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my old school was in hollywood ca, they had hundreds of sgi of all kinds and big iron ones too, but they would have got rid of them a long time ago, RIP.
it was part of a working film studio.
i'm pretty sure they moved to using HP workstations and servers, because they had HP alongside the sgis even back then.
and now sgi is HP, which is kind of ironic.

i'm glad you mentioned NFS, never heard of it before, i'll have to investigate it.

i have heard that sgi do not use any electrolytic caps, they're all tantalum, so no leaking to worry about.
and the power supplies should not need rebuilding for a long time, but if it does need rebuilt then they are a nightmare of complexity.
it might have been you who wrote about it in that thread.

the other day i was wondering if these mips cpu had the heatsink pasted or soldered on, and i saw a guy take one apart on youtube and it was a thermal pad.
he scraped his pad off and put paste there, but it looked like a crap job. so i am guessing thats actually a bad idea to try and do it.
when left alone, you don't need to worry about paste going bad. one less thing to worry about.
but has anybody done this and took temps before and after to see?

so since they're built fairly good, what would blow up after long term storage?
the hdd? some caps in the psu?

i have a pentium3 workstation that i haven't turned on in 20+ years.
i spent a TON of money on it when it was new. as much as it did cost, it was way less than a sgi.
and its almost identical in specs to an octane. so i'd like to try running it again someday.
what would you say to do before trying to power it up?

i have seen comments from people when tezro came out, and they were not impressed.
comments were: same old cpu, same old vpro, its not innovating enough.
they wanted ati firepro or nvidia quadro graphics in it instead, and thought pentium was better than mips.
public comments like that may be why sgi wanted to switch away from mips after tezro.
but those comments weren't from actual sgi customers... they shouldn't have listened.

or maybe mips really wasn't able to compete with pentium anymore.
i have seen benchmarks for tezro from Irinikus and it is twice as fast as octane if you have twice the amount of cpus.
this makes me think a dual cpu tezro won't beat an octane if they have the same cpu's and vpro model, they'd be nearly identical.
customers wouldn't have had much reason to upgrade unless they could afford the extra cpus for $$$
and whats your next buy beyond it? a pentium made by sgi which is identical to every other pentium system, but probably costs more money.
one that can't run your old software either, or irix. they flushed the company right down the toilet by doing that.

anybody buying sgi today for business uses has to be really stupid! its only good for collectors. they need to move on to modern hardware.
you'd probably have to buy tons of refrigerator sized sgi racks to match a modern computer, huge waste of money.
have you seen where Irinikus benchmarks all the sgi's to his mac pros? its on his youtube, was interesting to see.