Rebuilding a $34K SGI Computer from 1994 | Indigo2 Extreme Retro Revisit

hey everyone today we're working on a special project so this is the SGI indigo 2 extreme the SGI indigo two extreme they were sent to us by ian from SGI depot and they're really cool so this is basically the the graphics card this is more or less the graphic solution this is the extreme part of the Indigo 2 extreme and from what I at least from aw Ian tells us and he is an expert on this stuff this system I think was $34,000 when it came out to be clear we did not pay that for the system but these were like SGI was a really high-end graphics solution provider was one of the first and if not basically the first in any kind of wide reaching manner and worked a lot with I think the the film industry yeah maybe some others and so Patrick's joining me today we're gonna build these and after we get them built we'll test them and see what kind of graphics they were capable of because these for the time were really high-end systems so we'll see I believe these even have one of them has blender on it so we'll see how that does before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and there's straight power 11 high-end power supply be quiet straight power 11 focuses heavily on silence at the high performance using the silent wanes 3 135 millimeter fan for efficient cooling at low noise levels and incapable of 200 rpm startup fees for quieter low load noise levels than most power supplies on the market the straight power 11 offers LLC synchronous rectifying DC to DC transformation and comes in capacities from 450 Watts up to a thousand watts with a 1,000 watt unit being the one we're showing today learn more about these high quality power supplies of the link in the description below so Patrick's been working on this stuff for the past week or so and knows a lot more about it than I do let's let's go over the specs of this one that we have here this is the the Indigo 2 extreme we also have an o2 that we'll be building today and this I think was the earlier model yes chronologically so what 90 this one came out in 93 but the spec we have here is 94 more like these are all spare parts that UN had around so they're not systems as they shipped straight from the factory right but this is more of a 95 model okay so then we have a 12 sticks of RAM I think yes I think this is 96 Meg's total in this one split among twelve six obviously yeah which are mismatched whichever ones he had lying around right do we know that if it's like multi-channel there are three groupings here ring-a-ring Bering Sea so for a motherboard layout we have I guess what I would call the motherboard at the bottom I don't know if they use the same terms but I think is a CPU under this giant yeah yeah so there's a 200 megahertz or 4000 yeah okay this is I think from what we were reading it's a mips technologies architecture I don't know that we know who made this specific CPU next we could probably look yeah we could probably pop that heatsink off there's another one in the box if we don't want to do that one but yeah we might as well do it there's one fan in the system we can show that actually it's really here on the other side of the table at least as it was shipped to us but this fan the graphics assembly goes right here and then the CPU is on the other side of it right you'll see a little bit but so this will sock it how does this does this it goes in right here it's pockets here and yeah okay so that'll sock it in there when we're done and then that fan is a pole configuration pull the air through the cards so I don't I think this I'm a little scared to take this off honestly I don't know how like how it dried that paste is if there is paste yeah there's another one in there that we can mess around with as well um as you can see Ian has carefully labeled every component yes Ian iron Ian you if you're watching you have the most impressive documentation I've ever seen in my life and in the best way possible it made things a lot easier for us so even runs SGI depot which i don't know did you look at the site I guess it's like yeah little bit yes it has a bunch of information on all the old SGI parts I think does he sell some too yeah I'm not sure if that's his main job but he lists a lot of parts for sale either for collectors or businesses that need replacement parts to keep systems running yes so believe it or not a lot of businesses that have these systems I guess was it medical he said medical imaging they had a lot of government contracts like defense ok uses but I would hope that the military isn't using new it hopes that's yes this is anymore yeah typically though I guess there's two certain types of medical or enterprise clients once they have something working they really don't want to change it so yeah you can I guess some of these are still kind of used out there in the wild and also I think a lot of the software since the operating system was specific to this hardware and then the software that was written for that operating system is specific to its hardware it's difficult to switch away from that yeah it's a specific architecture yeah ok cool ok a little nervous on that cuz I don't I know nothing about how these are assembled so here's the bottom side I mean we're we said we're building this but I guess we're actually taking it apart first mm-hm what do we even I guess I'll just pull the heatsink off if I can oh I see okay so there's two more we pass this to you okay not sure what we're gonna find under here yeah we haven't actually uh opened that up yes I think that's all the screws this board can take up to 384 megabytes of RAM while the later motherboard revision has a maximum of one gigabyte using the later and much faster or 1000 you say one gigabyte one gigabyte that's a lot actually but not with the CPU okay so it's Intelli intel 3175 back style except a couple decades earlier nice oh man that is some dust yeah we mine didn't need to do a little maintenance before you turn this back on I can't yeah yes okay so there's an o-ring all right cool and a