Gadgetory

everyone I'm joined by Patrick again today we are building the SGI o2 so we previously built the indigo two extreme yes and it was pretty cool system it's like it was a $34,000 system and from the early 90s is all from the 90s this is also from Ian again from SGI Depot who sent it along for us to build and we're gonna spend some more time with a 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 this versus an 80 600 k yeah yeah that's what was in the suspend 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 the salon before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte ARS ad 27 QD gaming monitor the ad 27 QT is a 27-inch 1440p gaming display with 95% of dcpip 3 color saturation for high color accuracy accompanied by a 1 millisecond response time 10 bit IPS panel and display HDR visa certification additional features include fluid adjustment and slide RGB LEDs from personal Flair and firmware features like cooldown counters at reticles and adaptive a noise reduction learn more at the link below so here's the system this is do to Patrick do you want to walk us through some of the parts yeah so we have the power supply here it's got a bunch of warnings on the bottom about not removing the cover and we haven't done that but it's also got kind of a cool grounding strip on the bottom there yes it's a squishy so Sony made power supply hard drive that is not original to the system it would have shipped with 2 or 4 gigabyte hard drive but this is a 37 36 point 7 gigabytes gauzy drive yeah it's a lot more and what about the CPU is is this also in our series CPU yes our 5200 megahertz and we can't tell who manufactured at this time last night was Toshiba for reference yeah so CPU is is on I guess the motherboard and it's already pasted you said yeah this is the heatsink assembly this is the CPU daughterboard and both of these heat sinks are pasted on and we don't really want to peel this off there's no screws or anything underneath right so the last time indigo2 we have some footage of it we can show where we we pulled the heatsink off the cpu and that actually it looks very similar to what's in this box so it wasn't exactly this model but the Indigo 2 had a similar CPU to that under the heatsink and so other than the CPU daughterboard there's some memory slots and what do we know what type of memory this is no but we're not 100% sure so just to be clear here neither Patrick nor I are experts on SGI 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's certainly is Ian sent everything along has everything documented but yes we have I think is it eight six this time two four six eight sticks of memory last time I was 12 and do you know how what the capacity is yeah this is 256 megabytes which was the maximum when the system launched they raised that so one gigabyte later but this is maximum respect for the launch of the system okay and then what about this thing here that is av input so there's a lot of analog video connections on there and then on the end there's the o2 cam connector 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 can't show you the case and then you told me an interesting fact about this - yeah and said this is technically not a Navy board this is just an a board yeah but that's gee I ran I guess the audio only boards were more popular and they ran out and their solution of that was just to sell the AV boards with plastic covers glued over the video inputs so they just cover the video and then you have to cover off and then you have video so financially maybe not the best for them yeah it worked out well though they're bankrupt now haha what is this that is the front plane that's what everything connects together with and see it comes with tape well I that's my Edition I took some creative liberties 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 made in USA stamp is scratched out on both sides and replaced with Malaysia I think on this side made in Malaysia and we're not quite sure what the story is behind that but 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 yeah we can do that listen and then while Patrick's working on that I have some notes to that you took so the cutsy interesting things for people who know the are 4400 which was an hour indigo to you say was licensed to IDT lsi any see performance semiconductor Siemens AG and Toshiba yes I guess those were the the manufacturing sources yes NORs was made by Toshiba right and ours was 200 megahertz our 4400 that was in 94 and we did some more research on that too so that if modern TB is everyone's talking at 7 nanometre getting down to 7 or 10 nanometer for Intel and the are 4400 that we used was 300 nanometer process which actually is smaller than I would a guest and it was $2,150 know according to Wikipedia so it's a 2150 according to Wikipedia and that is 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 R 5,000 right hmm also made IDT NEC and KK that is a terrible noise yes and the uh let's see do those go in just straight down at all the memory six yeah or that you go in and out of angles um they going straight down but you know a little bit yes sir the are three thousand a 1.2 micrometer process I guess mm-hmm 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 I guess we called MIPS is this all MIPS architecture all of it or do you know yeah but licensed out to other companies for production and I think you're getting them another Nintendo is next right yeah our 4300 I 350 nanometer process used for the n64 and I think that console is probably one of the the most recognizable of all time so n64 license to NEC referred to as the NEC VR 4300 not virtual reality in this instance not quite they yeah not quite that would be the virtual boy still better than the rift there are fifty nine hundred 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 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 eventually bought MEPs just bothered company yeah and 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 I'm guessing they already damaged their relationship with MIPS yeah probably yeah so a fabulous company or were a fabric or business MIPS MIPS was a fabulous company you're saying yeah they continued oh yeah continues to be a fabulous design company AMD is another example of a fabulous company Nvidia another for headless company okay so the o2 specifically though this system now that you're getting it sort of assembled and this right here will show this the camera - that's just a connector so I think like the last one this is all cable this there's theoretically a cable for the optical drive again but we don't have an optical drive for this either okay yeah so I feel like I'm comfortable with how that's German yeah so this is we're not supposed to use this for the Indigo - because it's clearly labeled Oh - kit nine so we're using it for the proper yes our our sincere apologies in the last video we had an egregious error and used the fratello pack which i think is a british starburst knockoff I'm not sure he's the fratello pack to support the graphic set we may go to extreme somebody really angry with that they've probably found it in like 1912 or something the original starburst so Fratelli uclan was the original starburst I'm not claiming anything I would never claim anything on uses so all of these parts would be supported by plastic sleds and trays and stuff in the case but since we don't have this is the in solution yes and it works well enough so and we can find a photo of the case or something online - what is this thing that is the I think it's labeled it's a CI tray yeah required for normal operation if removed it must be reinstalled before restart yes okay so the Sun you can connect into it yes this is we put in right here pretty easy to identify with the slot layout yeah and then we connect this we do this is this right here