Hardware Wanted

There's one guy lurking around here who has a modern dual-XEON mega setup for Maya, but he also uses a Fuel/V12
he bought from me way back aswell since he said it's still good for some of the basic stuff and he likes how it behaves.

It's a mixed bag. I know another guy who's still happily using an IRIS Indigo because its audio is so good, whereas others
might say even the quickest SGI can be annoying re the js hog in Firefox. Indeed, it depends on what you want to do.
Use them for whatever matches their capabilities the best.

Note that complex renders on a Fuel/600 can match or outperform a dual-400 Octane (differences in L2 cache size,
RAM latency and bandwidth). Check the Alias render test results on my site.

Beyond a certain point though, if one is wanting to do some serious work, it's hard to push even the best SGI given
the potency of modern tech. I'm in the process of sorting out a 5GHz 2700K system for someone with just two
Quadro 600s, leaves a Tezro V12 in the dust speed-wise (yes, I build custom oc'd PCs now).

Ian.

hamei wrote: In some fields, the software has not advanced in the slightest

and in some cases it actually got worse. some programs got blown up ridiculously which makes the workflow actually worse than on an sgi and the older version. raw number crunching can't compete of course.
on the other hand if you're into coding then most of the time the whole system is idle anyway so for that even an iris4d is fine. assuming of course you don't wanna use some 500mb java based ide or a super-fancy scripting language where the interpreter is fatter than some complete older os

so let me emphasize what the others said already once more: it highly depends on what you wanna do and how

If you want to run Maya 6.5, which was the best and final version Maya on Irix, and you want it to run in any sort of usable manner, you can forget about anything that doesn't have a VPro, which means you can forget about anything that's not either an Octane(2), Fuel or Tezro. If you're patient (and vigilent), you can eventually find a good deal on an Octane2 on ebay. In 2007 I bagged a 400MHz Octane2 w/ V6 for $180 US.

I would humbly beg to differ. In my opinion, the mardigras cards for Octane are better for Maya because they do not glitch like the odyssey boards do (both the V6 and V12 I've had have acted in the same way).

Maya doesn't support the advanced features of the VPro anyway so you really only get a speed boost in the graphics. For my use case, that was less significant than a dual cpu module.

duck wrote: I would humbly beg to differ. In my opinion, the mardigras cards for Octane are better for Maya because they do not glitch like the odyssey boards do (both the V6 and V12 I've had have acted in the same way)..

what glitches are you referring to specifically? from what i recall there were always window refresh issues not just in maya but all over 4Dwm as well where windows would leave funky colored bits behind when dragged and resized. can not remember if these were only on Vpro and it was all dandy on older machines since i had only used Vpro for so long.

what i do vividly remember though is the abysmal performance of my indigo2 max impact when dragging windows around. even in '97 that was just mind boggling next to just about any other computer. 2D certainly did not seem like it's strong point. hope the octane equivalent fares better in that regard. (no i did not own a max impact in '97. bit tight on a student budget. that took a few years... )