CGTalk - Upgrade A Sgi 320 And Buy A New Workstation

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pudand

03-14-2003, 01:06 PM

Hi, I've got an SGI 320 PIII 550 2 CPU 1 GB Ram, and I'm thinking to upgrade it (I use maya, photoshop and AE for architectural jobs).

I would like to know if:

- is it possible to use maya 4.5 and MR with NT (changing the service pack to W2K), and if the SGI will be stable;

- can I install an accelerator card (like Pure, how much does it cost, does anyone use it?), and if the render time will really improve (now my test scene takes 3 min 30 sec for rendering);

- I need to change my HD, any suggestion about a new Ultra SCSI 320 73,4 GB (or something like this).

I know that it will be more easy to buy a new computer (infact I'm buying a new workstation too, my budget is about $ 8000, any suggestion will be appreciate), but I would still like to use my old SGI, if you could advise me if it is convenient to spend more money to upgrade it or not. Because I'm getting the money to buy all this stuff, it will be a shame for me to throw out my 320.

Thanks to all if you can help me.

CgFX

03-14-2003, 01:47 PM

One of the better things you can do is put two 1 GHz Pentium 3's in it.

MCronin

03-14-2003, 02:21 PM

Didn't those machines also use a proprietary version of Win NT? I mean, I thought, they used their crossbar system architecture and shipped a version of Windows that was modified by SGI specificly for their machine.

What I'm getting at is you may be able to upgrade your processors, but you may not be able to go to Win 2K unless you can get it from SGI. Also, if it is using SGI's proprietary video hardware, you may not be able to use any other sort of video hardware with the machine.

CgFX

03-14-2003, 03:22 PM

No. The 320 was built from day one to run WinNT 5.0 (aka Windows 2000). Dumb idea since M$ was obviously going to be late with that and SGI was screwed with the USB/Firewire/video I/O/etc. of the 320. All of which NT4 didn't support.

So, the special version of NT4 for SGI 320 is just NT4 with all the NT5 parts that the 320 needs.

You can install Windows 2000 on it. Make sure you have all the ARC PROM and driver upgrades from sgi.com.

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