Visual Workstation Rebrands

Stock image of a VW 230

Unlike the Visual Workstation 320 and its larger counterpart, the Visual Workstation 540, the other members of the line were rebranded PCs, as were all other SGI-branded PC and servers using x86 from before their sale to Rackable Systems.

Model Info

The 230, 330, and 550 models are essentially standard PCs and have the same capabilities and upgrade limits as other PCs of the time. The 230 and 330 are based on VIA chipsets, used socket 370 processors, and conventional SDRAM. The 550 used Slot 2 Xeon processors, the Intel 840 chipset, and RDRAM. The video cards these systems used are Nvidia AGP cards based on the Quadro 2 chipset, and differ from aftermarket Quadro GPUs in their drivers.

Operating System Support

These systems support all 32-bit x86 operating systems including Windows up to 10 32-bit edition, GNU/Linux i686 versions, and other 32-bit OSes. As it is a standard PC architecture, they are suitable for DirectX usage as well.