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by Keyframe 2902 days ago
A couple of years ago I got Octane2 and went through similar ordeal (new OS and a bunch of other fun things). SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day' (they were a highway robbery back then).

There's one advice from a friend here. If you ever want to use Octane2 on your desktop, let me warn you that it sounds like a jet engine. Not practical at all. Now I know why we kept only O2s on desktops and Octanes were in 'server room' when we did work on them.
3 comments
randomdata 2902 days ago
> SGIs and IRIX are a lot of fun, especially for us that saw those only at workplace or in adverts 'back in the day'

Back when I was in high school SGI brought their truck[1] full of all their toys to our school for the students to tour. That was a good day. I'll never forget the refrigerator-sized Onyx2 running a 3D flight simulator across three displays.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/cdTGzV8.jpg

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Florin_Andrei 2902 days ago
Pretty much weighs as much as a jet engine, too.

j/k, of course, but it's clearly the heaviest desktop system I've ever seen.

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Keyframe 2902 days ago
Definitely heavy as a neutron star! TBH, the coolest looking one (to me at least) is/was Indigo 2. Both green and purple one! They ARE more manageable.
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barclay 2902 days ago
As an indigo^2 user: holy shit they were trinitron heavy, too. But the internals of that case were [stunningly beautiful](http://www.futuretech.blinkenlights.nl/i2/i2open.jpg).
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Florin_Andrei 2901 days ago
All SGI hardware was beautiful inside (pun not intended). Source: was SGI employee for some years.
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octorian 2902 days ago
I have a late-model Indigo2. They're definitely a lot heavier than they look. The later models also suffer from being a bit of a "bridge" machine. Newer CPU and graphics paired with older SCSI, Memory, and Networking.
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octorian 2902 days ago
On the bright side, the Octane2 is one of the few SGI machines new enough to support graphics hardware with DVI ports.
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mrpippy 2902 days ago
It does support it, but the DCD card has always been expensive/rare. Also requires V10/V12 graphics, which are almost as expensive/rare.

Every Fuel has standard DVI, although Fuels have other drawbacks

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Keyframe 2902 days ago
I still had that 13w3 to something (might've even been a VGA), even though graphics was maxed out.
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