Hardware For Sale/Trade

Anyone want to do some trading ? I'm sick of this worthless fucking piece of shit. It's either get rid of it or throw it out the window (10th floor, bad idea for innoccent bystanders but big pleasure for me.)

Have available one complete O350 w/V12, dual 700's plus another one w/V12 that is almost complete but of course also doesn't work (bad interface board, L1 won't wake up).

I could throw in a fucking useless O2 also but it's not worth shipping.

I have a dual 400 V12 Octane2, would like a 2x600 and another V12 for it. If there's a 2xV12 carrier available, that would be cool.


O350's are garbage. I would suggest avoiding them. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to why SGI went broke ?

Reverse Psychology Sales Pitch Hamei?

uunix wrote: Reverse Psychology Sales Pitch Hamei?

Having owned both O300s and O350s - the 350s are definitely more temperamental.

uunix wrote: Reverse Psychology Sales Pitch Hamei?

Honesty is the best policy. They are poorly-designed, poorly implemented pieces of garbage but some people want them. I am very tempted to discard the Octane as well and get something that actually works, say a cheap Dell, but have too much invested in software and learning-time to do that. Plus the Octane has been reasonably reliable. The rest of this stuff is just crap. Disgusting worthless crap. May as well run Loonix on it, a partnership made in heaven.

Adrenaline : they aren't tempermental. They are shit. There's a difference. They were designed like shit, so of course they behave like shit. The only question is, why have I been so stubborn for the last couple years ? I should have thrown the stinking turd in the trash the very first time it played braindead.

Disgusting worthless crap

LOL

Can you output 2 different screens res on a DCD?

Anyway, I'm a sucker for pain, send it me, I'll send you a Play Station 3 remote control in exchange!

hamei is the born salesman

although i also think the ip35/53 models lack the charm of older models i wouldn't call them junk so i'm curious, what's so bad about them?

hamei wrote: Anyone want to do some trading ? I'm sick of this worthless fucking piece of shit. It's either get rid of it or throw it out the window (10th floor, bad idea for innoccent bystanders but big pleasure for me.)

Or drop it out of a B-52's bomb bay and watch it crater wherever it lands.

hamei wrote: I am very tempted to discard the Octane as well and get something that actually works, say a cheap Dell, but have too much invested in software and learning-time to do that. Plus the Octane has been reasonably reliable. The rest of this stuff is just crap. Disgusting worthless crap. May as well run Loonix on it, a partnership made in heaven.

Loonix Lol! I don't like it either, sucks moose balls. But don't dump your Octane, a cheap Dell or pretty much any modern machine has none of the charm and is just another boring generic box, with a generic OS.

oh hey, seems i missed it. hamei cracked the 10,000

hamei wrote: O350's are garbage. I would suggest avoiding them.

I guess I was lucky. I got mine in 2010 and it's been running 24/7 since then with only a single issue ( a PSU failed ).

jan-jaap wrote: I guess I was lucky. I got mine in 2010 and it's been running 24/7 since then with only a single issue ( a PSU failed ).

You never turn it off. All three of the poorly-designed overpriced pieces of crap from SGI fail at startup.

O2 - need we say more ? Red light, orange light, will it go green ? Is it going to boot ? No ? okay, pull the mainboard, move the jumper again , put it back, try again ... red light, orange light, will it go green ? oh yah ! yay ! it did ! Now I can use it again !

I also had an O2 run for almost two years. It was never turned off. But a hard disk died and it never turned on again.

Fuel : first we get the environment monitoring chip that fails. Then we get the V12 that doesn't identify itself so the computer won't pass POST and won't boot because a Fuel will not boot without graphics. Try five or six times and usually the dumbass piece of crap will accidentally see the graphics once and boot yippee ! Better not ever turn it off again. And oh yeah, the "save money" peecee power supply that SGI just had to butcher with their worthless fucking fifty-cent special chip that makes the $25 power supply unreplaceable. Yeah, leave it on forever and it's also fine. Plus let's not forget the failure-prone fifty cent garbage SCSI cable that they just had to fit with an unusual connector so you can't easily replace it. But hey ! it's only a $10,000 computer, we've got to make a proffffiiit somehow !

And then there's the super special O350 from the trusted leader in high performance computing. If you don't keep it powered up, the L1 can and will go south for the winter. Without an L1 it won't start. Ask people who turn them on and off -- they all have this experience, not just me .. what do you do when the L1 doesn't show up ? "Oh, I pull the plug and re-insert it several times, usually it comes back to life eventually." Oh good idea. Maybe I should sacrifice a chicken also ? Too bad I stupidly planned to do a little work today. That and the mechanical idiocy of bolting boards solid to sheet metal at 90* angles, the cheapest crappy connectors you can find that pull off the boards, sheet metal design that was so dumb they had to add access hatches, screws buried under other items or in places that human hands can't reach, and oh yeah did I mention ? It doesn't like to turn on.

