Not only SGI, but the SGI NT machine. Despite it running Windows, the 320 / 540 were great machines! They used the chipset from the O2, Copper I believe, in a shared memory configuration that allowed insane texture memory for the time. Bus based graphics cards could not even come close to what the O2 / 320 / 540 machines could do with textures.
Now, we just put a GB on the graphics card and use a faster bus and call it good. Works too, if a bit less than optimally.
Those machines used ARC loaders instead of the usual PC BIOS and they featured a nice administrative GUI instead of the usual cryptic post / setup programs normally seen. ARC loaders are file system and network aware.
Little known trivia on those machines. SGI originally planned to include X Window system drivers for Linux, putting the machines on par with the O2 series and to help kick off a move to Linux seen in animation / movie production at the time. A Microsoft / SGI graphics collaboration project called Fahrenheit was supposed to improve both OGL and Direct 3D, but the reality was OGL got hobbled legally and Direct 3D got a lot better...
Short story, Microsoft was not about to have a major vendor produce machines openly that were capable of running Linux with those kinds of graphics capabilities. Legal got involved right as the Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph 98 or 99, I can't remember. SGI legal buried them after that, never, ever to be seen again. Microsoft, it turns out, had some ownership of the ARC loader, which gave it leverage over SGI, who left the PC business right then and there.
There were other contributing factors too, but SGI essentially retreated to Linux, moving it's multi-cpu scheduler and IRIX real time features (which had basically no peers at the time) to Linux, solidifying their place in the HPC / Visualization space where they remain today.
It's not really used much, if at all, but that chipset has insane good TV grade video processing capability. The O2 computers can do real time video surface mapping, and overlay type activities. For a long time, the down lines in NFL games were done with O2 computers. Another area that chipset excels is in multi-layer compositing. Because it's got direct memory access, pushing multiple large images around is insane fast. An O2 user once wrote a compositing application featuring sub-pixel accuracy that was just mad fast and extremely accurate. I used to use it for aligning various images together from different sources and resolutions. Scale to size, align, pivot, mask, etc... At the time I was having to do it, no PC could handle the data over the bus, and graphics cards with GB RAM sizes were very, very, very expensive. An O2 off e-bay, stuffed with a few GB of RAM pushed that stuff around, and I'm talking 800MB images as if they were nothing, all while running at 500Mhz or so.
Had some of that been written for windows, the 320 / 540 machines would have rocked hard. It's all there, just unused now, due to lack of drivers / OS support.
Re: How much do you need?
Well, a few hundred Mhz, some reasonable storage and a graphics system and you are good to go. For years, I ran Mandrake Linux 8.x on a ~500Mhz Pentium something or other and it was great! I would build code on it, author various things, run CAD and play DVD's flawlessly using Ogle and a Matrox G400 graphics card. It was kind of impressive for the time and clock speed. Matrox offered hardware MPEG, and enough 3D to make basic CAD workable, though one would not attempt a car or anything.
These days, hand-me-down laptops from our training machine pool get it all done and quick. I really want to move to some Android machine or other and get setup on a very lean environment. I'm tempted by the Pi, but not so much that I'm gonna get one just yet.
Nice looking PC. Kind of miss building those, but I won't these days. Not when I can get portable stuff so cheap that lasts so long. Hope your new setup rocks and runs for a while.
A CubieBoard with a Sata hard disk would have been a very economical replacement - but you would have had to wait until December for a delivery date.
I am VERY interested in your solid-state hard drive. They tend to boot extremely fast and really make everything zip along. I'd love to hear more about the performance. silent too,,,,,
I have a GigaByte mother board running my 64 bit Quad machine and I am happy with it, but my first choice in motherboards for Intel will always be Asus.
I never actually play DVDs, but I do use them as a partial back-up storage solution. Since I need to burn a disc occasionally, I did migrate the Pioneer DVD drive from the old computer to the new one. I have three desktop computers, but that's the only DVD drive. Unless you have a real need to play DVDs all the time or burn them a lot, you could easily just use an external USB DVD-RW for those rare occasions when you might need an optical drive. I haven't shopped for one lately, but I'd guess the cost would be around $60 for an "assemble it yourself" unit.
The Mac Mini is the only Apple product I've ever been tempted to buy, but like most Apple products, I find it way over-priced for what you get. I'd really like to have at least one computer running the Apple OS, maybe I should look for a used one.
I am VERY interested in your solid-state hard drive. The tend to boot extremely fast and really make everything zip along.
