SGI: hinv

UPGRADED!!! See end

I'm making a new thread since this really is a "new" bigred -- new machine, new motherboard, new PIMM, new RAM, thanks to mopar5150. The only things carried over were the old hard disk, the SCSI card, the FireWire card and the DAT; I also installed the front bezel from the first bigred because it's a little nicer. I even installed a Pioneer 305S since it's a 40X CD-ROM drive (besides DVDs).

Just to see if the bump in cache speed makes any difference, I did a little testing in dhrystone, which is not a great benchmark but is easy to configure and run. When it was 700MHz, I got

...

At 800MHz,



I ran each one about three times and the numbers were stable. That's a 14% increase ... as expected from the simple ratio of clock speeds. Oh well. 14% is still better! And it runs very well.

It looks just like it did before except for the new drive, so refer to those pictures . Internally the M-Audio was replaced by the Audigy that mopar5150 provided, and he also threw in a USB card that works well. I'll let him comment on those, since I don't know if they're in the Fuel aggregator yet.

New hinv, gfxinfo, etc., with scsicontrol list of SCSI devices:

And after I posted that, it occurs to me that there's no way dhrystone could have tested the cache speed difference anyway, because the entire thing fits into cache and then some. Any benefit from 350MHz to 400MHz would have been well below the noise floor.

I should post a picture with the door open. The black Pioneer 305S I have really looks sharp in there, like it was made for it.

Any reason why you swapped the M-Audio for the Audigy? It otherwise looks like a very nice upgrade indeed, but that part seems to be a step backwards!

Purely laziness, since it was already installed in the new machine. I don't notice much difference, though I don't have it connected into anything particularly hi-fidelity.

Picture, as promised (Tomy Tutor at left). The black Pioneer looks very nice, I think.

NOW WITH MORE AWESOME. Thanks to mopar5150, I had some time tonight to make THE SUPERFUEL. THE FUEL TO END ALL FUELS. A 900MHz PIMM and a V12 DCD.



Now, if I can just find that VFO to make it run at 1920x1080@60Hz again, this will be unstoppable.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Now, if I can just find that VFO to make it run at 1920x1080@60Hz again, this will be unstoppable.

Pfft. You got the dcd, babe. Time to move up to a real monitor

(Don't forget to pick up a spare power supply while you are at it. Eventually you will need it )

Which model is that?

IBM T221. 22", 3840x2400. Was a very nice screen up until recently but now there are a large glut of 24"-ish 4K displays with better connectivity options. These new models have pushed the T221 prices way down.

guardian452 wrote: ... now there are a large glut of 24"-ish 4K displays with better connectivity options.

Not better for an SGI, however. Two or four DVI connectors is within reason for several SGI models. HDMI, thunderthighs, even dual-link dvi is something of a speed bump for anything from Sillycum Graphics.

It looks possible some day tho, which is nice. Maybe Classy can pave the way on this

guardian452 wrote: IBM T221. 22", 3840x2400. Was a very nice screen up until recently

4K at 22 inches seems rather packed. is there some sort of retina-like functionality you'd use this for? sounds like anything like icons and interfaces with hardcoded fonts would be pretty much unreadable?

GIJoe wrote: 4K at 22 inches seems rather packed. is there some sort of retina-like functionality you'd use this for? sounds like anything like icons and interfaces with hardcoded fonts would be pretty much unreadable?

"retina-like functionality" ?? GAG ME WITH A SPOON !!

Now that I've had my buzzword-revulsion attack, 4Dwm has no problem with the display but Windows sure does. And Loonix. Too bad Irix is not modern It takes about fifteen minutes to adjust everything in Indigo Magic.

In actual use, mia has one that he likes for text because his eyes are good and you can fit a lot on-screen. Otherwise, for a lot of uses, the high resolution is not an advantage. I mean, Thunderbird, who cares ? But for photos and some graphics it's absolutely another world. It's a little bit of a pain in the ass sometimes - for example,a screenshot when shipped to the rest of the world is huge. Or a 1024 x 768 jpeg imported is kinda dinky. Very sharp but dinky.

