> and digital/analog(ntsc) video out are all extremely cheap
> nowadays.
He wasn't talking about the games-oriented NTSC out fom the framebuffer. He was talking about a professional quality system that lets you output *and* input from reps. to graphics *and* memory/disk, at full-frame rate.
No, cards that do this (at YUV 4:2:2, 10 bits) are not cheap.
And no-one is shoving the Silicon Graphics 1600SW down your throat, even though many people I know (personally, not professionally) are willing to add that $2.5K to their generic PC now that they've seen one (well, most of them do some desktop publishing, granted).
> I think I will just save $4k and go witih 80% functionality.
Well, if you don't *need* the features of the Silicon Graphics Visual Workstations, yes, you may want to buy something else for those Excel spreadsheets (even though one person in this office really liked Excel on a Silicon Graphics 1600SW, she might also have liked the flat panel with a number nine card in a generic PC). That doesn't surprise me at all. The business model doesn't require SGI to grab 70% of Dell's market either ;).
Saving $4K will be hard -- with 128MB of memory, one Pentium II-350, and the official SGI 17" (and if you don't mind that a monitor has a different colour, and don't care about dot pitch, contrast, and horizontal frequency, I'm sure you can go *very* cheap there and get a faster PII or more memory), *very* hard ;). |