that looks like it these pens yeah so some pens on the board and those connect into there I guess yeah okay that's connected yes yeah so at this point we're done because we don't have the optical drive or some of the other extras that would attach to this and it is a pretty modular cable this system right so this this is a fully functional or - as it is right now I'm scared okay here so there's a more interesting shop for you of the motherboard in here so you've got the higher component density in there so expect for the system are 5000 is 200 megahertz CPU with one megabyte of l2 cache you said 256 megabytes of RAM for this mm configuration we think based on what Ian said who was again the the expert who loaned or sent this out to us we think this was like a 16 or 17 thousand dollar he said 1717 $17,000 we don't know if that's adjusted or anything are converted from from pounds or USD or what and you could increase this to one gigabyte capacity let's see you say the BIOS equivalent has Mouse control and also true with the Indigo - and then what is this aw real demo you wrote about yeah I was just taking some notes of software demos that we can show off later when we get this turned on okay yeah there's some interesting stuff on there okay cool well 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 hat we got it booted it's working this is we I guess it's a Windows 95 virtual machine mm-hmm and we've got a o/l in the background so we're multitasking here and it's gone and we have a solitaire so I guess this is what you do with your seventeen thousand dollar computer you you emulate Windows 95 and you play solitaire other than this though other than the emulate would be a virtual machine which is actually of course a very useful application there's presumably other stuff on here yes there's in told us that this I think this is probably the largest thing that's installed so the windows 95 yeah we could delete it if we want in the free up space but I don't have a lot of oh I've heard that song before I don't have a lot of SGI software that I really need the free I'm sorry I think that sound is used in every grade a under a video ever made so it's rough it's uh Andrew we did it we did our TX it's not a toaster this is the yes jo - sorry yes this is actually a really impressive demo we can barely that's kind of small reads an inventor file or if we have any other adventure files that IV looks like there's a few of them moves plastic mm-hmm this is the moose that's why the front plane is labeled in this head okay mystery solved that makes sense toast totus they call it a toaster so 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 map of a photo I think right it's really far from it's a bar some place they use it a lot in 3d testing power really looks like blenders monkey head okay so this like it this is a common one how do you think the reflection is done I was like map it onto it or something yeah you don't think it's real time ray tracing so what what do we have for like blender I think I've noticed from you previously you ran blender version 2.4 for mm-hmm so it's got bun 22.4 for I think there's a test file on here as well yeah this is just a standard test file that Ian had and I think this was created with version 2.4 for in mind right which makes our comparisons very unfair yes they're very anyway but we used blended 2.79 on and if we just had an ad 600k set to 5 gigahertz that was on the task bench so I move the test file over there and then 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 our hardware from the mid-90s it's kind of hard to equalize things so this is a rendering now I guess yeah I can't you tell sort of this um this this render took or was it eighty two point three minutes it took to complete yeah according to his benchmarks it with this spec it should be taking less time than that okay there's some things maybe setup 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 or even our hardware okay well either way let's if we take yen's numbers and we're not sure how how these were exactly tested I guess 45 to an hour versus 82 either way just to give you perspective on why that massive difference is not particularly relevant for comparing to these 600 K ladies 600 K did it in about 9 seconds so even if we're off by 50% it is still a massive difference but yeah so somewhere in that range for the for the render on this I guess it might depend on the soft reconfiguration to to some extent 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 so Ian said and 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 Massey phrased it to him and said bandwidth coping with big data sets etc 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 a anything interesting quake or you know won't waver No it's kind of wild that I mean we just took this blend file and put it in modern blender and it just opens up the output looks different but um how different does it like the lighting smoother no it's the output image on this is kind of noisy okay so that is impressive there that you just straight move the file yeah just nice and and just to kind of be clear here you know we're giving perspective on like the blender around Orion speeds modern versus then this system was extremely impressive for its time because if you look at some of the graphics demos we have ha ha an overpowered here so on the graphics demos we have from the Indigo 2 as well for they they're really pretty impressive you can get some basic physics simulation 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 but as it is you can launch quake also it's worth interesting that I mean quake was never officially released on these systems I'm elated 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 oh yeah and the doom version that's on the Indigo 2 is also and pretty context this is on a mouse movement right now I don't know the default quake controls at all okay alright it take a wild guess what do you think out what are you looking for well I for fire control is it ok nice another quake so I want to sort of campaign I feel like I don't want to start you get out of this level just to see if it's any faster or somewhere else alright I'm ready for a normal skill but I don't remember what my weapon switches oh it was faster for a second yes this is the third episode primal fear in the strange dimension dot dot dot tell that was written by the programmer and this is just as fun to play as it seems like this is also a mechanical mouse a mechanical mouse internet bobhouse the Corsair m60 3 mm RGB BM is for mechanical yeah you didn't have to send us a ball Mouse but I guess it is more authentic most psu connector my sword all mice of course are made the the MM 600 mechanical ball mouse or whatever for April Fool's yeah the M 63 mm RGB mechanical ball mouse will be available later this month we really think you're gonna enjoy our exclusive big ball of technology they've got me calling it a mechanical mouse cuz that's what they didn't April Fool's Day good job Corsair what else do we have on here yeah let's again here with this weight hood when this is my favorite part where they credit the sound effects to Trent Reznor and nine inch nails really he did the soundtrack but it's CD audio so I don't actually know the soundtrack will play so there's there's our look at the o2 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 yeah it's for what we have seen it's very impressive especially the demo of the the non retraced 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 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 if enough people are interested maybe if 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 and go to patreon.com/scishow numbers Nexus tops out directly that you were watching and thank you to SGI depot for assisting with this we'll see you all next time