thermal pad we could replace that with a mm-hmm I see diamonds they're all bad good put a real heat think on it that's you know right so the casting yes so just decimal no no me heatsink comes down and touches the I guess that's the CPU and there should be a brand on there if you wipe it off yeah yeah this like snake colored Orion on the outside was kind of preventing us from getting it all the way off Oh get it off as best I can and then we'll replace it with something that's like 40 dollars he'll be and recently made so it'll be a high-end solution Toshiba Toshiba so MIPS is responsible for the architecture and then toshiba made the actual hardware yeah so this is a I guess you can think of it kind of like arm or you've got that's actually glued in some spots MIPS doing the arc work there's the Toshiba part and it looks like it's socketed it seems like it we actually um we have a nun socketed one in here think this is an AR 10,000 maybe so there's the unsalted version of what we're working with well different different ckio you can see that IHS is a lot bigger let's call Roman and there's the bottom side I think he said that one was functional I think we have some that are very similar to that yeah from our viewers an appearance always alright so this is captain tape this is sometimes referred to as thermal tape it is neither electrically nor not really thermally conductive either so I'm using this just to protect the SMDs I'm gonna throw that icy diamond pad on there I don't want it to conduct anything because it's conductive I didn't actually go into the BIOS but he points out that smells good oh really yeah okay there are about 20 years ahead of their time on that URI if I didn't happen to like 28 2009 so this is just a temporary solution to kind of protect it while I'm messing around with it we're just gonna see if the if there's an indent on the IC diamond pad if there is then we know it's making contact and we can use it all right so now let me take it back off yeah that make contact for sure so yeah you can see the indent of the CPU nice alright so this is going to get quite the upgrade I guess I totally want to put that in I'll just buy another one I guess well I guess if he and wash was this video he can compile a list of our questions as we go and then answer that for us I want to make clear for the audience that I am being abnormally careful with this though so if you're one of the people who's like oh my god Steve why do you always quote unquote slam the video card on the table you will note that I'm Hin and being gentle with this one they were not built to quite the same standards in terms of being tossed around even like ESD standards were not as good yeah double-bag everything and yes tea bags and then bubble wrap outside about yes is very thorough all right cool so it it survived surgery and I think once I get these four screws and Batra can start probably working on I don't know what's what's the next memory or something else oh yeah we can put the memory back in so yeah from memory we have what you say was 96 yeah and I think it's evenly split this is pretty pretty cool so yeah graphic solution I don't know a whole lot about it actually you know what I have a good paragraph from Wikipedia on this so well Patrick's working on the memory here's a wikipedia says about the graphic solution I'm just gonna direct quote it it says extrema graphic systems that was the architecture extreme graphics extreme graphic systems that consist of eight geometry engines and two raster engines twice twice as many units as the Elan XZ graphics used in the Indy indigo and indigo to the eighth geometry engines are rated at two of these six mega flops maximum far faster than the mips are 4,400 CPUs in the workstation it also says extreme graphics consists of five graphics subsystem so that's the command engine this is still used today geometry subsystem sort of still used today raster engines still used and frame buffer and a display subsystem it can do 1280 by 1024 and 24-bit color and also does unencoded ntsc NP al so that's the extreme graphics system and architecture I guess and this is the board so this is pretty cool because it's three layers like a sad so you've got three layers and then set of pins on this side that socket between those two there's a set of pin socketing between these two boards another set of pins down here and then this right here is your actual socket to the whatever that I guess l-shaped connector board is that we showed you earlier with the fan on it and these are all LSI branded chips I honestly am NOT I'd have to do some research what they are you have to achieve a branded stuff over here I'm guessing that's maybe memory I don't know that's I think this is just eight screws to get apart same fit as the CPU or I'm a little ok hesitant alright cool so we're gonna need to remember the order of these going I guess shouldn't only go in one way really so here's the first board I know nothing about it Silicon Graphics of course branding in the center we have some giant LSI modules and I don't know if those are the GPUs I see some more at the bottom we I mean again to clarify this is from 90 something 95 96 93 or 94 93 or 94 okay so even earlier so I I know nothing about this stuff I'm not gonna pretend to but that's what it looks like in the middle an SGI we've said this before but Jenson Haun used to work there founder of Nvidia and departed because he disagreed with SGI on a few things like SGI didn't really see so era consumer graphics as a a major market opportunity and he and that's gi's bankrupt now and ended by HP and NVIDIA is a successful company so yes alright middle board top board that's pretty cool so we've I I was doing some preliminary research on the graphic solution I found some articles that were in magazines that had been scanned and uploaded and they were scanned and uploaded in 1998 and they were not particularly in-depth we didn't have we didn't have an on on and shrimpie writing about these types of things yet so I didn't know we're here to go look HPC had some