Reviving an SGI O2 Computer from 1996 | $17,000 Workstation Rebuild

hey everyone i'm joined by patrick again today we are building the sgi o2 so we previously built the indigo 2 extreme yes and it was pretty cool system it's like it was a 34 000 system and from the early 90s is also from the 90s this is also from ian again from sgi depot who sent it along for us to build and we're going to spend some more time on the software today so this one assembly is pretty straightforward so after we get it assembled i think we have blender on here and then quake and a couple of other things we can look at and we also have a blender benchmark of uh of this versus an 8600k yeah yeah that's what was in the system of time so yes it wasn't particularly important to get to make it a like for like comparison so we'll go through that today starting with the assembly and of course our thanks again to ian from sgi depot for sending this along before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte aorus ad27qd gaming monitor the ad27qt is a 27 inch 1440p gaming display with 95 percent of dci p3 color saturation for high color accuracy accompanied by a one millisecond response time 10 bit ips panel and display hdr visa certification additional features include fluid adjustment and slide rgb leds for personal flare and firmware features like cool down counters reticles and adaptive noise reduction learn more at the link below so here's the system this is the o2 patrick do you want to walk us through some of the parts yeah um so we have the power supply here um it's got a bunch of warnings on the bottom about not removing the cover and we haven't done that but uh it's also got kind of a cool grounding strip on the bottom there's yeah like it's a squishy uh ground or something like that it's a sony made power supply um hard drive that is not original to the system um it would have shipped with a two or four gigabyte hard drive but this is a 37 36.7 gigabyte scuzzy drive yeah it's a lot more and what about the cpu is is this uh also an r series cpu yeah this is an r5 200 megahertz and we can't tell who manufactured at this time um last time was toshiba for reference yeah so uh cpu is is on i guess the motherboard and it's already pasted you said yeah this is the heatsink um assembly this is the cpu daughter board and both of these heatsinks are pasted on and we don't really want to peel those off there's no screws or anything underneath right so the last time the indigo 2 we have some footage of it we can show where we we pulled the heatsink off the cpu and that actually it looked very similar to what's in this box so it wasn't exactly this model but the indigo ii had a similar cpu to that under the heatsink and uh so other than the cpu daughter board there's some memory slots and what do we know what type of memory this is i don't know but we're not 100 sure so just to be clear here neither patrick nor i are experts on sgi uh this was sort of before our time of working with computers so when is this this is a 90 this is 96. the other one was 93. okay so we're not experts ian certainly is ian sent everything along has everything documented but yes we have i think uh is it eight sticks this time two four six eight sticks of memory last time i was 12. and um do you know what the capacity is yeah this is 256 megabytes which uh was the maximum when the system launched they raised that to one gigabyte later but this is uh max memory spec for the launch of the system okay and then what about this thing here uh that is av input um so there's a lot of uh analog video connections on there and then on the end there's the o2 cam connector um we don't have an o2 camera but that's where you would hook that up and presumably this interacts with the case or something yeah i think that's like a locking mechanism we do not have the case so unfortunately we can't show you the case and then you told me an interesting fact about this too yeah um ian said this is uh technically not an av board this is just an a board um yeah but sgi ran i guess the audio only boards were more popular and they ran out and their solution to that was just to sell the av boards uh with plastic covers glued over the video inputs so they just cover the video and then you just take the cover off and then you have video so financially maybe not the best for them um yeah it worked out well though they're bankrupt now so what is this that is the front plane that's what everything connects together with um and see it comes with tape well i that's my addition i took some creative liberties um it's dated 96 i think all these parts are dated 96 they're not all from the same system but they are all from the same time and the maiden usa stamp is scratched out on both sides and replaced with um in malaysia i think i think on this side uh made in malaysia and we're not quite sure what the story is behind that but uh we did not do that so don't get mad at us all right so let's let's start assembling it i guess i'll let you wherever you want to start yeah maybe um yeah we can do that um snap this in and then while patrick's working on that i have some notes too that you took so the let's see interesting things for people to know the r4400 which was in our indigo 2 you say was licensed to idt lsi nec performance semiconductors siemens ag and toshiba yes so i guess those were the the manufacturing sources yes and ours was made by toshiba right and ours was yeah it was 200 megahertz r4400 that was in 94. and uh we did some more research on that too so that if modern cpus everyone's talking about seven nanometer getting down to seven or ten nanometer for intel and the r4400 that we used was 300 nanometer process which actually is is smaller than i i would have uh guessed and it was 2 150 new uh according to wikipedia so it's a 2150 according to wikipedia and that is uh we don't think that's adjusted for inflation but we're not sure i guess and then the the o2 the one that you're working on now so daughterboard here we have an r5000 right also made idt nec nkk that is a terrible noise and then um the uh let's see do those go in just straight down at all the memory sticks yeah or that you going in at angles um they go in straight down but you know just gonna wiggle a little bit yeah springs are a bit old uh so the r3000a 1.2 uh micrometer process i guess yeah and that was so 1.2 used for sony playstation you say was that the ps1 yeah i guess okay and this is all um i guess all mips is this all mips architecture all of it or do you know yeah um but