SGI 230 Visual Workstation

Silicon Graphics, renowed for building highend graphical UNIX workstations, entered the Wintel world in 1999. Why? Competition. Here’s one of these results: A medium prices standard PC, in a SGI-branded tower-case.

Quick Links:

• Historic Overview
• Specs
• Gallery
• Downloads

Historic Overview

With the Wintel machines constantly catching up in performance and capabilities, Silicon Graphics was to enter the PC market to defend their markets. To result of this initiative was a series of shortlived graphical Windows/Intel workstations from a vendor, that traditionally did UNIX workstations in the premium segment.

Trying to compete in the PC market is said to have put additional pressure on Silicon Graphics. Firstly, they would build Intel machines. Secondly, they’d rely on Windows NT and later Windows 2000. Coming from a pure MIPS world, that was set around SGIs own IRIX operation system and an entire entourage of applications built aroud it, this was a major change by itself.
Thirdly, SGI machines where very expensive, ranging into the tens of thousands, sometimes even into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This price premium was hard to justify and garner in the PC market, that was dominated by Dell, COMPAQ, HP, and others at the time.

So SGI entered the market with a Wintel lineup, that was propably doomed to failure from the get go. But was this also because the system per se where bad?

Well, that depends on the viewpoint. The SGI 230 models, like it’s bigger brothers, the 330 and the 550 models, where pretty much standard PCs, sporting VIA (230/330) or Intel (550) mainboards chipsets with a traditional PC BIOS in combination with Intel Pentium III/XEON CPUs, in either single or dual CPU configurations, and a clock speed in the range of 733 MHz to 1 GHz. As all CPUs are socketed, they could be swapped by faster ones, and with full PC compatibility, these systems would even support to run Windows XP.

The 230/330/550 models are in fact the last bow from SGI to the Wintel world, as these systems were introduced in 2000/2001 to respond to competition and the price pressure. In fact, as opposed to their predessors, the term “workstation” is not well deserved for these later models.

Having said that, if it weren’t for the special SGI-branded case (tower form factor), one wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between these and any other standard PCs at the time. Still a collectible item, as it stands witness for this important bad sad chapter in Silicon Graphics decline.

If you’re after a real SGI “Wintel” workstation, that also deserves the name “workstation”, the SGI 320/540 should be it. These are build around an entirely different architecture, have the custom ARC firmware, are thus not fully PC compatible, and require a special HAL, that is officially only supported in Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. But that’s definitely another story.

Specs

The PHINTAGE Collection currently holds a SGI 230 Visual Workstation.

Gallery

Coming soon.

Downloads

Coming soon.