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Hardware

Hands-on Review of the SGI Visual Workstations 64

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hardware-to-lust-after dept.
An anonymous reader sent us a good review of those SGI Visual Workstations that we all want to reformat and stick Linux on. The review is that its a solid, and even superior NT machine. Wonder what sort of Linux box it'll make. I volunteer to test it! (Along with I bet just about anyone else who reads this page)
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Hands-on Review of the SGI Visual Workstations More

Hands-on Review of the SGI Visual Workstations

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  • For "the low end box ... just below $4,000", SGI is once again trying to sell^H^H^H^Hpander overpriced, underpowered equiptment by cramming it into a "sleek-n-slick" shiny plastic box.

    Right now you can pick up a VArStation YMP(dual 450) with a 16mb Matrox G200 for under $3800 which will easily bury SGI's VPC320(UP) offering. VA's YMP(dual 350) at "just below" $2800 also outdoes this monster.

    What it comes down to is, you'd be hard pressed to find someone trying to charge more while offering less.

    Their LCD screen, on the other hand, is the coolest thing I've ever seen.

  • Very Funny, So, what is your opinion of the SGI workstation in question?
  • I am going to stick my neck out on this, but I would argue that pound for pound, there are more apps for Linux than NT. Granted, NT has more commercially known apps on it. However, some of the best cad and graphics programs can run under linux. There are a multitude of Ray tracing, frame editing, and other Graphics utilities that run under linux. On top of that, Linux can cluster a hell of a lot better than NT, which means you can
    more easily use Linux to ray trace large numbers of frames for large production Movies. This machine will market to the CAD and hollywood industries, where linux already has a strong hold. Linux makes sense for this SGI workstation, and SGI knows it.
  • I (am forced to) use NT at work on a AMD K6 233Mhz with 64mb, and it is TOTALLY annoying. It pauses and fits and starts CONSTANTLY. This happens if I'm typing a Word document, opening a spreadsheet or whatever. It just pauses for a second or two all the time! It drives me crazy. I would NEVER use this OS at home based on this experience.

    Can anyone out there comment on their experiences with NTWS4.0SP3 (or similar)? Have you come across the same thing? What about anyone using the OS maybe at work on some high-powered Intel-based computers?

    I'd be interested to hear...

    Cheers,
    Matthew
  • Let's see... do apps like

    Photoshop
    Premiere
    After Affects
    Infini-D
    Strata Studio

    run on i386 linux? (they run on NT and MacOS)

    Please don't tell me that I can use the gimp to get my work done under linux. I'd rather use Photoshop 3 on a Mac IIci. Work would get done much faster and with much less pain.

    I don't think linux makes sense for these workstations.
  • Wasn't an ars-tecnica review of the Visual workstations posted to /. like weeks ago?

    Or is this a different one?
  • i keep hearing "fast fast fast" but i don't see any benchmark numbers to back it up.

    until then, this thing is pure hype.
    __

  • I've always been impressed at what SGI can pull out of hardware. Unfortunately, I have doubts that OSS developers will be able to write well-optimized drivers for SGI without knowing the internal workings...
    Without that.. SGI is just another PC reseller now. Heavily optimized or not.. it's still NT.

    The CEO (Beluzzo(sp)) used to be at HP, when they made their ill-fated decision to move away from doing real work.. and started reselling NT instead. As cool as SGI's hardware is.. I kind of doubt that it will really stay ahead of other PC systems for very long..
  • Okay, let's be logical here...since SGI is going to sell machines with Linus pre-installed AND support them, it would be REALLY dumb of them not to have a custom made X server for their graphics chipset. Come on, they made a custom HAL for the NT implementation, why would they not build custom drivers and such for Linux? As has been remarked several times before, these boxes are quite pricey, and meant for graphic artists, so one would have to assume that when the machine is purchased from SGI (with whatever distro they want to use...I'll still buy one), they would have thought of all the nice little features like a custom kernel config & coding, a special X server, the GL libs, and the whole 9 yards. You don't actually think that there's going to be more than $100 price difference between the NT models and the Linux models do you?

