Hardware For Sale/Trade

hi
my friend wants to sell all his SGI machine in order to buy an O2+, so he wants also to sell his Impact, which comes
- CPU R10K @ 195Mhz
- RAM 8 banks of 128Mbyte each, so 1Gbyte of ram
- GFX SolidImpact
- Phobos G160 GIO network interface (10/100mbit)
- Phobos E100 EISA network interface (10/100mbit)
- the chassis has been painted, and it looks without any scratches, like brand new
- chassis feeds

if anyone is interested, send me a P.M.

i don't know about shipping cost, it's very heavy

ivelegacy wrote: my friend wants to sell all his SGI machine in order to buy an O2+, so he wants also to sell his Impact,

I understand the desire but this would be a mistake. An O2 is a dog turd compared to a Barney Box, in almost all respects. I did exactly this and regret it to this day.

hamei wrote: I did exactly this and regret it to this day

why ?

My fiend wants an O2+/R12K @ 400Mhz, that CPU is faster than R10K @ 195Mhz, and the whole machine is smaller, less noisy and thinner. Impact has a better gfx, and you can't upgrade the gfx of O2, but … who cares about that ? I think if you want that, you'd better get an Octane2.

he loves this machine, as the fact he has spent a lot of time repainting the chassis (which really looks like brand new, no scratches, and brilliant color, the dye was done professionally, like car's dye, that was his first job, years ago), i have to take a few photos as soon as i get a digital camera), adding a ZIP SCSI drive (it is included in the first machine bay), a Toshiba 2x CDROM (included included in the second machine bay), searching for the Phobos, and so on.

The CDROM is able to drive CDs when the Impact stands in vertical (feeds provided), it has a special "holder" that is able to take the CD.


to tell you all the Truth … my friend has asked me to buy his machine - why don't you take it ? good price for you as we are friends
and … since then i have been thinking about that

i have an O2+/400Mhz, which i can carry on my car, i have an Octane2 which is too heavy so i am using it remotely, actually it is installed in the room under my father's roof (is "attic" the right UK word ?), i have an arduino connected to the PSU, and i have routed the "console" to the UART port, so the machine boots from the LAN, and then route everything to the LAN



completely remote control


so my friend asked - why don't you take it ? good price for you as we are friends -
I answered - because my IP30 is a pretty linux box, and a pretty Irix box, while IP28 (the Impact) is not so good with linux, but it is good with Irix -



O2+/R12K is not able to run linux at all, but it is a pretty and small machine
and i can change the main board, putting an R5K on, in this case it run linux

this is my O2+, the guy who sold me it … damaged the plastic case, so i have remove the plastic case and modified the chassis (removing all the iron for the CD bay) to stuff-clutter the less space than it can. I have also put on a PCI-USB NEC EHCI card, because i am adding this feature to Linux/IP32. Irix doesn't care about it.

for such a reason, as the fact my O2+ has an R12K cpu module, which is issues with Load/Store & Cache coherency, i have bought the following CPU module


R5K @ 200Mhz CPU module, it run linux without any coherency issue


my friend wants to buy something similar, he said … with the original SGI O2+ chassis

hamei wrote:

ivelegacy wrote: my friend wants to sell all his SGI machine in order to buy an O2+, so he wants also to sell his Impact,

I understand the desire but this would be a mistake. An O2 is a dog turd compared to a Barney Box, in almost all respects. I did exactly this and regret it to this day.

Hamei is right. An Indigo2 always has that 'snappy' responsiveness that even the fastest O2 lacks. The R10K/R12K are rather restricted by the O2 architecture.

ivelegacy wrote: i have an O2+/400Mhz, which i can carry on my car

Well, your O2 looks reasonably rugged , but I wouldn't carry any other O2 anywhere unless securely packed (which takes a lot of time so that kind of defeats the whole portability idea). The skins get very brittle with age and shatter for no reason at all.

ivelegacy wrote: O2+/R12K is not able to run linux at all, but it is a pretty and small machine
and i can change the main board, putting an R5K on, in this case it run linux

If you want a portable non-x86 Linux system, try a Raspberry Pi

If I wanted to take an SGI with me on the road and not worry about it, I'd take an R5K Indy. It's light weight and reasonably indestructible. Hell, I think it even runs Linux if that's your thing.

jan-jaap wrote: Hamei is right. An Indigo2 always has that 'snappy' responsiveness that even the fastest O2 lacks. The R10K/R12K are rather restricted by the O2 architecture.

Thank-you! I recently acquired an R10K Indigo2 and immediately thought how much quicker it felt than my O2 which had a faster CPU (R12K 300MHz). Just a general all round level of snappiness and responsiveness - the O2 felt rather more old and out of shape in comparison. But when I posted my thoughts in the hinv thread I created, I was somewhat shot down.