As you can see, the only slowdown is the Intel graphics. I have an nVidia GeForce card which will improve that score a lot, but it hasen't been installed yet.
I haven't done any fine tuning yet, but the new computer boots to the Windows 7 desktop in under 10 seconds. It's awesome.
edit: for you non-Windows people, the maximum score possible is 8.0
The Mac Mini really needs a DVD-drive as it's often used as a multimedia centre.
Using DVDs as a backup media, though, is NOT something I'd recommend.
One tip for those of you who are constantly upgrading computers and have gone from WinXP to Win7, is to reformat the HDD and reinstall Win7 from the ground.
A lot of computers that was delivered with SATA drives and WinXP has the SATA-controller set to some sort of 'legacy' or 'IDE-compatible' mode because plain WinXP couldn't use SATA directly, but required a driver.
Setting it to AHCI-mode and reinstalling means it will be able to use NRQ(I think?) out-of-order reading from the HDD, which can give a boost of up to 20%.
Odds are also that the NTFS file system is using 512Byte blocks which causes a lot of overhead. Reformatting will give you 4KB blocks and a hefty boost.
7.6 for the processors is quite good. Trying for 7.9 might be a disaster.
I have a theory that lightning speed processors may not have the useful life of their slower cousins though. After all more clocks is more heat. And these might be just the chips that were sorted out as the best for clocking while other chips that ran slower in the same batch were derated.
If they are a special production run, they still may just suffer from too few being produced and the quality control might not have been fully resolved before they were released.
Does anybody ever get an overall 8.00?
Sounds like MS wanted to punish the XP users for not jumping for Vista and demanding XP applications run in W7.
My little EEEpc 701 absolutely convinced me that solid state hard disks are a near necessity. For laptops, they not only boot fast, they don't suffer from sudden drops and so on.
It all becomes clear not, you really didn't want to try an save your old computer. You wanted to get something that would sizzle.
Almost getting to the point that all I "really need" is a small ARM board. My IGEP board from ISEE makes a fine computer as does a Raspi and others. I can surf the web, develop software, edit documents, watch vids from YouTube and pretty much do everythhing I could did on my PC circa 2000. Now with propgcc, the open source Spin compiler and Somple IDE I can develop for the Prop on these boards as well.
Almost getting to the point that all I "really need" is a small ARM board.
I know what you mean, the first time I started my Raspi I was completely taken by surprise at how nice it looked and how well it ran. If it wasn't for the fact that I'm a big time PC gamer (Fallout, Oblivion, Quake...), I could probably get by with just one of those.
It all becomes clear not, you really didn't want to try an save your old computer. You wanted to get something that would sizzle.
Actually, I tried everything I could think of to fix it. If it had been something simple such as a power supply or disk drive, I'd be using it today. I was very sad when it became obvious that it had a major problem. I really liked that machine, it did everything I needed it to do and did it quite well. On the other hand, if you're going to go to the trouble and expense of building a new computer (not to mention the stress), you might as well do it right
Almost getting to the point that all I "really need" is a small ARM board. My IGEP board from ISEE makes a fine computer as does a Raspi and others. I can surf the web, develop software, edit documents, watch vids from YouTube and pretty much do everythhing I could did on my PC circa 2000. Now with propgcc, the open source Spin compiler and Somple IDE I can develop for the Prop on these boards as well.
Next you will have the Raspberry Pi powered by a solar cell. After all, the power requirements are next to nothing. Don't forget to provide solar power for your USB hub as well.
Rick,
Very nice machine. I bought very similar components yesterday to build my own Hackintosh, less the Nvidia graphics card. I wouldn't fret much over the 6.6 Graphics score in Windows 7. By comparison, my 18 month old HP 17 inch laptop with an i3-370M Graphics score is 4.0
Phil,
Last years and this year's Mac mini's don't look that impressive. No other computer company is selling a Dual core i5 except Apple - the specs seem similar to an i3. Apple sells an external DVD-RW drive for $79. If you have another Intel Mac with an optical drive, I think you can access the drive over the network.
If you want a reliable Mac, you could buy a refurbished 17 inch iMac from 2006/2007 with an 1.83 GHz/2.0 GHz Core2Duo, 2 GB RAM and OSX 10.6 for $350-$400. If you want a new machine - I would get last year's 21.5 inch iMac with the Qual core i5 - which should be dropping to $1000 any day now.
