quizzy Posted May 20, 2003 Share Posted May 20, 2003 Hey guys, A friend of mine wants to buy a second hand SGI 320 workstation, specs: DUAL P3 500 MHZ 512 MB WILDCAT 5000 A nice design. He mainly wants a workstation that is good in realtime modelling when using MAYA. His budget is around 1000 EURO's I've told him he should not buy this, but he is sure that this somewhat older machine is faster then any ordinairy P4 2.0 GHz with a geforce2 or geforce4 with 32/64 MB video memory. Because he thinks that SGI has some special architecture on the graphic throughput in the system. He doesn't mind long rendertimes. He could buy a P4 2,4 GHZ with a 64 MB geforce4 graphic card and a 17inch monitor for the same price.. about 1100 EURO's. I'm writing this post because I don't want him to make such a pricy "mistake". Maybe I'm very wrong and the SGI is indeed faster, but I don't believe this is true. I just want him to get the best value for his money.. PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: his main concern is realtime modelling and fast REALTIME rendering Well, any comments are very welcome.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted May 20, 2003 Share Posted May 20, 2003 Well at work they don't lease machines so we have a lot of old machines around... we have a lot 320 around the area. You would have to pay me $100 to take in to the dump... seriously... there is NO benefit to this machine. Some of our admin staff use them for word etc... Some of them are left on the farm for some reason... after all we have well over 1000 procs on the farm... the rendering times on the 320's are around 10 to 20 times slower then the new computers (which are dual 2.4's) That machine will be very slow compared to the P4... trust me on this. The "special" architecture that your friend mentions has always been slow. What SGI did when they went into the PC market was to introduce a new type of ram that is shared with the graphics card. It was very slow... even then. So they abandoned it and bought the out Wildcat to save face... So the computer he is referring doesn't have any benefit over any other computer which is 5 years old. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Hess Posted May 21, 2003 Share Posted May 21, 2003 P4 will slaughter the dual 500. SGI or not. Though technically if your in the states right now, you can get a 2.8B P4 pretty cheap (around 250 USD) which is what I'd push for. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigcahunak Posted May 21, 2003 Share Posted May 21, 2003 The only SGI product I still have is a very nice black keyboard... Just don't let him buy that SGI thing. Any modern CPU from either Intel or AMD will be a much smarter pick. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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