New to me Visual Workstation 320

New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Printable Version

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New to me Visual Workstation 320 - GeekLucanis - 04-27-2021

A friend went down to LA to collect this machine for me. It is very middle of the road in terms of spec. It boasts 2 Pentium 3 500s, 512MB ram, floppy drive, optical drive. and a working power supply. The friend took the scsi card for his trouble of driving down there, which I don't mind as they are on ebay for about $30. In the future I would love to do some upgrading, as I do want to max it out, but from what I know, the ram and 1.0Ghz CPUs are hard to come by. The skins are in good condition, and the door works.

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - weblacky - 04-27-2021

Really the best looking machine of the Windows SGI systems!

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Irinikus - 04-27-2021

(04-27-2021, 06:48 AM)weblacky Wrote: Really the best looking machine of the Windows SGI systems!

The 320, as well as the 540, are the ONLY proper SGI's out of the "Windows SGI" systems, as they feature an O2-like architecture! (The rest of them were no more than re-branded PC's!)

The only problems that they had, was that the SGI marketing division incorrectly marketed them as a rendering machines, rather than as a machines to be used for manipulating large image files, as that was actually their forte! (Due to the unified memory architecture, similar to that found in the O2) Combined with the fact that there were no followup systems.

I have successfully run 3D Studio Max R3 on mine, and it was a pleasure to use! (Despite it not being an extraordinary rendering machine, since it features standard x86 CPU hardware!)

It's a great little machine, and one well worth having! Smile

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - weblacky - 04-28-2021

(04-27-2021, 06:57 AM)Irinikus Wrote:
(04-27-2021, 06:48 AM)weblacky Wrote: Really the best looking machine of the Windows SGI systems!

The 320, as well as the 540, are the ONLY proper SGI's out of the "Windows SGI" systems, as they feature an O2-like architecture! (The rest of them were no more than re-branded PC's!)

The only problems that they had, was that the SGI marketing division incorrectly marketed them as a rendering machines, rather than as a machines to be used for manipulating large image files, as that was actually their forte! (Due to the unified memory architecture, similar to that found in the O2) Combined with the fact that there were no followup systems.

I have successfully run 3D Studio Max R3 on mine, and it was a pleasure to use! (Despite it not being an extraordinary rendering machine, since it features standard x86 CPU hardware!)

It's a great little machine, and one well worth having!

You may be forgetting the much unloved 230 and the 550? Each had the different cases and unfortunately the most powerful one is the plainest...uggh. I still think the 320 is the best looking of the fives systems, though I failed to remember the 320 and 540 were sibiling cases, so I'll call that I tie! 540 to cool looking too. 330 is ugly like the 550, why?

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Raion - 04-28-2021

The 230 and 550 have Nvidia graphics and BIOS.

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Irinikus - 04-28-2021

The 320 and 540 are siblings, but the 540 isn’t as Fibonacci correct in my opinion, making the 320 the prettier of the two! Smile

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Shiunbird - 04-28-2021

Wow! Congratulations!

Would you be willing to run Quake III on Windows NT 4 and report back on performance?

I've always heard that WinNT 4 is the best (most efficient) platform for Quake III, and I'm curious to see if its true.

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Irinikus - 04-28-2021

(04-28-2021, 11:49 AM)Shiunbird Wrote: Wow! Congratulations!

Would you be willing to run Quake III on Windows NT 4 and report back on performance?

I've always heard that WinNT 4 is the best (most efficient) platform for Quake III, and I'm curious to see if its true.

Here's Quake III running on my 320 @ 1280x1024 (Dual 1GHz, 500MB, Windows 2000)

It is Windows 2000 and not NT 4.

It gives you fair performance.

I think the Cobalt graphics chip lets it down a bit, as it predated Quake III!

It would be interesting to see how it runs on GeekLucanis' 320, as this could confirm the Cobalt chip to be the bottleneck. (Just remember the design intent of these machines: Large texture file manipulation!)

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Shiunbird - 04-28-2021

Oh, it seems indeed that the CPU is not the bottleneck there.

I thought they ran NT 4 - I remember reading somewhere that NT 4 is indeed the holy grail for Quake III performance. By the time I got a dual Pentium III back in the day, I had to run Windows 2000 because otherwise the machine would be very useless - I was a teenager and liked to game =)

Thanks for sharing!

RE: New to me Visual Workstation 320 - Irinikus - 04-28-2021

(04-28-2021, 03:59 PM)Shiunbird Wrote: Oh, it seems indeed that the CPU is not the bottleneck there.

I thought they ran NT 4 - I remember reading somewhere that NT 4 is indeed the holy grail for Quake III performance. By the time I got a dual Pentium III back in the day, I had to run Windows 2000 because otherwise the machine would be very useless - I was a teenager and liked to game =)

Thanks for sharing!

You can load Windows NT 4 onto these machines, but I don't think there are many people doing that though, as Windows 2000 was significantly better overall.