    I wasn't just high when I read that SGI was going to be shipping Linux versions as well, was I?

    This does not make sense...what would an 8 foot tall wookie from Kishi be doing living on Endor with a bunch of 2 foot tall Ewoks? It does not make sense!!! (Thanks Johnny Cochran... :)

  • and not betting the entire company on this one until it starts getting some revenue. Only then, if they're convinced that it's working, they'll finish OpenGL and port Linux to it. Otherwise they'll just unload it for a stake in Hardware Canada Computing.
  • I run NT at home and Linux at work. Aside from being a bit of a resource hog, NT4 SP3 is pretty solid (I wouldn't do anything silly like run a server on it, though). My system w/64MB naturally chokes on large graphics in Photoshop, but it doesn't grind too much otherwise.

    SP4 doesn't seem quite so stable. It's crashed during boot a couple of times for reasons I cannot fathom, so when I migrate to my new box next week I'll be applying only SP3. Linux will be quite happy on the old box.
  • Blow it out your a-hole. Who cares. Apparently NetBSD's port to a NEW arch is boring for you Linux people, so why should the rest of us care that Linux is being ported to x86? Wait? What? Linux doesn't run on x86? Yeah whatever.
  • ick!
  • Not trying to advocate NT here, I'm not a server or into placing heavy loads on my machine...
    It would seem that perhaps running on a K6-233 May be part of the problem here... It also helps immensely if you have a SCSI system, compared to an IDE drive w/o ultra DMA or whatever it's called. NT, being a resource hog, barely runs in 64MB itself without swapping, add in an open Netscape window, some telnet windows, and a copy of Word, and maybe WinAMP in the corner, and you will definitely creep past 64mb...

    However, this is where the disc drive subsystem and the CPU come in; it can be argued either way that NT is a 32 bit OS, as opposed to 95/98/3.1, and relies heavily on an optimized 32bit CPU like the PPro, P2, and Celeron, or vice versa that the CPU was tailored specifically for 32bit compute operations, and that the old Pentium line, and cousins and such, just aren't up to it-don't ask me, I've only run NT on a PPro 200 with a SCSI disc subsystem, and for my usage of Word, Netscape, email, telnet, and VC++, it works fine. For similar performance and usage on older hardware, Linux really does seem to be the way to go.

    A lot of people think that SCSI is a rip-off, and stupid for being so more expensive that IDE, except that it takes 30% or so less CPU resources than standard IDEs; that can mean a lot for a swap happy OS like NT. However, spending an additional 70$ for another 64mb might be all that's needed to stop those swap stops you mentioned. Don't quote back numbers to me about ultra DMA IDE drives, and their bus mastering efficiency; I have no experience with that, though I would appreciate being informed and not flamed =)
    -Twink
    louisjr@cco.caltech.edu
  • blender (for many, that and the gimp are why they even have linux)
    any free software that uses GL
    GLquake and family

    any ported commercial ware.

    then theres the competitive price performance...
    yes you con run this stuff on an SGI(irix), but
    you would pay far more for far less performance.

    seriously, some of us like to code GL stuff. some
    of us even do it for fun, and think linux is a more fun environment than NT. (ok, so some may think NT is more fun, but they have nothing to
    complain about)

    and, yes there are many corps, studios etc who have in house software written for irix or some other unix that they would rather port to linux
    than to NT.
  • i use both NT server (for IIS, Cold Fusion, Oracle and MSSQL) and workstation (Visual Studio, Dev/2000, browsers, email etc) and in my experience it's pretty solid. Some work needs doing, of course, but stuff like MTS has really made NT usable for serious applications. And as a workstation, NT blows away nearly anything else i've used, ultras, rs6000, AXPs the works. Fast, stable, rich GUI, essential apps - it's great!
  • they're not built for mainstream developers, tho' - i can't imagine someone writing business apps specifically for one of these...

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