx2 skins...

zski128 wrote:

Black Cardinal wrote: Bringing this thing home from the freight terminal in my pickup truck caused some eye-rolling by my wife

Ha, been there as well. That machine is in great shape. Nice find! Seems as though the east coast if flush with O2k desksides, would love to have one of these.

After the second one she simply just gave up lol

smj wrote: Nice snug setup and a good looking machine. The purple Indigo2 next to it seems to bring out the plum in the Onyx2 skins...

Thanks, although it's a little too snug. I have to really watch the room temperature and keep it below 73 deg F or else the unit kicks into fastfan mode. Right now it's in an upstairs bedroom, and keeping this room cool enough is difficult. In the early evening I can just close the door and open the window, but one of my 2 year-olds sleeps in there and once he's in bed I have to close the window.

I really need to move my desk over a few inches and make some clearance around the Onyx2, but that's a huge undertaking...

If I have one complaint about the Onyx2, it's that it turned what was a cool-looking Indigo2 next to it into something that almost looks like a toy!

If anyone is interested in some more power consumption numbers, I measured the Onyx2's power draw with a Kill-a-Watt. It draws about 630W when idle, and 640W under load. Power factor was always darn near 1 when the key was in the On position. I'm running it on a 15A 120V circuit shared with several other computers and a laser printer, so I was happy to discover it drew much less than I was expecting. Of course, this is mostly because of the limited hardware installed.

Just install a second node board, fill everything up with 512MB RAM kits (the 'sandwich model') add, a second RM and some misc options and watch that power consumption rise to ~ 950W

Do I get that right, you run an Onyx2 in a bedroom while your 2year old is sleeping there? Wow, I have to tell that to my wife

jan-jaap wrote: Do I get that right, you run an Onyx2 in a bedroom while your 2year old is sleeping there? Wow, I have to tell that to my wife

Yeah, the roar of fans actually seems to lull him to sleep.

We have fraternal twins, and keep them in separate bedrooms so they don't keep each other awake. This one sleeps in our computer room, and my wife has her own computer in addition to the several that I own. He's pretty used to it.

Updated hinv. The R10K's have been replaced by a 400MHz R12K node board, and the RAM has been upgraded to 2GB. The GUI is noticeably snappier, and according to my Kill-a-Watt it actually dropped the power consumption to 584W under load. I presume this is because of a process shrink relative to the R10K, and the denser DIMMs drawing less current.

I have another 400MHz node board loaded with another 2GB ready to install but I need to deal with a minor mounting hardware issue first.

~0.6 kW is not that much for this kind of machine imho

Now with 4x400MHz R12K processors and 5GB RAM. Thanks go to recondas for some mounting hardware I needed to get both of these node boards installed. I also had some issues getting the second node board running, but I found the answers I needed by searching the forum. It was the typical POD logs issue.

Power consumption is up to 713W at idle, 770W under heavy CPU/graphics load.

Forum question: How do I edit the thread title to match the new configuration? I've seen it done by others before but I can't figure out how. Editing the subject for this post and the first post don't seem to do it.

Black Cardinal wrote: Forum question: How do I edit the thread title to match the new configuration?

I don't get quite the same edit panel you do, but to the best of my pre-moderator recollection the title changing bits were the same. You'll have to edit the initial post to change the title of the thread.

In the top left panel of the 'Edit post' window should be selections for "Delete post", "Post icon", "Subject" and "Message body". The field to the right of "Subject" should be a editable text box containing the thread title. Changing the contents for that text box will change/update the thread title.

If you have a way to measure power consumption, I'd be curious to see the consumption with the power supply on, but the key off. I know some SGIs are pretty high (something like 30w for a powered off Octane.)

Geof