Is my boss nuts or is it me ???

[WHATif]

I have an AMD Athlon 1.33 GHZ machine(266FSB)....with 768mb of RAM( At home).

My collegue at work has a Silicon Graphics machine ....model no-320.It has a PII CPU inside.
Anyway the collegue is fed up of the machine as it is slow as hell. I suggested my boss to buy a similar AMD machine as my private home computer.
My boss thinks that in 3d or 2d work my home machine can't compete with the SGI 320 ...PII based machine. Surely he is talking bollocks ?????
Can you guys throw some light.

 

[Rickten]

SGI, he's probably right. Aren't those things built with graphics soley in mind. He probably has a real good video card for 3d rendering and stuff.

 

[Keego]

Never argue with the boss

 

[neuralfx]

ya, he's just seeing the SGI name, obsolete hardware, is obsolete hardware, i dont know what vid card u have in ur machine, and what exact one the SGI is using, but ur box should no-doubt be able to outperform that particular sgi, is it running Irix?..
-neural

 

[ECUHITMAN]

yep he's crazy. I guess your boss has never read a single report about AMD. Other than if you got a really really low end graphics card (I am talking like an old 3dfx voodoo 1000) with that processor and that chip there is NO WAY that old comp could even hold a candle to it.

 

[Helznicht]

Be careful, the video hardware in those machines are designed to work with paticular software packages.

 

[neuralfx]

Nasa just replaced an aging $100,000 VAX system, thats managed by Cal-Tech, which is for training army officers in battle simulation, with a $4,000 beefed up Athlon 1.4 rig with Redhat 7.1.. the people said that the vax just couldnt keep up with the Athlon/RH system in high fidelity terrain mode.. so its very possible that ur box could smoke that particular sgi box.. it is an older one obviously..
-neural

 

[Ben]

I all depends. It that environment the name of the game is graphics so it depends heavily upon the video card. SGI probably has a proprietary video card they put in that machine that may or may not be faster than, say, a GeForce3 for example. And I mean faster at what the workstation is designed to do, not faster at Quake3.

 

[CQuinn]

Rickten makes a good point.

What exactly is that workstation being used for?

Your Athlon may be the central point of a good system,
but the SGI workstation are built around the idea that the video capabilty
is the center of the universe. If you are going to recommend a PC
based system you need to be aware of what the SGI's are capable of in comparsion.
Keep in mind that even the 320's graphics bandwidth is hyped at roughly 3 times
AGP4x.