I'm glad it wasn't just in my imagination!

jan-jaap wrote: If you want a portable non-x86 Linux system, try a Raspberry Pi

about portable non-x86, i am developing Atheros MIPS32 SoC @ 800Mhz, they are MIPS, it is thinner like RPI.
SoC are chunk of integrated peripherals, SGI box are uncommon machine, e.g. the numa and che Xbox, so more exciting from the development point of view (linux).

OpenBSD runs on the O2, and is less of a pain to use than that Loony Loonix

chicaneuk wrote:

jan-jaap wrote: Hamei is right. An Indigo2 always has that 'snappy' responsiveness that even the fastest O2 lacks. The R10K/R12K are rather restricted by the O2 architecture.

Thank-you! I recently acquired an R10K Indigo2 and immediately thought how much quicker it felt than my O2 which had a faster CPU (R12K 300MHz). Just a general all round level of snappiness and responsiveness - the O2 felt rather more old and out of shape in comparison. But when I posted my thoughts in the hinv thread I created, I was somewhat shot down.

I'm glad it wasn't just in my imagination!

I noticed the same when going from my O2 to my Indigo2. Even though I dropped 5MHz and went to the slower FastSCSI2 bus for the disks, it feels a lot more brisk and snappy than my O2 ever did.

Saying that, I do appreciate that the O2 is smaller, lighter, quieter and less power-hungry than the Indigo2! A lot depends on what you want it for and what your expectations are.

btw, the Impact R10K machine is for sale, if you want more information, ask my by P.M.

We know you're in Italy so it's shipping in Euros right? Is that a Phobos G130 (EISA) or G160(GIO64) in it?

I've an Indigo2/R10K, never found it snappy at all. I was quite disappointed when I got in circa 2002.

noth wrote: We know you're in Italy so it's shipping in Euros right?

i don't know, we could check together the best price solution, shipping within euro i think it should be something like 40 euro at least

noth wrote: Is that a Phobos G130 (EISA) or G160(GIO64) in it?

it has both, 2 boards, G130 and G160

also it has
- CDROM 2X
- Iomega Zip 100Mbyte
- extra fan

i have also found original CDs, they are drivers for the 2 lan boards

chicaneuk wrote: Thank-you! I recently acquired an R10K Indigo2 and immediately thought how much quicker it felt than my O2 which had a faster CPU (R12K 300MHz). Just a general all round level of snappiness and responsiveness - the O2 felt rather more old and out of shape in comparison.

i have a few news about that: it seems to that having 3 lan inside an IRIX box can cause a lot of issues if they are not configured in the right way (as my friend did); i have manually edited a lot of configuration files and now i am appreciating an incredible speed up

for example before editing file i had a desktop that takes 10 seconds to launch a console X______X, now i have an instantaneous reaction, i am shocked how fast it can go with the right script, and there are still a lot of things bad configured, i have noticed them routing the console to the serial line, e.g. daemons bad configured that take resources and time (i will remove them)

btw, i have launched Mathematica v5 for Unix on both machines (my O2+ R12K @ 400Mhz and on my friends R10K @ 195Mhz) and i was shocked about how fast the O2+ performs, it looks quite twice faster than Impact!

the reason why ? .. i think it is the just about the CPU clock (400Mhz vs ~200Mhz), i mean Mathematica is only a CPU task, there is no I/O, no gfx, just computation that can stay in cache, so having a difference of +200Mhz means completing things two time faster X______X

really shocked about that, but O2+ seems to be slow about load/store, i feel something like the more your application need to access the memory, the more the machine go slow. Also there is a gfx gap, so i launched Alias Wavefront (my friend used it for his previous job so we have samples to be used for benchmarks), i know this App uses the gfx very heavily, and as result in this case the Impact was impressively faster than O2+


I am Mathematica addicted, that is the reason why i feel the O2+ is faster than Impact, but it is just relative, perhaps, it is just related to Mathematica.

sure, it depends on what you do. the o2 is an all-in-one machine with all the pros and cons such machines have even tho it's an sgi.
as for the cpu, of course an r12000 at 400mhz is significantly faster than anything that you can put into an indigo2 no matter whether it's in an o2 or not.

