[jan-jaap]

Since you're here and we're talking interchanges, would you consider swapping the IO9 in your O350 for the IO10 from the Altix to see what it does ? I remember that the SATA interface on the 10 wasn't that great, but still, it'd be an interesting parts-swapping experiment to see if you could get an all-in-one sata interface (maybe for a dvd-rom ?) into the O350 ....

I forgot the details, but this was discussed @ Nekochan and it won't work. The SATA ports are not on some well known chip (e.g. LSI 1064) but probably integrated as a softcore in the IOC4 ASIC. The O350 firmware only knows the IOC3 and will want to boot from Qlogic SCSI. For a while I considered putting an IO10 in the secondary unit of my dual-module O350. I went with an LSI SATA card instead. I've been very happy with that one.

NB: The DVD ROM in the O350 isn't anything special, is it? Other than that little piece of sheet metal needed to mount it and the fact that it's IDE, thus old? I bought onw from my O350 and I think I used it exactly once: when I installed IRIX. There are other ways to install IRIX.

Anybody running an Onyx4 want to report in on how well it works with SGI graphics ? Reports at the time were, lots of glitches and stuff that wasn't quite right. But you know people, if it was just a flash when changing windows or something, a single O4 would do this job much easier than a four-box pileup.

I think the problem with the Onyx4 wasn't so much with the ATI cards, but with the fact that they changed X servers. SGI spent 20 years developing their own Xsgi which was probably derived from MIT X11R3 or X11R4, and then in the end they ditched it for XFree86 for this one product in their lineup, which was also replacing their most prestigious graphics hardware (Infinite Reality), used by their most demanding customers. These customers were of course using software tweaked for many years for Xsgi.

And then you wonder why you've got 'glitches'