[jan-jaap]

As an aside, I'm missing almost all the screws that hold the front board connectors in place. The connectors are definitely snug, but I'm wondering if I need to source replacement screws. The old USENET posts make mention of any loose connections being a cause for errors and boards not working correctly. Any thoughts?

I've seen a fair number of PowerSeries pass through my place and I don't think I've ever seen one that had all the screws in place. In the photo of the 4D/380 you can see the screws installed in opposite corners (bottom/left & top/right), this seems to be the most common. This VGX has dual RMs and a VideoLab option installed so it has the rare 4-slot front connector board. It has holes for 8 screws, but only 2 are used.

I can imagine that some people can't be bothered to put everything back in, but in that case other small bits and pieces would likely be missing. I think they simply considered two screws for every front connector enough.

They do take a good bit of force to install, and they need to be firmly in place or the graphics will fail.

Here's a look into the card cage of my 4D/440VGX deskside. Notice the nylon lock bars which are missing from the later systems (Crimson). Again, probably 15 years old :dodgy: When I'm done rewiring the place I'll take some time to make some decent photos with a more recent camera.

[dstep]

Hey, another Predator rack! Don't see many of those around.

Any idea about it's history? Mine was originally owned by the Fraunhofer-Arbeitsgruppe für Graphische Datenverarbeitung in Darmstadt, Germany (FhG-AGD, now Fraunhofer-IGD). Mine is the system in the article below:

This Predator actually is property of company I work for, not mine own. It was bought new in about 1991-92. We are producing simulators for training power plant personal and such SGI computers were used for run mathematical model of physical processes and devices of power plant. Now we are using Linux servers for this.