Lots of SGI benchmarks at http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/sgi.html#SYSCOMP

ivelegacy wrote: Also there is a gfx gap, so i launched Alias Wavefront (my friend used it for his previous job so we have samples to be used for benchmarks), i know this App uses the gfx very heavily, and as result in this case the Impact was impressively faster than O2+


I am Mathematica addicted, that is the reason why i feel the O2+ is faster than Impact, but it is just relative, perhaps, it is just related to Mathematica.

that's fine

also i am collecting benchmarks about the CPUs. I am used to put linux on SGI machine in order to run "nbench" (byte magazine benchmark). I have collected informations from different king of CPUs. HPPA, MIPS, ARM, and so on.

i think will open a thread with this informations.

edit:
thread about nbench benchmark (cpu only benchmark) opened here

O2 is a fun little box, and with an R10K/R12K it does have the raw on-paper integer benchmark
performance one might expect in tests that takes some seconds, minutes, etc., but hamei & others
are correct, it does not have the snappyness of an R10K Indigo2 and certainly not of Octane/Fuel
(and remember it's fp performance sucks compared to all other SGIs from the same era, reasons
why given on my site). However, people like O2 for other reasons, eg. its small footprint, low noise
(use a Fujitsu MAS drive and replace the PSU fan with an Arctic F8, it's basically silent), low-cost
real-time video functions, etc. Depends what one wants from an SGI I guess, which is why for newer
enthusiasts I suggest a long term plan to obtain several different systems, contrast & compare.

However, I'm not posting because of all the above factors. Rather, I wanted to mention that O2+ was
a total marketing/PR con: there's no such thing as an O2+ in that the only differences between an O2+
and any previous O2 was packaging/plastics. Every part of what will always be in an O2+ was already
in use with older O2s, namely the 030-1327-002 mbd and DVDROM. I've obtained plenty of older O2s,
even some with original logos, which have exactly the same mbd and 1401/1711 DVD. Absolutely nothing
changed hardware-wise; the same R12K/400 was already available, and although SGI used the O2+
launch to announce R7K/350 availability, that was quickly recalled due to a manufacturing fault (and its
performance wasn't that good anyway, see my site for examples).

The only unique thing about an O2+ is its purple skins. Commercial buyers will pay a lot for an O2+,
but not for any sensible reasons; they often just have to source the same named item as they already
use, so the value is artificially high. I suppose a hobbysist might prefer the colour styling of the O2+,
but don't convince yourself it's better than a normal O2 because it's not - they're exactly the same.

Lots of benchmarks on my site if you want to compare performance , though they can't really convey the
snappyness factor so well. I did once separately test an R12K/400 O2 vs. an R12K/400 Octane MXI
for running Avid; the Octane wasn't just 5X faster for doing general stuff like AV clip import, as hamei
implies it was also a lot nippier in general (R10K Indigo2 would be somewhere between the two).

O2 is a great system in various ways, and I use one for MJPEG editing, but I wouldn't use an O2 for
'productive' work (I have a Fuel/900MHz for that), not when there are better SGI alternatives, and certainly
not when it makes more sense to use something else entirely, eg. I have a 3930K @ 4.8 with quad-GTX 580
for converting video data. From a collector's perspective though, I'd say owning an O2 practically compulsory,
as it sums up so much about what SGI was up to back in the day (a friend of mine who used to work at SUN
once said, "I wish we'd made something like this.")

For those who have commented on its performance (heh, including me), do remember that when O2 first
launched, it was 4X faster than the best Intergraph PC one could buy for running apps like Chalice/Shake;
we forget this now because today it's too easy to compare it to the best of what is possible with other SGI
models, but at the time it was a very good system (that is, when its unique arch matched an application
suite spot), and for some apps it was 10X faster than anything else available in its price range, eg. volumetric
medical imaging; I talked to a doctor in S. Africa who said it cut his preparation time for CAT scan followups
from an hour to just 5 minutes, which was life-saving stuff, he was delighted.

If a hobbyist asks though, I tell them there's no need to hunt for an O2+ in any technical sense, only if
they're seriously obsessed with that colour styling (in which case, why not get a normal O2 and have
it painted?), because they're going to be expensive unless one gets really lucky on eBay or something.
Except for the skins, a normal R12K/400 O2 with a 1327 board and DVDROM is an O2+, and they're
much easier to find. For those who struggle to locate a unit in good condition, the CPU-mod R12K/300 units
I have available are a good compromise (they'd be 350MHz if only I could be certain of what resistor
positions to use in the mod), though note they don't come with a 1327 mbd by default since that's simply not
necessary for a hobbyist system at all. See my feedback page for example comments from someone who bought
such a system from me last year, and I'm just about to begin preparing another for someone in Sweden.

Ian.

Nicely put Ian.
I've 2 o2s and I never expect super fast performance, but they are.. ok in my book, and the form factor, the CDROM etc and they way it plays with the 1600sw is just what I want. I don't want noisy and big for a lot of what I do (or have been doing over the years) I have my Octane2 for that.

I went from an R5000 195mhz to chicaneuk's R12000 (with more memory) and to be honest, it seemed like a clean install feel. It wasn't massively faster, but it hadn't had the build up of years of crap being done to it like my R5000 had.

Pros and Cons for me, Form Factor, Noise, Power Consumption, 1600sw and cuteness.