[ Thanks to Jason
Perlow for this link. ]
If you’ve got an extra $6,000 or so laying around, and you need
a graphics workstation that takes advantage of dual GHz processors,
512MB RAM, it sounds like the SGI 330 might be the way to go. This
review says it’s “a shining example of what every Linux-compliant
PC workstation vendor should supply.”
“To call the 330 a PC on steroids would be a serious
oversimplification; this machine has been optimized for producing
lightning-fast, super high-resolution 3D graphics, with no
compromise. The onboard 64 MB DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM 4x AGP
graphics card, branded as the VPro VR7, is a highly tweaked version
of the nVIDIA high-end Quadro2 Pro 3D graphics processor. It takes
full advantage of SGI’s OpenGL 1.2 3D graphics library and is
capable of pumping out more than 31 million triangles per second
and up to 1 Gigapixels per second. This is the type of performance
you would expect from a machine being used to design vivid space
battles in the next Star Wars movie.The SGI 330 is not just the latest and greatest in buzzword
graphics and PC hardware however. To pull it all together, the 330
runs an extremely tweaked Red Hat 6.2, Turbolinux 6.0, or SuSE 6.4
(support for other distributions and newer Linux versions is coming
soon). We performed the installation by first installing the
base-level Red Hat 6.2 and then the SGI Linux Pro Pack 1.3 for
Visual Workstations.”