content anyway that's the graphic solution I'll reassemble this and then we'll finalize the assembly of this system what are the other parts eat I guess do you want to walk through some of these other parts on the table we have all this stuff but this needs to be lifted slightly so that you can put in the EIS a backplane okay and that's not the way that goes like this and if you made a point that other than this cable right here and both of the systems that he mailed to us there's not really any cabling it's all socketed was unable for the scuzzy there's an optical drive that we didn't use or didn't send but it also connects the boot drive okay see so it's the backplane it has a lot of slots in here of which we were using I think only one for the graphics orange no yeah he also sent this star birdies not for consumption these have a very important role in all of this very technically supposed to rest under the fan right there because otherwise this backplane isn't supported yes so he says this early revision black plane has three g io 64 slots 64-bit 33 megahertz 264 megabytes per second kind of like PCIe a PCI and not these yeah he not PC and 4 E is a slots right here that's I think that's what the think we're using these did you say is a no we're using these ie is yes the later impact version has four g io 64 slots and three E is a slots but both versions have only had two logical Jo slots and then there was a custom one with more slots enabling the use of dual max and poetic graphic sets and those are the really high-end ones this is the extreme graphic set I think max impact is the highest end that goes in these systems right so this is just one step down I guess strumming or is it I think it's one step down it's like the mid-range okay what's next sake in the card we can yes we can put the card in um I can remember which way it goes yes it would make sense for it to go I think yes with the slots oriented towards the slots and over there no okay I was wrong it wouldn't make sense for to go that way wouldn't have but it doesn't okay so yeah these supports right here just hold my the edges of the PC and the fan pulls air through there you have some flexibility with where to connect this but he recommended putting it in just the top slot okay hmm so there we go this isn't supported super well and yeah yeah we don't have the case but that's why this candy thing is here to hold up to that point I'm sure we could do better than that but that is what Ian recommended yeah and it's the metal supports here holding the graphic said cool okay so now we have remember this is 13 w3 to VGA adapter so obviously this is not standard standard thing that we can plug into a monitor even the VGA signal is something that doesn't work with most of our monitors it's a sync on green signal yes we're using actually a an early 2000s 1280 by 1024 monitor yeah for this and that seems to work pretty well actually yeah um it doesn't align in super well with this one but you can just manually remove the image yeah now attach the host ID and i/o ports backplane module so this has the IO four keyboard and mouse as he's very carefully labeled but it also contains the hardware MAC address IC for the machine which is used by flex LAN for software licensing so there's a socket here or what yes it's like it's on right there see um there's a group of pins back here and how does it does it align a specific way yeah that's right yeah okay it's like a USB 3 header except Ammar fragile yeah so theoretically you could upgrade any of the hardware in here and not have to buy new licenses but he says people did their own custom walkouts anyway no of course okay all right cool so that is mostly sound we have a speaker left yes Drive we have the power supply over here which is pretty awesome socketed also yeah just since this is all on a piece of cardboard it's pretty easy to move around I can tell the power supplies in there we shouldn't test this on the power supply tester if you can figure out I guess the voltages are labeled yeah it's uh-huh so this will the power supply will connect to these pins here yeah I believe okay I'm sure he has a little bit more trouble running these because I don't know yeah in the UK right I don't know if there's a switch on there for UK power line up these here we have the outputs by the way I'll read these out because they're kind of interesting output so we have 120 to 240 volt and it says outputs are +5 volts at 40 amps 12 volts at 12 amps minus 12 at 1 amp 3.3 at 12 amps minus 5 at 1 amp and 5 arcs at 1 amp so there's your power supply spec so I guess you could you could add those together and figure out the maximum power but either way it's built for the system so we're not gonna be underpowered so this is our scuzzy backplane this is a massive ferrite core yes that is gigantic ferrite core so this just goes right here there's one connection to the motherboard right here and it is powered with molex okay it's the only other power connector that doesn't go straight into the motherboard so we use that that's for the drive you said our well that's for an optical drive this thing this part this goes to the optical drive there would be one mounted in the case right here but it's not necessary he says and normal use you would transfer most of the files over the network anyway okay what about this one next scuzzy link assembly scuzzy ribbon cable this the board what's kind of alarming it's having unplugged cables but you know trust in you and then I believe this is this would be for the optical drive for the OS call on this hi Rick's Irish that's right it's unix system v but it's a custom flavor of it I guess Florida SGI and then this is the system speaker which is the only LED I think in the entire system and mono audio well obviously but all the sound comes out through there unless you uh I guess you would have to hook up an audio board because I'm not sure there's any audio outputs on here right but yeah this this should be as it is yes so this is the system this is the Indigo 2 extreme there's the extreme part this