I've been researching the Hackintosh at http://www.tonymacx86.com for a few weeks - we'll see if it works. This machine may need a lot of bit findeling to work with OSX. I've spent $411 on the components, and if it doesn't work on OSX, I'll switch it over to Windows.
You mentioned getting a Mac Mini. My iMac G5 just died, and I've been struggling with an underpowered Linux Mint box as a temporary replacement. The Mini looks interesting, since I already have a good monitor to plug into it. But what do you do for an optical drive, since they no longer come with one?
-Phil
Yea I was to say the least bit happy that in the persuit of thin computers they went too far and nixed the OP Drive..... was a bad move.
I have no op drive in mine as it was removed , Slot loaders are a badd idea too. so I just put a HUGE fan in mine and frankin maced my mini,
I have a External FW800 Bus ( and USB2.0) case that I put a jack of all trades Drive with light scribe and DVD ram .
now that the Imac is Op drive less ./ that is not gonna work ..
If it was ME I would get a 1 Year old one with a Drive and just put 10.8 on it .... the Graphics for a small computer is Really good ! I dont play games but I have no issues with Final cut or other high end Video graphics Software.
the gig is that the mini has 1 Video ports so you can 2 screen on a quite nice computer ,,,,,
Comments
Now, we just put a GB on the graphics card and use a faster bus and call it good. Works too, if a bit less than optimally.
Those machines used ARC loaders instead of the usual PC BIOS and they featured a nice administrative GUI instead of the usual cryptic post / setup programs normally seen. ARC loaders are file system and network aware.
Little known trivia on those machines. SGI originally planned to include X Window system drivers for Linux, putting the machines on par with the O2 series and to help kick off a move to Linux seen in animation / movie production at the time. A Microsoft / SGI graphics collaboration project called Fahrenheit was supposed to improve both OGL and Direct 3D, but the reality was OGL got hobbled legally and Direct 3D got a lot better...
Short story, Microsoft was not about to have a major vendor produce machines openly that were capable of running Linux with those kinds of graphics capabilities. Legal got involved right as the Linux drivers were shown at Siggraph 98 or 99, I can't remember. SGI legal buried them after that, never, ever to be seen again. Microsoft, it turns out, had some ownership of the ARC loader, which gave it leverage over SGI, who left the PC business right then and there.
There were other contributing factors too, but SGI essentially retreated to Linux, moving it's multi-cpu scheduler and IRIX real time features (which had basically no peers at the time) to Linux, solidifying their place in the HPC / Visualization space where they remain today.
It's not really used much, if at all, but that chipset has insane good TV grade video processing capability. The O2 computers can do real time video surface mapping, and overlay type activities. For a long time, the down lines in NFL games were done with O2 computers. Another area that chipset excels is in multi-layer compositing. Because it's got direct memory access, pushing multiple large images around is insane fast. An O2 user once wrote a compositing application featuring sub-pixel accuracy that was just mad fast and extremely accurate. I used to use it for aligning various images together from different sources and resolutions. Scale to size, align, pivot, mask, etc... At the time I was having to do it, no PC could handle the data over the bus, and graphics cards with GB RAM sizes were very, very, very expensive. An O2 off e-bay, stuffed with a few GB of RAM pushed that stuff around, and I'm talking 800MB images as if they were nothing, all while running at 500Mhz or so.
Had some of that been written for windows, the 320 / 540 machines would have rocked hard. It's all there, just unused now, due to lack of drivers / OS support.
Re: How much do you need?
Well, a few hundred Mhz, some reasonable storage and a graphics system and you are good to go. For years, I ran Mandrake Linux 8.x on a ~500Mhz Pentium something or other and it was great! I would build code on it, author various things, run CAD and play DVD's flawlessly using Ogle and a Matrox G400 graphics card. It was kind of impressive for the time and clock speed. Matrox offered hardware MPEG, and enough 3D to make basic CAD workable, though one would not attempt a car or anything.
These days, hand-me-down laptops from our training machine pool get it all done and quick. I really want to move to some Android machine or other and get setup on a very lean environment. I'm tempted by the Pi, but not so much that I'm gonna get one just yet.
Nice looking PC. Kind of miss building those, but I won't these days. Not when I can get portable stuff so cheap that lasts so long. Hope your new setup rocks and runs for a while.
I am VERY interested in your solid-state hard drive. They tend to boot extremely fast and really make everything zip along. I'd love to hear more about the performance. silent too,,,,,
I have a GigaByte mother board running my 64 bit Quad machine and I am happy with it, but my first choice in motherboards for Intel will always be Asus.
