Visual Workstation 540

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A typical VW 540 setup including speakers and 1600SW display.

The SGI Visual Workstation 540 is an x86 workstation manufactured by SGI and designed to run Windows NT and GNU/Linux. The Visual Workstations are notable for their use of the Intel Pentium II and Intel Pentium III processors (rather than the 64-bit MIPS RISC architecture usually used in SGI computer products), but are fundamentally ARCS firmware systems regardless of their ISA used.

Hardware

The 540 is capable of taking 4 Slot-2 Pentium II Xeon or III Xeons with up to 2GB of system memory, shared between the GPU and CPU. Otherwise, it can take 3 3.3V PCI expansion cards. Architecturally, the COBALT graphics processor is related to the MIPS-powered O2 system.

Operating System Support

It was designed to run Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 as well as several GNU/Linux distributions.

Caveats

These systems are OpenGL-only. No DirectX support is provided for the COBALT chipset. All games will either run in software or OpenGL mode.

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