First
off, as seen on the left, I finally
got my office set up for ADAT digital
audio! I have a couple Acoustic Research
(AR) toslink cables going right into
my Octane's optical I/O, wow this
is nice! 8 channels each direction,
24 bit precision, 48,000Hz sample
rate. This not only sounds amazing,
has very wide bandwidth for all those
channels, and looks cool... it's also
much less hassle when wiring up the
audio system! Two cables, click click,
and I'm finished. Also, it gets rid
of any possible humming, buzzing,
or other noise from grounding issues
& radiation elsewhere in the house.
Next,
I finally upgraded my ATi 3D Rage
IIc (yes..), to an ATi Radeon 9600
XT! While this isn't the best card
they make, I'm quite QUITE happy
with it's speed & stability
in Maya and other OpenGL apps in
general. I've had nothing but trouble
and bad luck with nVidia cards,
on many machines (home-built and
Dell factory built). My GeForce2
GTS had blown up a few months ago
(rather, the video filter circuit
blew up, and my ugly bypass rig-up
didn't seem to have an effect),
so I had to replace it with the
only AGP card I could find: an ATi
3D Rage IIc. Yuck. I spent months
in 1280x1024 hell, with no windowed
3D acceleration of any kind, and
agonizing slow 2D performance. Just
recently I went out to Best Buy
(because I had acquired a $50 gift
card at the store) to buy a new
3D card. To my dismay, they were
entirely sold out of every Radeon
except for the 9000 A-i-W. So, I
figured I'd give nVidia yet another
(6th?) chance and bought a GeForce
FX 5700 Ultra. When I installed
the thing and ran Maya, it crashed
left and right. Switching between
1 and 4 viewport mode caused terrible
noise in the viewport, and using
the hypergraph or doing too much
camera panning simply lead to a
total crash. 1 in every 4 times
maya crashed, the OS went with it.
I was quite upset, so I exchanged
it for an ATi Radeon 9600 XT (and
saved $21 as well). It works beautifully!
I'm finally back up to speed with
things!
Also,
the GeForce FX card was manufactured
by a company called BFG
Technologies, part of their
"Asylum" graphics line.
Honestly, I was very pleased with
the quality of their hardware, their
support, and the lifetime warranty
that came with it. They seem to
be a very good company, 'run by
gamers'. I really gained respect
for them in the short few days I
had one of their cards. It's too
bad the chipset (or driver?) was
unsuitable for my needs. If you
use nVidia cards successfully, check
BFG Tech out!
Finally,
I'm adding a second SGI Octane to the
network as another dev workstation.
This one is an R12000, 270Mhz with 2MB
L2 Cache and 1GByte of ram. It also
has SE (ESI) series graphics. I've grown
to quite respect these machines a lot,
despite their old age (Mine are from
1998 and 1999). They are a breeze to
work on, very quick & responsive
systems. The OS is great, as well. Definitely
worth the investment.
First
off, as seen on the left, I finally
got my office set up for ADAT digital
audio! I have a couple Acoustic Research
(AR) toslink cables going right into
my Octane's optical I/O, wow this
is nice! 8 channels each direction,
24 bit precision, 48,000Hz sample
rate. This not only sounds amazing,
has very wide bandwidth for all those
channels, and looks cool... it's also
much less hassle when wiring up the
audio system! Two cables, click click,
and I'm finished. Also, it gets rid
of any possible humming, buzzing,
or other noise from grounding issues
& radiation elsewhere in the house.
Next,
I finally upgraded my ATi 3D Rage
IIc (yes..), to an ATi Radeon 9600
XT! While this isn't the best card
they make, I'm quite QUITE happy
with it's speed & stability
in Maya and other OpenGL apps in
general. I've had nothing but trouble
and bad luck with nVidia cards,
on many machines (home-built and
Dell factory built). My GeForce2
GTS had blown up a few months ago
(rather, the video filter circuit
blew up, and my ugly bypass rig-up
didn't seem to have an effect),
so I had to replace it with the
only AGP card I could find: an ATi
3D Rage IIc. Yuck. I spent months
in 1280x1024 hell, with no windowed
3D acceleration of any kind, and
agonizing slow 2D performance. Just
recently I went out to Best Buy
(because I had acquired a $50 gift
card at the store) to buy a new
3D card. To my dismay, they were
entirely sold out of every Radeon
except for the 9000 A-i-W. So, I
figured I'd give nVidia yet another
(6th?) chance and bought a GeForce
FX 5700 Ultra. When I installed
the thing and ran Maya, it crashed
left and right. Switching between
1 and 4 viewport mode caused 
Finally,
I'm adding a second SGI Octane to the
network as another dev workstation.
This one is an R12000, 270Mhz with 2MB
L2 Cache and 1GByte of ram. It also
has SE (ESI) series graphics. I've grown
to quite respect these machines a lot,
despite their old age (Mine are from
1998 and 1999). They are a breeze to
work on, very quick & responsive
systems. The OS is great, as well. Definitely
worth the investment. 
