--- On 29/09/00 19:25 -0700, Indraneel Majumdar wrote:
> Thanks for the added info about cards.
>
> On Fri, 29 Sep 2000, Nikhil Shankar wrote:
>
> > hrishi's a game maniac, all he cares about is better fps. but for real number
>crunching rendering, u
> > better go for an SGI. i think there do exist SGIs with SCSI drives... but if u
>still want to run on a
>
> I'm not arguing with you, however we do have an assortment of SGI machines
> (one Origin2000 (the stuff that SGI uses to make supercomputers) (4
> processors, 780MB RAM), one Octane (belongs to SGI's server class
> machines), five O2 (the latest in SGI's range of high end graphics
> workstations)).
>
> I find that number crunching and disk read write is generally faster on my
> AMD-K63-400/64MB/Seagate IDE HDD at 5200RPM and certainly much faster on
> this PIII-600/256MB/Quantum IDE HDD (tuned with hdparm). I tried putting
> XFree86-4.0 (had to remove it since it broke default windowmanager
> configurations) and found the graphics (visual comparison with SGI demo
> CD) to be just a slight bit slower than the SGI O2 (I have a NVidia RIVA
> TN44T2 8MB card). The O2 costs 4.5 lakhs.
>
IMHO, the O2 is sucker-bait. It's a bare-bones system. It was built to
attract all the clowns who couldn't resist the thought of getting an SGI
at only Rs4.5 lakhs (I thought it was 2.5 lakhs actually) . As I
understand it you need to spend another Rs 7-8 lakhs on hardware and
software to make it useful. I know of at least one multimedia company
here in Bangalore that went bankrupt after buying an O2 and finding out
that the only thing they could afford to do with it was write mail on
vi. The basic point is that running comparisons with a base O2 is flawed
because a base 02 is basically crippleware.
> In comparison the Apple G4 and G3 (we have one of each and both cost less
> than 2 lakhs each with DVD, ATI Rage Pro 16MB, SCSI HDD etc) outperform
> the SGI by a wide margin (it leaves the SGI in the dust, so to say) (I'm
> wondering whether a mac with linux will be better for graphics work).
> Everyone here has finished off with SGI systems (final touches kindly by
> Tata Elxsi who take especially long to respond, being the only authorised
> SGI center in this place, ie. SGI USA will not deal with you directly).
>From what I hear Tata Elxsi are a bunch of clowns. They have single
handedly destroyed SGI in India because of their poor service. Their
service is slow, they have no understanding of how to recommend configs
for new customers and are pretty much ignorant of the machines they
sell.
Biju
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