SGI: hinv

So I’d been on the lookout for an SGI 20” granite monitor. I have a TFT that works on my SGI kit but I wanted a proper monitor for originalities sake. I found one on eBay fairly cheap and got talking to the seller and established that he also had an Indigo2 he wanted to shift. We talked back and forth a bit and I didn’t think I was interested because I already have an Indigo2 but purely in the interests of it going to a good home and not to recycling, we brokered a deal of a part exchange for a spare Android tablet I had and some cash. Went to go and pick it all up today.

Very pleased overall with it in the end. Skins aren’t perfect but pretty good overall. As you can see from the specs below it’s an R10K 195MHz, with 384MB RAM and HighImpact (Non-HighAA, 1MB TRAM only) graphics and with the added bonus of a 10/100 network card too (Phobos EISA) and the vertical stand feet. And for extra fun as you can see in the pictures, it comes in the original box! That made it worth the 160 mile round trip alone Also came with an external HDD enclosure, external SCSI CDROM AND a DAT drive too as well as the keyboard & mouse - so quite a collection of spares all told.

I’m rather surprised at how fast the system feels - actually feels more nimble than my R12K O2 that I sold a few months back, though I guess it could all be just in my mind.

Didn’t seem to be any juicy software installed, so broke out the IRIX 6.5.22 media to reinstall it only to find that it was packing a whopping 2GB internal drive - and IRIX complained there wasn’t enough space to install, so liberated a 72GB 15K Ultra320 SCSI disk out of another system and reinstalled it successfully on that.





Few piccies to follow once I get them off my phone.

Nice system! I'm a big fan of the R10K Indigo2s. My system also feels a lot more responsive than my old O2, but then my O2 was just an R5000 one. The network adapter is a big plus as the built-in 10Mb NIC really is too slow if you're doing any amount of data transfers over the network (as I often do).

Looking forward to the pictures!

The NIC is a strange one actually. I've installed the driver from Ian Mapleson's site, and forced it into 100mbit mode. Admittedly I'm only using a power line ethernet adaptor at home which maxes out at I think 70mbit, but the fastest I've seen so far has only been about 1.2MB/sec transfers. Will need to do some more testing.

I'll sort out some of the pictures now

OK - see attached









The Idiot Outside sticker was jettisoned pretty quickly

chicaneuk wrote: The NIC is a strange one actually. I've installed the driver from Ian Mapleson's site, and forced it into 100mbit mode. Admittedly I'm only using a power line ethernet adaptor at home which maxes out at I think 70mbit, but the fastest I've seen so far has only been about 1.2MB/sec transfers. Will need to do some more testing.

There's something about these cards if I'm not mistaken -- has to do with duplex auto-negotiation. You have to manually force the card to full duplex operation, or force the switch on the other end to half duplex operation.

Even when running properly it won't go faster then ~ 35Mbit I think, and it loads the CPU quite heavily. Other 1st gen 100Mbit implementations like the Challenge/Onyx VFE board are equally crappy

The Phobos G160 and the SGI FDDI cards can do the full 100Mbit speed and cause hardly any CPU load.

Yeah I noticed the effect on CPU load. I have forced the card into 100mbit full duplex but still doesn't seem to be exactly er.. performant I should try get it on a proper 100mbit switch with a fast machine at the other end and see what it can manage.

Yeah, you won't get a full 100Mb out of them and they do load the CPU quite a bit when transferring lots of stuff, but that's the limitations of the EISA bus for you. I get about 4-5MB/s with mine which isn't exactly incredible, but it is still significantly faster than 10Mb networking.

It's possible to get full 100Mb networking with the Indigo2, but then you need the GIO expansion card and these are a lot more expensive (and rare).

Edit: Glad to see that "Intel Inside" sticker quickly disappeared

Sexy! And the box!

Where did the "idiot outside" sticker come from?

Trippynet wrote: It's possible to get full 100Mb networking with the Indigo2, but then you need the GIO expansion card and these are a lot more expensive (and rare).

Don't know if the supply is holding up but those guys in Canada used to have them on sale pretty regularly.

ClassicHasClass wrote: Sexy! And the box!

Where did the "idiot outside" sticker come from?

No idea Was something from the previous owner. Bit of fun I suppose but I like my SGI boxes as clean / original as possible so it had to go very quickly!

Unbelievable. Went to switch it on today to show a friend and it's dead seemingly. Will not switch on. It worked the last time I turned it off. Time to see if the PSU in my other Indigo2 is compatible with this one I suppose!

I've been having problems like this with my Indigo2 recently. Just to check, turn it off completely at the wall and unplug it, then after 20 seconds plug it in and try again. My own system will not power on after a soft shutdown unless I unplug it first - which is annoying. After an unplug/re-plug, it powers up OK.

No dice sadly. Left it unplugged for a couple of minutes but doesn't want to know.

Doesn't sound good! One other thing you can try is to open it up and remove most un-essential bits, such as add-in cards, hard drives, CD drive, that sort of thing. I have had a 50->80 pin adaptor place a short across the PSU in my own Indigo2 and that obviously prevented it from firing up at all. I removed the hard drive, hit the PSU switch and it then burst into life.

If it's still dead with most none-essentials removed, it sounds like the PSU. It's possible to re-cap an Indigo2 PSU - something I intend trying with mine at some point, but it's not completely straightforward unless you know what you're doing with high-voltage electronics. Jan-jaap has done it before with varying degrees of success. Alternatively, it's probably replacement PSU time.

The only add-in beyond graphics is an EISA 10/100 network card. There's only one internal SCSI drive. I popped that out hoping for the best but no luck.

Sadly my skills with electronics extend only about as far as plugging and unplugging things - I've never got into home electronics in terms of soldering, etc so there's no way I'm opening up the PSU.

I will check out part numbers though and see if the PSU in my other R4K Indigo2 is suitable for R10K/IMPACT as I can at least get it back up and running again, and the R4K doesn't really get touched much anyway.

my friend has

• Impact R10 @ 195Mhz
• SolidImpact graphics board
• it boots from an external scsi hard drive.

i am experimenting a slowdown on the console, e.g. more than 10 seconds to wait since you click on "console", to when it really appears on the monitor, while exporting things through the lan, and using them remotely with X11 client, has no slowdown

i really wander what could be wrong

any idea ?

chicaneuk wrote: I’m rather surprised at how fast the system feels - actually feels more nimble than my R12K O2

I’m rather surprised about that: my O2+ with R12K @ 400Mhz is faster than my friend's impact R10K @ 195Mhz
the feeling you have sitting in front of the machine is that O2+ is faster than impact
and Mathematica for Irix completes things faster

but, may be there is something wrong in the Impact of my friends, perhaps … about his Irix installation.

Trippynet wrote: It's possible to get full 100Mb networking with the Indigo2, but then you need the GIO expansion card and these are a lot more expensive (and rare).

i am afraid i have not understood which netlan you are talking about, never seen other options except the Phobos
any link, or "research key" (for google) in order to better understand this -real-100Mbit/sec card for Ip28 ?

ivelegacy wrote: my friend has

• Impact R10 @ 195Mhz
• SolidImpact graphics board
• it boots from an external scsi hard drive.

i am experimenting a slowdown on the console, e.g. more than 10 seconds to wait since you click on "console", to when it really appears on the monitor, while exporting things through the lan, and using them remotely with X11 client, has no slowdown

i really wander what could be wrong

any idea ?

My first guess would be a dns issue.

yeah, it may be
any other causes ?


i will check the networks setup
as soon as i will have an access to the machine