SGI: Hardware

I was looking at neko blog (retrocomputing section) and saw the Tezro, which seem like really nice machine, I dug around for a bit, and headed for ebay to see prices.
omg, are you freaking kidding me??
There are rigs there selling for 20K, 31K, 50K and 75K. If it's not coming with Magen Fox driving a 1967 corvette roadster, I can't wrap my mind as to why this would be the price tag. 75K would buy me 3 sunfire servers with 8 way quad core and 256GB, cr*p load of storage, and I would still be left with money to buy a couple of new desktops and host all of this in a L1 hosting service for a year.

So, my question is, why??

?
I think you are mistaken... That may have been the price when it was new, but they typically go from 1k to 5k depending on the configuration these days. There are discreet products like "Flame" that are very large video editing products with lots of add on hardware. The tezro "package" (like this: http://www.rdlx.com/discreet_flame_v9_system_hd.htm ) can be very expensive - because it IS very expensive.

Can't REALLY compare x86 Sun servers to a Tezro setup - different tasks at hand.

ah, yeah, you're right, the ebay items are indeed the discreet Flame, I thought it's just a cute nick name, like O2 "moosehead" or something.
Thx for clearing that up.

Btw, if we're on the topic, what would (roughly, of course) be the equivalent to Tzro in term of intel/amd hardware?

A Mac Pro maybe?

A G4 maybe .

Well if you want to go by the Blender Render Benchmark results, it clocks in a round a Quad 2.5 G5 or early Mac Pro (which makes sense, its from that time period).

SGI: http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/ ... ender.html
Everyone else: http://www.eofw.org/bench/

But it matters not. The people that have them will tell you its not about benchmarks.

I know this is not my thread, I apologise for just using it for the purpose of my question.

You wouldn't happen to know what a decent price for a G5 is?

I sold my 2.0 DC with 6GB of ram for $500 last july. I wouldn't spend more then that.

Ah, I guess I shall wait a bit then.

Unless you are a magazine they don't pay you for running benchmarks

@indyman007

I own two G4 (G4, not G5), one is happily running Debian, the other just sits and do nothing.
It's a 350Mhz, complete model, nothing missing. will give for free if you're willing to pay the international shipping (they weigh like a small neutron star).
(Just to put it out there, it's quite a slow machine in my perspective, even with their "native" mac OS 9 installed, I won't start a with-debian-it's-much-faster flame war though).
(though it truly is).

It ISN'T about the benchmarks, unless you are going to be spending a lot of your time waiting for processing tasks: a tezro (for that matter, most any irix machine) will be much more responsive and reliable than any wuss-o-rama new age mac machine could ever dream of.

Yes, between $1k and $5k seems like a reasonable price range. Keep looking

Having just acquired a Tezro, I can tell you that it is an amazing machine and (to me) well worth what I paid for it ($975 with shipping). Unfortunately, due to switching jobs and moving, I haven't had a lot of time to use it yet, but so far it is AWESOME.

As a daily driver (at home) SGI user that sold a Mac Pro (and never once missed it) to upgrade his Octane 2, I 100% agree with sybrfreq. I went SGI all the way, and I have not been disappointed. Be warned though, this path is certainly not for everyone. The way I look at it was this: I paid 3x as much as I did for the Tezro for a machine that I grew to despise. $1000 - $2000 is not a lot to spend for a daily driver machine if you're a computer person, just figure out where your priorities are.

Just my $0.02.
-Jesse

I love mine also Zerolapse! It's not only powerful — even for nowadays' standards, very capable I'd say — but also the one of the most complete, full-featured and fulfilling RISC UNIX desktop experiences I've had so far! The only thing IRIX systems ‘lack’ is USB and the like support, but I can live without it (I have other systems, across the network, to deal with that).

squigly,

Other than your O2, do you have any other SGI hardware? If not, go spend $100 and get a mid-spec, dual processor Octane. I think you'll be VERY surprised how responsive it is compared to machines that are supposedly far faster. Heck, I bet you'll be surprised how well IRIX runs on your O2 (you're still running BSD on it, right?), but it really shines with more than one proc. If you find that you enjoy IRIX and can live with some of its shortcomings, you'll realize why people will easily spend a few grand on a Tezro, even though faster commodity hardware can be had for less.