Overall, it seems you bought a nice upgrade.
The Mac Mini is the only Apple product I've ever been tempted to buy, but like most Apple products, I find it way over-priced for what you get. I'd really like to have at least one computer running the Apple OS, maybe I should look for a used one.
As you can see, the only slowdown is the Intel graphics. I have an nVidia GeForce card which will improve that score a lot, but it hasen't been installed yet.
I haven't done any fine tuning yet, but the new computer boots to the Windows 7 desktop in under 10 seconds. It's awesome.
edit: for you non-Windows people, the maximum score possible is 8.0
The Mac Mini really needs a DVD-drive as it's often used as a multimedia centre.
Using DVDs as a backup media, though, is NOT something I'd recommend.
One tip for those of you who are constantly upgrading computers and have gone from WinXP to Win7, is to reformat the HDD and reinstall Win7 from the ground.
A lot of computers that was delivered with SATA drives and WinXP has the SATA-controller set to some sort of 'legacy' or 'IDE-compatible' mode because plain WinXP couldn't use SATA directly, but required a driver.
Setting it to AHCI-mode and reinstalling means it will be able to use NRQ(I think?) out-of-order reading from the HDD, which can give a boost of up to 20%.
Odds are also that the NTFS file system is using 512Byte blocks which causes a lot of overhead. Reformatting will give you 4KB blocks and a hefty boost.
I have a theory that lightning speed processors may not have the useful life of their slower cousins though. After all more clocks is more heat. And these might be just the chips that were sorted out as the best for clocking while other chips that ran slower in the same batch were derated.
If they are a special production run, they still may just suffer from too few being produced and the quality control might not have been fully resolved before they were released.
Does anybody ever get an overall 8.00?
Sounds like MS wanted to punish the XP users for not jumping for Vista and demanding XP applications run in W7.
My little EEEpc 701 absolutely convinced me that solid state hard disks are a near necessity. For laptops, they not only boot fast, they don't suffer from sudden drops and so on.
It all becomes clear not, you really didn't want to try an save your old computer. You wanted to get something that would sizzle.
Actually, I tried everything I could think of to fix it. If it had been something simple such as a power supply or disk drive, I'd be using it today. I was very sad when it became obvious that it had a major problem. I really liked that machine, it did everything I needed it to do and did it quite well. On the other hand, if you're going to go to the trouble and expense of building a new computer (not to mention the stress), you might as well do it right
Next you will have the Raspberry Pi powered by a solar cell. After all, the power requirements are next to nothing. Don't forget to provide solar power for your USB hub as well.
Very nice machine. I bought very similar components yesterday to build my own Hackintosh, less the Nvidia graphics card. I wouldn't fret much over the 6.6 Graphics score in Windows 7. By comparison, my 18 month old HP 17 inch laptop with an i3-370M Graphics score is 4.0
Phil,
Last years and this year's Mac mini's don't look that impressive. No other computer company is selling a Dual core i5 except Apple - the specs seem similar to an i3. Apple sells an external DVD-RW drive for $79. If you have another Intel Mac with an optical drive, I think you can access the drive over the network.
If you want a reliable Mac, you could buy a refurbished 17 inch iMac from 2006/2007 with an 1.83 GHz/2.0 GHz Core2Duo, 2 GB RAM and OSX 10.6 for $350-$400. If you want a new machine - I would get last year's 21.5 inch iMac with the Qual core i5 - which should be dropping to $1000 any day now.
I've been researching the Hackintosh at http://www.tonymacx86.com for a few weeks - we'll see if it works. This machine may need a lot of bit findeling to work with OSX. I've spent $411 on the components, and if it doesn't work on OSX, I'll switch it over to Windows.
Forrest
Thanks for the recommendations!
-Phil
Yea I was to say the least bit happy that in the persuit of thin computers they went too far and nixed the OP Drive..... was a bad move.
I have no op drive in mine as it was removed , Slot loaders are a badd idea too. so I just put a HUGE fan in mine and frankin maced my mini,
I have a External FW800 Bus ( and USB2.0) case that I put a jack of all trades Drive with light scribe and DVD ram .
now that the Imac is Op drive less ./ that is not gonna work ..
If it was ME I would get a 1 Year old one with a Drive and just put 10.8 on it .... the Graphics for a small computer is Really good ! I dont play games but I have no issues with Final cut or other high end Video graphics Software.
the gig is that the mini has 1 Video ports so you can 2 screen on a quite nice computer ,,,,,