SGI 320/540

[jmc]

Hi.
I was thinking about buying a second hand SGI NT/win2000 Box. From what I read in reviews those systems must be very nice machines, even for another one or two years .

Why where they taken of the market so quickly?, did they not sell well because of technical probs?

I want to do 3D animation and DV editing. But what's the story about the DV feature?, do the basic 320s and 540s not yet have a DV board? Do you need to install win2000 on the system to be able to use the DVediting feature?
If the 320/540 don't have a built in DV card, which cards can you put in?

Also, whats the performance of those systems like, let's say using 3D MAX and Adobe Premier? They should be good at rendering because of the amount of CPUs that you can put in?!

Have any of you got experience with those sgi systems or experienced technical problems?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[dougr]

I have a SGI 320 and really like it. The reason the 320 and 540 were discontinued was because of the propritery nature of the machines. They are based on uniform memory architecture similar to the O2. Meaning the graphics are tied into the ram and every thing moves around the system in SGI's own special way.

Basically having a propritery NT box kind of goes against some reasons for have an NT box in the first place. You cannot go moving cards arounds and adding things here and there. So, SGI recieved a little resistance in the NT market. That is why the their new NT boxes are fairly basic with Nvidia cards.

SGI knows how to build a good box. They are the inivators of our industry, not only creating machines but the technology that drives them, like creating OpenGL.

As for DV. both the SGI 320 and 540 have firewire built in to the box. SGI was a little ahead of the game because NT did not support firewire, But it was already there for future releases. It is my understanding with Windws 2000 you can use the firewire built into the 320 and 540. Both of them have rca and svideo ins and outs as well.

Performance and stablity are very good on both machines. Check out ebay or call your local SGI dealer and tell them you want one. There are a lot of new ones still sitting around in warehouses.

[hoodoo]

Hi,
We used 320 and 540 almost 2 years.
They had some good options: good Cobalt video chipset, good set of programms for interconnectivity, you can work 2D - Premiere, After Effects / with realtime video preview on video monitor/, worked good in 3D:3D MAX, Softimage, and Maya,and flexible change amount of video memory, but today those workstations are OLD.
not so good options: 320 support up to 2 PIII 600, 540 up to 4 XEONS 550, no upgrade, SGI SDRAM costs x 5 than regular SDRAM, no option for 2nd monitor, only ATA 33 MB/s IDE and SCSI2 HDD 80 pin only /540/ , no BIOS upgrade. About DV options, we didn't checked it, but there were period when SGI gave to 540 registered owners ORIGIN MOTO DV card, interesting, why, if they had it built-in ? 320 support only 3.3 V
PCI card, so not every PCI card will work. Every repair-power supply for example, will cost a lot,if you are not under SGI support, and you would probably not.
Today you can buy 2 CPU motherboard up to 1 GHz
/ASUS/TYAN/MSI/, 2 CPU 1GHz, 1 GB SDRAM, huge HDD ATA100/66, separate 1394/DV card with analog I/O /Pinnacle
or Matrox/, and graphic card ELSA, Oxigen, or FireGL
that will give you better performance then 320/540,
and after 2 years or less you can change platform to P4.
So, may be this system will cost more then 2nd hand SGI,
but " It costs money, it costs money- but it saves money"

Best regards

[jmc]

HI!
Thanks for the replies.
Is there anyone else out there who could give me some advice, personal opinions or links to reviews etc..
I'm only a student, so I won't be able to get a top of the range workstation. Do you think the VW320 is still good for 3D Animation and Video Editing if you've only got a certain amount of money to spend (ca. $1500-2000) ?.

I heard that you would need a MOTO DV card for DV editing on the 320, can that run under WindowsNT?

Thanks for any replies.

[domh]

Hi

I have an SGI 320 machine, and have, unfortunately, had endless problems with it. In 2 1/2 years, I have had my motherboard replaced, RAM replaced three times, and one drive blowing up! NT is pretty unstable on this machine - even with a fresh installation, the kernel goes down at least once a day - & that's without any software installed other than that which comes with the machine! I have learnt to work around these problems, but it is rather infuriating. I have experienced many network-related issues when using PCMaclan, like when one of the Macs on the network that I have been connected to shuts down, I get a BSOD.

The internal Firewire ports do not work, but luckily SGI arranged to supply Digital Origin MotoDV cards to registered users who applied before a certain date. I waited six months for the card, but it works very well under NT.

As for regular video capture, It works very well when using the built-in codec - SGI MotionJPEG A - & HackTV (a small capturing app from Apple). I have yet to perform an acceptable video capture in Premiere, despite having engineers talking with me on the phone whilst trying.

3D performance on this machine is very good, until you get to about 200,000 polys at which point it becomes quite sluggish. Don't get me wrong - you can still work acceptably, but don't expect 25fps playback in the viewport. I find scenes around 80,000 to 120,000 polys handle very well, & I can play them back in (near) real time shaded in MAX, depending on texture size.

Photoshop absolutely flies on this machine - kicks the G4 Velocity Engine's butt! - & After Effects is a pleasure, provided you have enough RAM.

But don't let me put you off! When my 320 is operational, I am more than pleased with the application performance, although opening windows & browsing files in NT could be a bit quicker. Maybe I'm just a bit too sensitive to a machines's speed? I don't know, exceot that until I can work at the speed of thought, I'll never be hapy!

Good luck!

