The collected works of nekonoko - Page 16

ShadeOfBlue wrote: I vaguely remember reading something about floating-point bugs in the 350MHz CPU's, which made them unsuitable for e.g. Maya. Since the O2 uses the main CPU for geometry transformations, it could be triggered by an OpenGL app.

Right, that's why SGI recalled the RM7K/350MHz CPUs. Kind of interesting to see it pop up now though, and equally interesting that the faster RM7Ks aren't affected.

Edit: A little more info here: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys ... fecdf3e025

Looks like it was a RM7000A problem. The 600MHz hobbyist upgrades use the RM7000C.

Martin Steen wrote: P.S. thank you very much for reporting about my programs on the start page!

Glad to do it -- it's always great to see new IRIX stuff

I use the Emerald viewer which is open source as well. Probably would be a fairly complex undertaking though

bplaa.yai wrote: but I guess both viewers use OpenGL extensions that are not available in v1.2

Yep - that's my thinking as well. I'd post some screenshots but certain of our forum regulars would undoubtably come down on me for posting irrelevant crap so I'll refrain.

dhjj wrote: I'm not sure they will work in an xbrick????

Yep, pierocks engineered a method for using them in an X-Brick. See: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=16721935

It appears to be missing a graphics card.

ajerimez wrote: (As an aside, I see this kind of behavior a lot lately. Are grade schools no longer teaching the basic laws of supply and demand?)

I probably mentioned it before someplace, but there was a guy on Craigslist locally that increased his asking price for a broken Apple Lisa by $50 or so every week, complete with a "firm" tag. The thing was on there for months and reached astronomical prices.

Yeah, looking at the auction description again it does say it's missing video (graphics) as well as the drive sleds. The sleds aren't really a problem as Tezro uses generic sleds (one suitable replacement being Sun 330-3696 spuds; there are several of those on eBay).

Finding a cheap Tezro/Fuel V12 for it might not be fun though. But it would make a good parts machine for Dr. Dave

ramq wrote: I'd take it if:

* It's without CPUs. That way I could move one of my quad-700s into the Tezro.

But it could be hiding quad 800 or even 1GHz. It's like a box of chocolates

I have a 7044-270 with missing front facia and an old faithful 5150 PC.

japes wrote: Popular for air flow management. HP did it on a number of x86 servers too. Now they got smart and made clear plastic duct work, that probably still gets left out by some techs.

Yep. SGI used foam in the O300s too, eventually replaced with plastic in the O350s.

NTFS 3g works nicely under Snow Leopard. I recently set up a Windows 7 x64 Boot Camp volume on my Mac Pro and use NTFS 3g on the Mac side and Paragon HFS on the Windows side. Technically Boot Camp 3.0 offers a Windows HFS driver of its own, but it frequently bluescreened Windows until I disabled it (and a web search revealed I was not alone in this).

ritchan wrote: Is that the cheapest SDSL plan? Is a SDSL plan really required when it comes to bandwidth? And you have to pay extra for a static IP too, right?

You're not paying for it, so why does it matter?

I decided to upgrade my old 2.66GHz Xeon 5150 Mac Pro rather than buy a new one, so installed the following over the past week:

Two quad-core 3GHz X5365 Xeon (8 cores total; sourced from eBay)
Two 4GB FB-DIMMs (bringing total installed RAM to 13GB; sourced from eBay)
XFX HD4870 1GB (flashed with EFI ROM; hand-me-down from GTX 285 upgrade in Hackintosh)
Additional 1TB Hitachi SATA drive with Windows 7 Ultimate x64 w/Boot Camp 3.0 and AHCI SATA fix (drive was an unopened spare I had on hand, Windows 7 Ultimate was bought new)
Apple Internal Bluetooth module (sourced from eBay)
Apple Internal 802.11n Airport Extreme module (sourced from eBay)
LG 8X Blu-ray RW (bought new)

All that probably sounds terribly expensive, but it worked out to be not much more than a new Mac mini, and the performance jump was huge. eBay was essential in keeping costs reasonable as the the X5365 CPUs ran around $1200 each retail but can be had for a quarter of that used.

Changing the processors wasn't bad at all - the CPU heatsinks came off quite easily and were no trouble to reinstall. You just need a long hex wrench or torx bit.

This system lives in my living room. So far I've done some gaming on it and watched a couple of Blu-ray titles

Here are some links that were helpful in putting this together:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=760482 (Windows AHCI SATA fix)
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=811768 (ATI flashing tool)
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=3 (CPU upgrade process)
http://www.wintellect.com/CS/blogs/jrob ... -love.aspx (Boot Camp 3.0 driver installation workaround)

Now I have a set of Xeon 5150 CPUs I need to figure out what to do with.

Pretty much the same situation here - I really wasn't using the machine much anymore aside from streaming video from my file server to my projector and HDTV (something a Mac mini could do in a smaller footprint). Now I also use it for gaming (Aion presently) and Blu-ray playback. Watched JJ Abram's Star Trek on it last weekend and picked up "Up" (Pixar) while I was out yesterday.

I've been having a lot of fun with it so far; I'm on the Fregion server and have playing mostly with a Chanter and Gladiator. Leaning towards the Chanter though

One point I neglected to mention concerns memory. If you're upgrading a first gen Mac Pro (2006 or 2007), you're probably aware it calls for 667MHz FB-DIMMs.

Memory vendors are crafty though. They're actually charging considerably less for the 800MHz modules normally used in the 2008 Mac Pros. An example: Memory Giant has 667MHz 8GB kits (2x4GB) priced at $320 on their web site. The 800MHz flavor of the same is $240 - a whopping $80 less. The amusing thing is that 800MHz RAM works just fine and dandy in a 667MHz machine - just a bit of an underclock. If anything, it saves you the worry of RAM clocked at the ragged edge. Don't waste money if you don't have to!

You can even save a bit more by buying the RAM on eBay (from the same vendor as above - Memory Giant). I paid $215 (free shipping) for my 8GB kit, though that's up a bit from last month when the going price was around $165. Ah, the volatile whims of the memory marketplace.

Yeah, last Spring was definitely the time to buy RAM; I paid $170 for 12GB of DDR3 for my i7 (6x2GB). Same memory is $325 now.

Yeah, it can hold 32GB. I may go ahead and grab another 8GB kit before the prices go up even more - replace that 1GB kit the machine came with

The Aion boot screen has the CryEngine logo on it as well. It does look really good though.

I bought one for my parents for Christmas - it's in the spare bedroom waiting to be wrapped. I'm not going to mess with it until I give it to them though

Nope - this is completely out of their sphere.

PymbleSoftware wrote: After we have an acceptable libtorrent in nekoware.. I (or someone else can) work on rtorrent.

Yeah, this will need to be cleaned up and packaged as a proper tardist before I can add it to the beta directory. If you want to post a raw tarball like that, just attach it to the thread instead.

dexter1 wrote: Well, everybody has a Tezro nowadays and babies, 'cept for Neko, he has old Apple hardware

Hey, I have a Tezro too - just no babies

nekonoko wrote: Power costs are fairly significant for the O350s as well.

I've resolved this part at least - got a faster web server and lower power costs in one go