SGI: Discussion

Got myself an indigo, cool little machine. The seller said that it was a 100mhz model, so I was planning on throwing in 384mb of ram and the 150mhz r4400 module I had left over from my indigo2 upgrade.

Powered on the machine, all looks good, but its the r3000 model, with only 32mb of ram... Not sure what to make of it??? The older processor makes it a bit more vintage and interesting, but is 32mb really useful for anything? Could I run netscape 4.x on it? Is it possible (and not too $$$) to get for ram for it?

Or, should I just look for an ip20 board and go with original plan?

What's everyone's thoughts?

Irix 4.0.5 is fair choice for an R3K with only 32mb ram.

Like pentium says, go with Irix 4.0.5 and you can get perfect vintage Indigo setup. It's not as slow as we can expect for a 33Mhz system. You need to change the power supply, backplane etc.. to have an IP20 system, it's much easier to find a complete R4000 system if you want one.

It's also cheap and not diificult to add a 16 or 32mb ram kit to improve the responsiveness. Also check the graphic card. Having the second generation (XS etc) can improve dramaticaly the user experience.

Depending on what you want to do with it. There is one catch with XS graphics - if you don't have the Z-buffer then it is not emulated in software (I think this is the only instance were a GL feature is not emulated if it isn't present in hardware). Look for XS-24Z if you need to do 3-D (or stick with LG).

Thanks for all the feedback!
My machine does hae the XS-24Z board.
The oldest IRIX that I have is 5.1.1, is it going to be too much for it?
Would 5.1.1 be an option if I up'd the memory to say 64mb or 96mb?
Where would I find the memory kits?

Make sure it's non-Indy 5.1.1. 4.0.5 is better for low-memory systems, or perhaps even a base install of 5.3, turn off all the gegaws and install the X11 port of 4Sight's environment from 5.1.1

5.1 had terrible memory leaks and I can't recall how much 5.1.1 fixed.

Tom Davis' infamous "Software Usability II" document about what went wrong in 5.1, must reading: http://owww.molgen.mpg.de/~wwwutz/Unix_Haters/old/usability.html

IRIX 5.3 will run 'fine' in 32MB. Back in the day we had a 100MHz R4000 Indy at $WORK used for software development. Ran IRIX, compilers, DDD, the application under development, all in 32MB RAM. They used to sell them with only 16MB RAM. When I got it, it had the original IRIX 5.1 + 5.1.1.3 (???) install on it. That would slowly eat up all it's RAM and had to be rebooted every couple of days. 5.3 fixed that.

At some point I scavenged some RAM from a 486 and upped it to 96MB RAM. That made a big difference