SGI: Hardware

Hi

Iam new on this forum , and i plan to by an SGI Octane from eBay.
I am an pc/Windows user , but under the surface a great SGI fun;p

I have heard a lot of storys on SGI machines ... and iam really curious to hear some fresh firsthand experince from reall users.
An SGI Octan (first gen) could be compared with what kind (config) p.c. or Mac?

The two are not easily compared.

Rutrem wrote: An SGI Octan (first gen) could be compared with what kind (config) p.c. or Mac?

A Pentium-III nailed to a fridge or a 604 superglued to a washing machine?

Rutrem wrote: Hi

Iam new on this forum , and i plan to by an SGI Octane from eBay.
I am an pc/Windows user , but under the surface a great SGI fun;p

I have heard a lot of storys on SGI machines ... and iam really curious to hear some fresh firsthand experince from reall users.
An SGI Octan (first gen) could be compared with what kind (config) p.c. or Mac?

As Pinecone said it's hard to compare them.
Most stuff that you run on decent SGI is quite snappy, one exception is firefox, in that regard it will comparable to a 500MHz PC.
But it depends a lot on how fast your disk is, if you have dual CPUs etc.
Although they very speed monsters in it's days, a modern Core2 PC will run circles around them.

Comparison is hard because the SGI focused a lot on fast buss, very good multi CPU architecture, fast memory and disk etc.
So a SGI can handle tremendous
loads and still be snappy.

The PC on the other hand usually has weak buss, slow disks etc but a fast CPU. If you run a single program the PC would be fast, but clog it down with a heavy load and its weak architecture will hinder the CPU potential.

As analogy, if they were transports, a PC would be a fast motorcycle, and a Octane or Onyx would be a monster truck.

Generally, you can expect performance similar to a well-equipped late-90's PC. For example, a 300MHz Octane with MXE is probably about the speed of a 500MHz Pentium 3 with an Oxygen VX1 card. It should do everything you want at an acceptable speed.

Typically, SGI machines are less adept at common tasks like web-surfing, movie watching and photo editing. This is largely due to a lack of well-designed software and not a shortcoming of the hardware itself. These machines were designed for intensive graphics production work such as 3D animation and video compositing, so there's a wide variety of high-quality graphics software available. They were not, however, designed for AOL, playing Warcraft, or burning home movies onto DVD.

Of course, with the Octane you're getting an industrial-grade UNIX workstation with a very high coolness factor. Plus the Octane's digital audio subsystem is of extremely high quality. And an MXI or Odyssey system will actually run Quake 2 pretty well

basically a turbo charged pc of sorts

thnx a lot for the responses.
Basiclly iam thinkin to use a SGI Octane for 3D(Blander) and 2D(Gimp),
primarlly for open source software. Its not my intention to play games on this machine(ex.Quake2 , hi,hi,hi)

I heard a lot of good stuff around the Xbow arch.,
and stability of the IRIX OS.

Rutrem wrote: I heard a lot of good stuff around the Xbow arch.,
and stability of the IRIX OS.

probably the best combo ever made
if you wanna experience the very definition of 'workflow' ... you're right here.

Probably for interactivity, double the clockspeed and add 'Pentium III' and you're probably in the ballpark. Once you go dual CPU's, that jumps quite a bit.

Of course, the high-bandwidth also means it's good and snappy right up to and including 'full-load' on the system, which is really the best part.

i found this review for AthlonMP cpu, where also tested a Octane 2 with 2 400Mhz RISC cpu

http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?article_id=30000190

...Octane is working very well if u consider that is faced against an Athlon system with 2 CPU on 1200Mhz!

it's a pity they didn't use a dual r14k-600 octane2 in this benchmark

that would give a 33% speed increase. not enough to beat that athlon MP.

GIJoe wrote: that would give a 33% speed increase. not enough to beat that athlon MP.

Probably more than 33%, note that 4xR10k@300MHz = 2xR12@400 witch would indicate R12k is 50% more efficient than R10k.
R14 might have a similar increase in speed that is due to architecture rather than increased clock frequency.

Rutrem wrote: 3D(Blander)

deBug wrote: Probably more than 33%, note that 4xR10k@300MHz = 2xR12@400 witch would indicate R12k is 50% more efficient than R10k.
R14 might have a similar increase in speed that is due to architecture rather than increased clock frequency.

well, previous benchmarks scattered over these forums showed an almost exactly linear speed increase according to cpu frequency. my own tests reflected this very well (i own a dual400 and a dual600 octane and did some render-comparisons with that duo).

the maya renderer used in the linked benchmark probably does not utilize more than two cpu's, which would explain the weak results of the onyx. and there is no R10k-300, only an R12k chip with that frequency - also afaik, of course.

edit: just ran the benchmark: 01:57 min is the result for dual-600's oct2. on a newer version of maya/mental ray though