licensed out to other companies for production okay and i think you're getting the nintendo is next right yeah the r4300i 350 nanometer process used for the n64 and i think that console is probably one of the the most recognizable of all times the n64 license to nec referred to as the nec vr 4300 not virtual reality in this instance not quite they uh yeah not quite that would be the virtual boy still better than the rift the r5900 250 nanometer process cpu was used for the playstation 2 and then mips we did some research on as well so sgi i guess you say they were a customer at first of mips yeah um and mips did the architecture for these yeah so they were a customer and then they i guess wanted to protect their investment in the company and and eventually bought nips just bought the company yeah and uh so sgi acquired mips in 92 for 333 million dollars and there's new ipo and 98 and then eventually became a separate company again in 2000 when sgi started to or wanted to use intel yeah that's one of the things that ian mentioned a few times is that sgi jumped the gun on announcing that they wanted to move to intel parts and then they took a really long time to do that but i'm guessing they already damaged their relationship with uh mips yeah probably yeah so a fabulous company or where a fab or is this mips mips was a fabulous company or something yeah they continue to be yeah continues to be a fabulous design company uh amd is another example of a fabulous company nvidia another headless company okay so the o2 specifically though this system now that you're getting it uh sort of assembled and this right here we'll show this to camera too that's just a connector so i think like the last one this is all cableless there's theoretically uh cable for the optical drive again but um we don't have an optical drive for this either okay yeah so i feel uncomfortable with how that's drooping so this is uh we're not supposed to use this um for the indigo 2 because it's clearly labeled o2 kit 9 so we're using it for the proper yes our our sincere apologies in the last video we had an egregious error and use the frutella pack which i think is a british starburst to knock off i'm not sure use the frutella pack to support the graphics set and make it go too extreme somebody really angry with that they were probably founded in like 1912 or something the original starburst sofitel you claim was the original starburst i i'm not claiming anything i would never claim anything on youtube so um all of these parts would be supported by plastic sleds and trays and stuff in the case but since we don't have the case um this is ian's solution yes and it works well enough so and we can find a photo of the case or something online too what is this thing uh that is the i think it's labeled it's a pci tray yeah required for normal operation if removed it must be reinstalled before restart yes okay so does anything connect into it yes uh this is what we put in all right here pretty easy to identify with the slot layout yeah and then we connect this how do we do this is this right here that looks like it these pins yeah so some pins on the board and then those connect into there i guess yeah okay i think that's connected yes yeah so uh at this point we're done because we don't have the optical drive um or some of the other extras that would attach to this um and it is a pretty modular cableless system right so this this is a fully functional o2 as it is right now i'm scared okay there's uh there's a more interesting shot for you of the motherboard uh in here so you've got the higher component density in there so specs for this system are 5 000 is 200 megahertz cpu with one megabyte of l2 cache you said 256 megabytes of ram for this configuration we think uh based on what ian said who is again the the expert who loaned uh or sent this out to us we think this was like a 16 or 17 thousand dollar he said seventeen seventeen seventeen thousand dollars we don't know if that's adjusted or anything or converted from uh from pounds or usd or what and you could increase this to one gigabyte capacity uh let's see you say the bios equivalent has mouse control and also true with the indigo two and then what is this aw real demo you wrote about yeah i was just taking some notes of uh software demos that we can show off later when we uh get this turned on okay um yeah there's some interesting stuff on there okay cool well uh yeah i guess we'll boot it up and take a look at the software then and we'll spend more time there on on this one because i think it's a bit more interesting too so i walked away for a second and patrick started installing aol we have a uh we got it booted it's working this is we i guess it's a windows 95 virtual machine and we've got aol in the background so we're multitasking here and oh it's gone we have a solitaire so i guess this is what you do with your 17 000 computer you you emulate windows 95 and you play solitaire other than this though other than the emu the virtual machine which is actually of course a very useful application there's presumably other stuff on here okay sorry yes there's ian told us that this uh i think this is probably the largest thing that's installed um so the windows 95. yeah we could delete it if we wanted to free up space but i don't have a lot of oh i've heard that sound before i don't have a lot of sgi software that i really need the free i think that sound is used in every grade a under a video ever made so it's it's uh andrew we did it we did rtx is that a toaster this is the sj802 sorry yes this is actually a really impressive demo um we can barely it's kind of small reads an inventor file i wonder if we have any other adventure files dot iv looks like there's a few of them moose plastic oh this is the moose that's why the front plane is labeled moosehead okay mystery solved that makes sense uh toast toast they call it a toaster i don't know this one runs a lot better because there's no reflections on it yeah this is genuinely pretty impressive like for the for the era yeah so the reflection is a a map of a photo i think right it's just a photo from it's a bar someplace they use it a lot in 3d uh testing oh really yeah it's like blender's monkey head okay so it's like a this is a common one how do you think the reflection is done just like map it onto it or something yeah you don't think it's real time ray tracing uh so what what do we have for like blender i think i've noticed from you previously you ran blender version 2.44 so it's got blender 2.44 i think