Octane Upgrades & Parts
Got some new parts in for the Octane today… an SE+TRAM graphics card with a bonus Personal Video (EVO) board included. I’m not so thrilled about the SE board (I already have one), but the TRAM board is nice because it now allows me to replace the bad TRAM on my MXI and finally get texture mapped 3D working on my Octane.
The Personal Video Option is cool for me mostly because it allows you to plug an o2 camera into an Octane. Now to find an o2 cam…
Also, I kind of splurged and bought two gutted Octanes on eBay after the seller agreed to cut the price. They arrived today as well and they are in the expected condition, so that’s nice. They both have PSUs and frontplanes and skins and that’s about it. One is missing the door, which is a bummer. They are a little scraped up and have some old stickers on them. We’ll see how well they clean up.
One of the salvage Octanes has SGI capital asset stickers on them which is interesting. The other nice bonus is that both machines came fully loaded with drive sleds which are expensive/difficult to locate. One was broken but the other 5 are in perfectly good shape, and have what appear to be original system/option drive labels on them. These machines are probably very early examples, dating from the first half of 1997.
To fill out the empty Octanes, I also grabbed a pair of old-model IP30 CPU boards with RAM and dual CPUs on them. Not really sure which CPUs or how much RAM will actually arrive on them, but I’m going to guess the CPUs are dual 195MHz R10000’s and the RAM will be somewhere around 1GB per board. If for some bizarre reason either of them have better CPUs I’ll migrate those into my main octane, put the two SE graphics cards in, LED mod the lightbars (they’re both burnt) and probably try to sell them. Once they are fully working/tested they’ll make decent collector machines even if they aren’t super pretty.