[dougr]

maybe look into a refurbed SGI 230 or 330. SGI has them on their web page http://www.sgi.com/products/remanufactured/weekly.html

they range from $1500 to $1900.

or look at refurbed dell.

A side note, I have not had the problems with my 320 that others have reported.

[maya4me]

I have a 320 with W2K, the SGI patch, 3D StudioMax and it flies. It has never, never crashed or froze. Tried Photoshop on it and that was fast as lightning. My problem was with WindowsNT and W2K and finding drivers for the scanner and printer. No complaints at all.

[safarisister]

The 320/540 are excellant machines - the 320 was on the market for quite a while, starting with PII 350 all the way until the release of the PIII 600 - in fact with the latest Firmware update last month you can upgrade a PII350 to a PIII850(100Mhz FSB only) - thats a pretty long life machine. The 540 had a shorter life because it was released late. The thing to remember also with these machines is that although the graphics aren't the fastest they are still very respectable - also because the graphics processing can be partially off loaded to the main processor, a second (3rd, 4th) processor will show an improvement in graphics performance - some other highend boards have drivers that will also allow this to happen. Unlike a lot of other Highend 3D graphics card the 320/540 have very good 2d and Multimedia capabilites.
The last point that many people seem to miss with the 320/540 is that they have a 256bit memory bus and I know some of you will say that benchmarks say that the 320/540 don't have very high memory speeds, what they forget is that slow and VERY wide will still beat fast and narrow. The standard PC has 64Bit FSB and 64Bit Memory, nicely balance for a single processor system but very inefficient as a multiprocessor system. On the other hand the 540 with four processors has a nice balance of 4 x 64bit Processor to 256 Memory ratio. This would probaby explain why for example if you look at http://www.highend3d.com/tests/maya/testcenter/ the 540 with 4 processors still hangs around with the much newer dual 1000 processor systems. I would also hazard a guess that with a much larger data sets that the better designed dual 1000 motherboards such as the one in the ZX10 with a 128Bit Memory bus and the 540 would begin to differentiate themselves from the other systems tested.
That said the 320 and 540 have some big drawbacks - the cost of RAM and the Xeon Processors in the 540.

Happy 540 Owner

Disclaimer although I have researched much of what I have said and firmly believe it to be true, I am not a Hardware Specialist and gladly accept anyone correcting any of my statements if they are incorrect.

[hell-raiser]

I've had my 540 for over 2 years now. It's been VERY stable. Very rarely do I have any problems. It's a REALLY solid machine but it is OLD.

I just installed win2K on it and it runs nicely but there are a few video card bugs. It doesn't look like we are going to be getting any new drivers either.

I just bulit a no frills dual 860 with a Geforce for about 1200$ and it keeps up nicely with my 540. I bought it just as a rendering machine but I can do real work on it just as well.

If your thinking about video editing I would stay away from the 540. The built in video system is very weak and not really compatable with much of anything. In my opinion (of course) I use it to preiview my after effects stuff on a monitor.

Hope this helps

dave

[jandrew]

We have 5 SGI 320's, all dual 550's.

They are great, and they suck.

They are great because:
1. They are fairly stable
2. They look cool
3. USB in WinNT4. Love the mouse and keyboard

The suck because:
1. Memory access speeds are HORRENDOUS!!!
2. The memory is proprietary, so don't try to upgrade without spending $$$ this is POINTLESS in today's RAM market
3. Don't try to add any cards, it's all 64-bit PCI slots which are incompatible with standard cards.
4. if you are going to Win2k from a machine that you buy that had NT4, you may have to do PROM upgrades. If you don't do it in the right order (multiple upgrades necessary) you're going to be very frustrated.
5. 3D Accelleration is pitiful by today's standards.

The 320 and 540 were SGI's first attempts at PC's. SGI representatives have told me that SGI was attempting to go for the far-high end with the quality, but totally missed the mark. There is next to ZERO support for the hardware outside of SGI's service contracts.

Sean

[jmc]

Hi,
thanks everyone for your help.

I looks like I might be better of putting together a PC workstation myself, than buying an sgi at the moment.
It will probably be quite a lot cheaper, since second hand sgi systems are still quite expensive over here in Europe.

Any tips for the components of a Windows Workstation not more than ca. $1500? ( CPU, RAM, GraphicsCard, etc.)

Thanks.

[jandrew]

There are posts ALL OVER here with hardware lists..

AMD CPU
Abit KT7A or Asus A7V133 mobo (screw DDR for now)
lotsa RAM
Geforce2 video card (anything but the MX's)
Quantum, Fujitsu OR IBM 7200RPM drives are all great.

Sean

[tito212]

I'll repeat my post I just made to someone else.

ASUS CUV4X-D Dual Capable - $161.00
PIII 1 GHz Retail (2) - $464.00
512MB RAM 133Mhz (2x256) - $158.00
Floppy Drive - $ 10.00
Maxtor 20G HD - $ 99.00
Leadtek GeForce 2 Utra - $282.00
Antec Case - $ 65.00

Total: $1239.00
(Prices from Googlegear.com)

This will get you a bootable machine that you can install an OS to.You can obviously alter the price by not getting two processors or getting a bigger HD The GeForce 2 is minimum GFX card I would recommend for anything.

I built this system for a firend of mine running Maya and he has been very happy.

I personally bought a refurbished Dell 420 with a Wildcat 4110 for ~$3100.00.

If you have any questions feel free to email me.

adam...
adamhill@pobox.com