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View Full Version : Intergraph workstation, need advice


dparm
03-04-2005, 10:07 PM
The upcoming surplus property auction has an Intergraph GX1 workstation in it. I did some research and got the following specs on it.

-dual Intel P3 Xeon @ 700MHz
-32MB SDRAM (max 2GB)
-512KB L2 cache
-Wildcat 4000 AGP video card (64MB texture, 16MB video)
-9GB Seagate Ultra2 Wide SCSI hard drive
-Windows NT 4.0 (original OS)

This thing did cost about $8000 when new in 1999. I found one on eBay for about $100. It looks like it was primarily used for 3D design and high-end computing.

My question is this: would it be worth it to buy this thing, or would it be a slow piece of garbage? At minimum, the casing is frickin sweet looking (what originally caught my eye). I also looked on eBay for older SGI workstations (Indigo, Indy, etc)...I take it these too are dinosaurs by today's standards? Perhaps some of the MLL or MZ people would know. I also have seen some old Sun Ultra 5 workstations dirt cheap on eBay.

Thoughts?

bgwinkel
10-30-2006, 09:42 AM
Slow as heck. I remember my XPS desktop in 2003 blew away workstations only a year old. My simple 2.8 P4 computer with a non-FireGL Radeon 9800 Pro could run Pro/E a lot faster than the year old dual-Xeon workstations. Now it's 2006. 32 MB PC100 or PC133 RAM? I'd pass. UWSCSI only has a throughput of 80 MB/s compared to SATA 300 MB/s.

Also, it's just old. The motherboard caps would probably be leaky, and components just fail sometimes.

dparm
10-30-2006, 11:13 AM
LOL this thread is OLD!

nlopez
10-30-2006, 11:19 AM
Yes, SATA2 can do 300MB/s, but your drive still only does 75M/s, tops. Putting a cannoe on the missassippi doesn't make it faster.

dcv
10-30-2006, 12:01 PM
LOL this thread is OLD!

So...

Did you buy it?

dparm
10-30-2006, 12:01 PM
The 10K drive can probably push through more, but yes, we're not nearing the theoretical limit of SATA-300.

The SATA-600 spec is currently being finalized as well, lol.

dparm
10-30-2006, 12:02 PM
No, I got this instead:

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/resources/2006/07/dellxps410.gif

bgwinkel
10-30-2006, 02:36 PM
Whoa, didn't even notice the dates...
Yes, SATA2 can do 300MB/s, but your drive still only does 75M/s, tops. Putting a cannoe on the missassippi doesn't make it faster.
And even that's optimistic for sustained, perhaps, but with burst my drive gets to around 240. And once we get Readydrive, burst speeds will matter a lot more.