I didn't buy this p.o.s. to play Quake. As the official Nekochan Troglodyte, let me just say this : every fucking cheapass computer I've ever owned that did not come from SGI actually turned on when I pushed the button. The Assistant's $500 Netvista from the same period as this O350 actually turns on every single time (It also outperforms the O350 but that's another subject). And in seven years, I've added a larger hard disk and cleaned the fans. That's all. My 4 mhz 286 turned on every time I pushed the start button. Reliably. I can't even depend on this worthless piece of shit to start. And the Fuel before it and the O2 before that.

The so-called engineers working at SGI ? They should have been driving a train. One of the little wooden ones on the wooden tracks because they shouldn't be allowed near electricity.

i'm sorry to hear you had such problems with the o350. as jan-jaap i got mine rather late in 2010 after and because of my forced time out but never had it on around the clock. yet i didn't have problems either and that despite my rather humble customization due to the differently sized 1ghz module.
i ran an o2 for a few years as a server which was fine as well. only after turning it on again several years later i had to re-seat the rams once. fine again since.
as for the fool i can't say anything because i never had one.
only last fall after exactly 20 years of flawless service my extreme gfx bit it and that was the first and only issue i ever had with it. put in another one (thanks to ian) and fine again.
my octanes have been rock solid just as everything that reads ip27 somewhere so all in all at least for the machines i had and knew of i can say reliability has never been an issue.
same goes for my alpha btw. pulled it out of storage a few months ago and fired it up. although it's "only" one of the pc164 models it just worked.

regarding x86 my experiences however were very different. reliability? not by a longshot and tons of "never to be solved" mysteries i gave up on investigating at some point. non-existant hardware diags add to it. since i started running osx there around 2007 a couple of machines just died and i had some of the mentioned mysterious issues along the way. it even fried a monitor once thanks to some crappy gfx drivers and/or card. another example sometimes when i turn it on the network is down; i pull the cable, stuck it back in and then it's fine ... you get the idea, stuff that doesn't fuel (pun intended ) trust much. not to mention the crappy hfs but that's not the hardware's fault so ...

foetz wrote: only last fall after exactly 20 years of flawless service my extreme gfx bit it and that was the first and only issue i ever had with it. put in another one (thanks to ian) and fine again.
my octanes have been rock solid just as everything that reads ip27 somewhere so all in all at least for the machines i had and knew of i can say reliability has never been an issue.

I never had a speck of trouble with an Indigo, an Indigo2, an Indy and an Octane. The Indy went on train plane and bus rides all over the world, the Octane underwent the gorilla luggage handlers on a plane and went on a train down to Guangzhou where it is still running today.

But O2 is flaky (fu named his "crybaby" for a reason), the Fuel is terrible and the O350 doesn't show me shit. There is no excuse for this crap in a $10,000 computer. None.

btw, ask j-j if his Fuel is running or do a search on nekochan for Tezro L1 failures. There are at least two more that I know of that are not even mentioned here. It's not just me. Like I said, there is absolutely no excuse for this low-level basic stuff to fail. None whatsoever. SGI "engineer" == incompetent chimpanzee.

(Try to clean the SCA backplane on your O350 some day, foetz. You will be using some new words )

The Fuel has another time bomb in it too, if something happens to the Atmel chip(SEEPROM?), the only easy way to replace it is to get another mainboard that has it or find someone willing to sell you one that was salvaged. Since either there's no way to reprogram a new chip with a serial number or it's something that's far out of reach of the average person. That's one of the reasons I passed on getting a Fuel.

hamei wrote: (Try to clean the SCA backplane on your O350 some day, foetz. You will be using some new words )

i did dismantle the whole thing back when i got it because parts were missing at first (i didn't get the system as it is now in one go). no doubt could be better but it wasn't better or worse compared to an indigo2 either. did you ever try to get these metal thingies back on an octane frontplane without having checked how they were on before?

but sure, the ip35 machines were the cheapest of all irix machines and feeling heavy pressure from x86 at the time so don't expect the same level of quality as from systems that went for 4x the bucks

Lets face it.. owning SGI gear is like owning a classic car.. consistent maintenance.

hamei wrote: btw, ask j-j if his Fuel is running

Nope I could have fixed that long ago, but technically he ownership of the system is a bit undefined so I'm not terribly motivated.

