SGI Workstations

Hey all

I am graduate student from Architecture. Im researching on SGI workstations to be used with MAYA for graphics.

Can anyone tell me some imp. specs about SGI i.e Hardware and will that be useful to me???

Anyone knows please do reply Im scartching my head here.

Thanks
kal

yeah, SGI, the queen of 3D they say...
within sgi you have to consider 3 most important aspects of the story.
1) Long history in 3D with dedicated hardware
2) the spine of data roaming (moving around large quantities of data), irix the os running on those funny machines.
3) price, extremely high.

lets take point 1.
 sgi machines have dedicated gfx hardware, native implementation of openGL. anyway the processors
seem tooooo slow for my taste, so rendering is out of question here (i use a dedicate intel/linux machine for rendering). Maya performs very good on an Octane r10k 250Mhz, with MXE gfx.

point 2.
Irix is the heart of the system here. (i'v never seen crash maya on my box). scripting capabilities, large filesystems. very good.

point 3.
Extremely expensive hardware. Licences for the irix are getting very very expensive. thus, PC based workstation (intel) and mac (with the macos x) are
pretty fast peaces of hardware. they are not lame any more.
You can find used sgi hardware for no more than 600$ in the states (www.reputable.com).

Conclusion : sgi was and still is the queen of the 3D.
You have to check it out yourself and see if you are happy with it.

mooR