is an r4 you say 4000 or four hundred four thousand two hundred Hertz processor MIPS architecture and we have our 96 what is it megabytes of RAM yeah the unit of measurement was some 96 megabytes of RAM power supply is connected so here's our system then at this point we are we're just going to plug it in look at the OS go through some of the software on there and we'll show you what the the software looks like and what kind of graphics capabilities this had for the time is actually some of it's pretty cool this one I believe has doom on it is that right yes that one has doom on it and the o2 the o2 were gonna build in a separate video so make sure you subscribe to catch the second one we are gonna look through this software here today though but the o2 I believe has quake yes work week two has quake on it definitely it might also have great not ray-traced and do him on this one that we have blender to look at some other stuff so yes let's let's go look at the software as we boot this thing up quick history lesson SGI was founded in 1981 from then until the early 90s it was an enormous ly successful company famously supplying the hardware responsible for cgi effects in many movies maya was originally exclusive to the SGI operating systems and so had big pull but it was also used for government and defense applications anything to do with manipulating tons of data huge images or 3d in general was the domain of SGI until 3d graphics made its way into x86 systems and SGI's position was challenged as a ian summarized quote they dropped the ball with later updates that did limit their eventual success SGI is failure to remain competitive led to its stock being delisted in 2005 with declaration of bankruptcy 2006 the company continued to exist for several years after that but that was the end of the SGI that anyone bothers to talk about HP is the current owner of whatever remains after multiple bankruptcies and acquisitions the operating system installed on both systems is eirick s-- today we're just looking at the indigo 2 extreme which uses the iris 6.2 version OS I Rick's is a UNIX based operating system developed specifically for SGI systems you can see it in use here we have some capture footage of it technically the last update shipped in August 2006 but the last major revision was in 1998 IREX is a variant of the UNIX system V r4 which is several branches removed from Mac OS X maybe it's unix system v r4 i don't know but anyway it's far removed from the Mac OS X OS or anything that any non masochistic gamer might be interested in using since SGI's hardware wasn't intended for that purpose the games included by Ian quake and doom are mostly hobbyist supports consider that the difficulty of running third-party software runs both ways emulating SGI machines is an ongoing effort so for the time being physical hardware is the only practical way to run iris or the applications that run on it both systems sent to us use mips processors as did almost all other SGI systems until their final years when the company switched to x86 Itanium and xeon based systems ian loaded up the hard drive with 3d demos before he sends it over to us as he pointed out this is impressive stuff for a system that launched in 1993 the 3d graphics you can see in our demos are enabled by that three layer extreme graphic set that was sent along SGI made multiple different graphic sets including the high end max impact that we don't have here SGI chose not to make any consumer gaming GPUs though and those that wanted to left to join Nvidia Newton is probably the most convenient demonstration of what the 3d graphics hardware and the Indigo 2 can do it's a simple application that allows manipulating and bouncing soft body objects in real time with a bunch of controllable variables more conventional rendering softer like blender and BM RT are also good fits Maya was included on very versions of SGI hardware as well lumen rendering tools was used for multiple Pixar movies and eventually led to the Nvidia gelato renderer Cosmo worlds is an interesting piece of software for editing VRML or virtual reality modeling language this was intended to be the file format for 3d vector graphics on the web although the world has since moved not button-fly is another good demo on the system and is sort of similar to the 3d vector graphics demo it's a 3d GUI with completely unnecessary animations for launching other demos and files as for games since this isn't a top spec into go to the selection is limited SGI runs Doom kind of okay but doom isn't considered a 3d game from a rendering standpoint and therefore it doesn't really show off the capabilities of the system when we look at the o2 our next SGI system build will have a couple of other software solutions to look at as well including some blender benchmarks that we ran on a modern system in 8600 k vs the o2 that's kind of interesting just for some charts and then we'll also be looking at quake which is on our oat ooh so thanks for watching we will see you all in the next one make sure you subscribe to catch the o2 system build with Patrick as well you go to store documents actions done that or patreon.com slash gamers next to stuff that directly and there's a view on patreon did you get to see a behind the scenes an early look at this so we'll be publishing more behind the scenes stuff like that pretty soon thanks for watching we'll see you all next time welcome to the guided tour of your indigo magic user environment this tour introduces you to the features and functionality of this environment and teaches you how to use many of the tools to get started place your mouse over the introduction ball and click the left mouse button

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 281,473

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, retro revisit, sgi, sgi depot, sgi indigo2 extreme, sgi indigo 2, sgi o2, sgi computer 1993, first graphics card, first gpu, first gaming gpu, sgi indigo2 2019

Id: K_RVnQeWLZI

Length: 29min 52sec (1792 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019