CompuServe Messages

Mike, Mark and everybody else, The new SGI Indy is not quite what the press releases seem to describe, and the real 'street price' is in actuality 8 to 10 times the ballyhooed $4995! We have been intensely evaluating the Indigo and Indigo-2 SGI machines and the Maui Research and Technology Center has just committed to buying several (probably 6) Indigo-2s. During this evaluation we became familiar with the Indy specification. The machine is very powerful – compared to a 68040 based Amiga or Mac or a 486. Its R4000 RISC CPU places it well in front of the Pentium-based machines running Unix or Windows NT. But at $5000, the machine can't get out of its own way. Like the early Amigas it doesen't have anywhere near enough RAM to function. For the kind of programs that one buys such a machine, 32 megs is not a lot and 64 to 128 is a nice comfortable figure. And RAM for the Indy costs $90-100 per meg! Other significant 'peripherals' such as monitors, drives, add-in boards, and the like are very expensive. And then there's the software. Whew! 3D modeling and animation packages start at $8000. Right – eight _thousand_. A page layout program roughly equivalent to Quark Express is $2900. Photoshop is $1100. Adobe Illustrator is about the same. To give you some perspective, my graphics prepress workstations are Macs. A well equipped 800 Quadra with 96 megs of Ram, a 24 bit 15" monitor, about 500 megs of hard drives, running Quark, Photoshop, and Illustrator weighs in at about $7000. It is a good performer, everything works well and I get _gobs_ of work done on it. A similarly equipped Indy costs $30,000! And (parodoxically) the software is not all that dependable. Bugginess in software and hardware is inversely proportional to its cost. Of course if you need the power of the R4000 processor, then the SGI is the way to go. No Mac or PC can touch it in terms of sheer processing power. And its operating system and proprietary graphic software are the best. But this machine [ MORE ]