About a year ago I purchased a 3COM 3C597-TX card from the USA at a very good price but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to install the card in the Silicon Graphics Indigo 2 before the power supply broke.
This card is an EISA 100MB network card. Standard networking on the Indigo 2 only stretches to 10MB. The alternatives (from wikipedia) are:
10Mb on-board LAN interface, 100Mb LAN options were available from 3rd parties, either via EISA or GIO64 expansion cards. The two most known and widely used Indigo2 network cards are 3Com 3C597-TX 100Mbit EISA Card, and the Phobos G160 GIO64. The second one offers better overall performance due to using the superior GIO64 bus, which also has the effect of reducing the CPU utilization due to DMA transfers.
I thought I’d use installation of the card as a general excuse to take some photos of both the exterior and interior of the box, so here goes!
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- In flat configuration. The Indigo 2 can be installed either flat like this or on two sturdy feet in an upright configuration (see later picture)
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- The power button, reset button, CD drive and hard drives are all accessible behind the flip down front cover.
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- In order to remove the cover there are two push tabs on the left and right.
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- The cover then lifts free.
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- … revealing the CDROM and hard drives. These are mounted on caddies with a lever which can be used to remove the drives.
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- Two other tabs allow the top cover to be removed. This is the one on the left.
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- This is the tab on the right.
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- The top cover then pivots up. The case is held together at the back by two hooks in the top cover.
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- Here you can now see the top of the CDROM and the to of the two hard drives. These are 50 pin SCSI drives.
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- Top cover can then be lifted clear.
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- Power supply is top right, graphics and expansion card cage on the left.
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- Access to the expansion cards is via a fold down door on the left. There is a little metal tab which lifts out before the door can be lowered.
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- Door open allowing cards to be removed and inserted.
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- I’ve removed the graphics card here. You can see the EISA slots on the left and the GIO64 slots on the right with power connectors for GIO64 cards in the middle.
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- Here you can see the 3com network card installed in the bottom EISA slot. This is the recommended configuration, presumably to allow maximum airflow across the top of the graphics card.
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- Graphics card being inserted. It’s a beast! Note both the power and GIO64 connectors.
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- Graphics card re-installed.
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- This is like a pitot cover for expansion cards. Not sure what purpose it really serves!
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- Installation of the card lock. Maybe it just ensures that all cards are fully inserted before you power the machine back up again. That would make sense.
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- With the card door closed. Ready for the top cover.
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- 3COM 3C597-TX 100 MB EISA Network Card. Note the extended card connector – you have to ‘double push’ the card to get it to seat properly.
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- 3com 3C597-TX box contents (excluding card)
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- 3com 3C597-TX back of box
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- 3com 3C597-TX front of box
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- The Indigo 2 in upright configuration
Post installation there is some additional work to do. The card itself doesn’t come with any drivers, but if you do a google search you come across some initial information on Alex’s SGI page. This tells of a company called Phobos that sold a re-badged 3C597 with some ROM changes for a substantial premium. It is possible, by following the instructions on Ian Mapleson’s website, to install a patched set of drivers which bypass the ROM restrictions and allow a vanilla 3COM card to be used. The drivers are patched into the kernel which then requires a reboot. As I found out the driver is also sensitive to which EISA slot the card is plugged in to.
Anyway, after all this everything is working very nicely, and although with the EISA bus I won’t get full 100MB it will be substantially better than the standard 10MB ethernet device.
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