But for playing with photos off the camera, there's nothing like it. Not on an SGI, anyhow. We don't have thunderthighs, hdmi, any of that crap. And I've noticed that Classy takes photos occasionally, so ...

If someone were to experiment with those dvi-to-whatever adapters and get a current high-res screen working on V12, it'd make a nice addition to the hardware list. A high-res flat panel you could buy in a store would be great.

hmm.... i don't think the interface of anything graphics related will be usable at this kind of resolution. sure, content will look crisp but a photoshop, maya, illustrator, lightroom interface? or anything else that comes with lots of icons or narrow sliders for that matter.

aaaaaanyway, that's a pretty nice fuel the OP has here. wish i'd have had something like that back in the day.

Yes, I'm having fun with it.

GIJoe wrote: hmm.... i don't think the interface of anything graphics related will be usable at this kind of resolution. sure, content will look crisp but a photoshop, maya, illustrator, lightroom interface? or anything else that comes with lots of icons or narrow sliders for that matter.

I'll get you a screenshot shortly ... at this moment doing a ground-up rebuild in the vain hope of getting this O350 p.o.s. to be even a little bit reliable. But I can tell you right now, you're mistaken. Indigo Magic sings at high resolutions

hamei wrote: But I can tell you right now, you're mistaken. Indigo Magic sings at high resolutions

Even windows is getting fairly decent given the glut of inexpensive hi-dpi laptops and tablets out there. The issue is that it isn't super easy for programmers to implement, so a lot of the lazier ones don't bother (E.g. 3S CodeSys simply gives an error message if you start it with dpi at anything other than 100% ) OSX still has the simplest hi-dpi solution, but it's also the least flexible (either 1x or 2x, and scale up or down from that). So most mac programs support it now, but there is only so much you can do (either ~100 (standard) or ~200 (retina) dpi, if you want it inbetween the GPU must scale the framebuffer; it works well enough but is not totally ideal. I have two 2560x1600 screens, one is 13" and one is 27" so, it works.

No shock Irix knows how to handle different resolutions (dpi's) as one of the very first things I played with when I got started with it was the scaling scrollwheel of the vectorized icons

guardian452 wrote: Even windows is getting fairly decent given the glut of inexpensive hi-dpi laptops and tablets out there. The issue is that it isn't super easy for programmers to implement, so a lot of the lazier ones don't bother (E.g. 3S CodeSys simply gives an error message if you start it with dpi at anything other than 100% ) OSX still has the simplest hi-dpi solution, but it's also the least flexible (either 1x or 2x, and scale up or down from that). So most mac programs support it now, but there is only so much you can do (either ~100 (standard) or ~200 (retina) dpi, if you want it inbetween the GPU must scale the framebuffer; it works well enough but is not totally ideal.

T221 is kind of slick, it scales all by itself, no software needed. Say your kompewter delivers 1920 x 1200, that's one-fourth of 3840x2400 so each big fat low-res pixel becomes four skinny hi-res pixels. All the common resolutions likewise, although some have a band around the perimeter. It has its own frame buffer which refreshes at 48 hz, no matter the input frequency, so it can do tricks like this.

One thing that is super annoying tho, is the plethora of idiots programming in pixels on the web. Haysoos Chuy Kreestos, this is 2015. With all the caterwauling about mooo-durn you'd think the little nitwits could figure out that display-agnosticism is even more important now than when Mr Berners-Lee invented the web. But html displays perfectly, while their groovy current web2 css* displays like crap. "700 pixels wide", can we shoot someone, please ?

* rmb, "View Page Source", ctrl-f, enter "px" in the search box. Yeah, phpbb. You fucking idiots. X has a dpi setting and vector fonts (googlefonts, anyone ?) scale perfectly with points. POINTS, idiots. POINTS.