I can name many things that are broken or unreliable in many SGI systems, but the O350 just isn't high on my list of crap designs. I can think of:

* PSUs of big iron. All of them. At least the old ones (4D series) are generic enough that they can be repaired or replaced. The ones in the Onyx1 can set your house on fire. The ones in O2K are impossible to diagnose because I can't figure out how to fire them up outside a system and you can't do anything once they're in the system. The O350 PSU was flawed but at least they are generic enough that you can buy a new one on eBay for as little as 1EUR (really. did that).

* RMs of big iron. Especially 1st gen SMD fabrication -- Reality Engine. There's enough flex in these boards that, not they're old and soldering joints are brittle, they will be 100% DOA if you ship them. Also affects IMPACT TRAMs.

* In my experience, power supplies are a very weak link once they get older. Which makes the Onyx1/Challenge, with it's countless DC/DC converters all over the place a complete reliability nightmare. Add to this the RM and PSU issues I just mentioned and you'll understand why I got rid of my Onyx RE.

* Anything with compression connectors. Even in a controlled environment there's dust, it's just finer, black dust. Which builds a 'cake' layer on your PCBs after a decade or so. Damn the poor soul who takes apart an Onyx2 or Octane in this condition because that crap will ruin your compression connectors and/or make them fail intermittently.

I can think of many other blunders, like how flashing the CPU speed of a mainboard works (sic) on many systems. This still kind of works for a Fuel as long as you install a faster CPU than what was in originally, but the same applies to O2000 and, more severely, O200. In an O2K you can flash one node from the other, on an O200 this means you need a second O200 system to do the job. Really, the L1 should have been able to take care of this. Or maybe it can and nobody told us?

If you have as many SGI systems as I have, there's always something broken. That's to be expected, many of them are 20 or 25 years old. It's sometimes a challenge to keep up with the breakage and get things running again.

I usually don't keep PC hardware around long enough to compare it to my SGI's in terms of reliability. It's easy to complain about the (un)reliability of the PSU of a 1990 vintage 4D PowerSeries, but the truth is I have no idea whether a PC from that era would still work because I just don't have them. My experience with 'PC' server hardware is quite good as far as reliability goes, but I use Tyan or Supermicro boards, Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and I retire them after ~ 5 years, before they fail. My current PC workstation is an HP Z600 with two hexacore Xeons and 48GB RAM -- best PC I ever saw. Side panels in solid aluminum, sounds like a vault door when you close them.

jan-jaap wrote: Anything with compression connectors. Even in a controlled environment there's dust, it's just finer, black dust. Which builds a 'cake' layer on your PCBs after a decade or so. Damn the poor soul who takes apart an Onyx2 or Octane in this condition because that crap will ruin your compression connectors and/or make them fail intermittently.

so the IP30 is a bad system from this point of view because disassembling the the gfx out of the chassis is a trouble due to the dust, and you'd better put a protective cap on the compression connector. The same should be done by who wants to sell, before putting in the parcel.

I had dust troubles with the compression connector on the pci cartridge, solved blowing air compress.


i have to remove a gfx, when can i get a few protective caps ?

ivelegacy wrote: so the IP30 is a bad system from this point of view because disassembling the the gfx out of the chassis is a trouble due to the dust, and you'd better put a protective cap on the compression connector.

I think the problem is more that a dirty system is best left undisturbed because once you pull the thing apart the dust goes everywhere, including the compression connectors.

ivelegacy wrote: I had dust troubles with the compression connector on the pci cartridge, solved blowing air compress.

Don't forget that you need to clean the opposite side (the backplane) as well, not just the compression connector. Properly cleaning an Onyx2 backplane is no walk in the park, you need to remove *a lot* of sheet metal before it comes out.

ivelegacy wrote: i have to remove a gfx, when can i get a few protective caps ?

If you have a 3D printer you can make your own . A tictac box works too

hamei wrote: Anyone want to do some trading ? I'm sick of this worthless fucking piece of shit. It's either get rid of it or throw it out the window (10th floor, bad idea for innoccent bystanders but big pleasure for me.)
Have available one complete O350 w/V12, dual 700's plus another one w/V12 that is almost complete but of course also doesn't work (bad interface board, L1 won't wake up).
I could throw in a fucking useless O2 also but it's not worth shipping.
I have a dual 400 V12 Octane2, would like a 2x600 and another V12 for it. If there's a 2xV12 carrier available, that would be cool.
O350's are garbage. I would suggest avoiding them. Anybody want to hazard a guess as to why SGI went broke ?

More to the point: where are these machines located? My wife is 75% likely to kill me if I check, but I want at least to know how much it'd cost to ship to my backwater.