there's a test file on here as well yeah um this is just a standard test file um that ian had and uh i think this was created with version 2.44 in mind um right which makes our comparisons very unfair yes they're very unfair anyway but we used blender 2.79 on and we just had an 8600k set the five gigahertz that was on the test bench so move the test file over there and then you uh you ran the benchmark so it's it's not like for like blender versions but you really can't blame us when we're talking about hardware from the mid 90s it's kind of hard to equalize things so this is it rendering now i guess yeah i can tell sort of uh so this um this uh this render took what was it 82.3 minutes it took to complete yeah um according to his benchmarks that with this spec it should be taking less time than that and there's something's maybe set up wrong yeah i don't know okay well either way what do we know what his benchmarks were i think his were more around like 45 minutes to an hour for our hardware okay well either way let's if we take ian's numbers and we're not sure how how these were exactly tested i guess 45 to an hour versus 82 either way uh just to give you perspective on on why that massive difference is not particularly relevant for comparing to an 8600k the 8600k did it in about nine seconds so even if we're off by 50 it is still a massive difference um but yeah so somewhere in that range for the render on this i guess it might depend on the software configuration too to some extent uh because if you i don't know how blender in this version is but current version you can change samples and things like that speed it up yeah and uh so ian said let's see he said really though their systems were never about how fast one could process data rather they were about how much one could process and he says that's how john mashy phrased it to him and said bandwidth coping with big data sets etc uh they often did hold straight cpu speed records as well though so so that's blender what else do we have on here we have uh anything interesting quake or you don't want to wait for blender to finish no i it's uh kind of wild that i mean we just took this dot blend file and put it in modern blender and it just opens up the output looks different but um how different does it look uh the lighting's smoother um it's the output image on this is kind of noisy okay so that is impressive though that you can just straight move the file yeah can i just nice and and just to kind of be clear here even though we're giving perspective on like the blender rendering speeds modern versus then this system was extremely impressive for its time uh because if you look at some of the graphics demos we have getting overpowered here by the uh some of the graphics demos we have from the indigo 2 as well for they they're really pretty impressive you can get some basic physics uh simulate soft body physics simulation with cloth stuff like that so very impressive hardware and very high end although it is having some trouble with quake yeah if we had a better cpu in the system i think it would handle it pretty well um but as it is you can launch quake also it's worth mentioning that i mean quake was never officially released on these systems so it's emulated uh well they're ports by my fans this is like sgi quake or something like that is the name of the project it's a fan port yeah and the doom version that's on the indigo 2 is also uh for context this is on the mouse movement right now i don't know the default quick controls at all that's it okay all right take a wild guess what do you think oh what are you looking for one for fire control is it okay nice i know the quake buttons i'm not holding this do i want to start a campaign i feel like i don't want to start let's get out of this level just to see if it's any faster somewhere else all right i'm ready for normal skill but i don't remember what my weapon switch is oh it was faster for a second yes is the third episode primal fear in a strange dimension dot dot dot until that was written by the programmer and this is just as fun to play as it seems like this is also a mechanical mouse by mechanical mouse and a ball mouse the corsair m63 mm-rgb vm is for mechanical yeah he didn't have to send us a ball mouse but uh i guess it is more authentic most ps2 connector mice are all nice of course i made the uh the mm 600 mechanical ball mouse or whatever for april fools yeah the m63 mm rgb mechanical ball mouse will be available later this month we really think you're going to enjoy our exclusive big ball technology they've got me calling it a mechanical mouse because that's what they did in april fool's video good job corsair uh what else do we have on here yeah that's we're not getting anywhere with this wait um this is my favorite part where they credit the sound effects to trent resner and their niche nails really he did the soundtrack but it's cd audio so i don't actually know the soundtrack will play right um that's really cool though so there's there's our look at the o2 uh we're not sure if this one has is performing that exactly where it should be i don't know it's kind of hard to tell so we'll check with ian on that but uh yeah it's for what we have seen it's very impressive especially the demo of the uh the non-ray traced reflections enclosure for the case and it's got maya on there we didn't have any demo files that we could find i don't think so uh we couldn't load up a demo for that but we did have blender and we had some demos for blender and for obviously the hardware of the era it is pretty impressive but quake unfortunately was not running at a frame rate that was really acceptable for play even by our standards so so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always if there's interest in doing more of this type of content let us know because we can revisit these with some extra depth or something if uh if enough people are interested maybe if ian if you want to send us an email and say if you have any particular suggestions for other software but that's it for this one subscribe for more as always you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus helps out directly that you're watching and thank you to sgi depot for assisting with this we'll see you all next time so you

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 88,261

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, sgi o2 pc, sgi onyx, sgi o2 workstation

Id: o-asW3b2CJ0

Length: 25min 1sec (1501 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 06 2019