Rare, Strange, or Downright Interesting Hardware Thread

This thread is all about that weird piece of tech you found, or maybe own, that you’d like to share.

Non exclusive to PC hardware!

I posted this in the lounge earlier, but I’ll post it up here too. This AMD Socket G3 blank sample chip from around 2008.

Could simply be a machanical sample (I.E. blank PCB with pads and an IHS) but if this exists there must also exist a motherboard… And the 800 series chipset did support the necessary I/O to interface with this chip, since AMD dropped the project pretty late.

Cray T3E compute Module, one or the Rare Water cooled ones

various ES GPUS:
GTX 680:

GTX 460 or gts 450 i forget that i gave most of the ones i had to @Fouquin

By far the rarest I’ve had is when i got two ES Quadro K6000s that were dated very early for kepler. pic below.

DFI ITOX CT132-B

image

PGA478M (Merom) socket mini-ITX board with PCI, PCI-E 1x, and PCI-E 16x; as well as SATA, IDE, and 1.44MB floppy. There are less feature rich E-ATX boards than this little guy.

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Could be a neat little DOS or legacy machine :thinking:


ATi Radeon X850 XT Platinum AGP. One of the very last designed-for-AGP enthusiast class graphics cards (before they switched to using AGP-PCI-E signal changers on the back of the cards).

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Huh. Neat.

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Oh hey look at that, he finally put the video up. Been helping him get the card running with the proper settings in benchmarks for a couple weeks.

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the Giga Accel 180 fixstars cell/be x8i accelerator
its a card made for ps3 development and render
2 of the cards when used right can fake a quantum computer while from 2006 this card FUCKING BEATS EVERYTHING I HAVE AT h264/5 encoding its a nightmare to actually get it to do anything but once you build everything its a dream for real time rendering

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neat

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my sun penguin card, a slot pc amd geode for running windows as a guest os beside solaris
has vga, usb audio on the back, parallel and serial on the card with some cables
is in my ultra 60 with them 2 ultra sparcIIis

my 2 pentium 3 xeon slot cpus, 550mhz with 2mb of l2(each) has cool holographic sticker with the die shot on it, and the ultrasparcIIIi slot configuration, has extra cache, vrm and stuff on the card too i didnt disassamble(had 2)

random vrm modules for the workstation i pulled the cards from

some pci-x>3 pci thing

pictures ended up shitty need more light still :X lel gotta stop ordering dumb expensive stuff so i can order camera lights so it can do faster exposures

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A bunch of us retro enthusiasts convinced Anthony to archive those preproduction drivers. Quite a few of those cards are actually in the wild with no way to run them outside their original environment.

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here he goes again lol

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So I think Anthony has been lurking in a few retro hardware channels and is calling the shots on these videos. Kinda sucks for the small guys who have been doing these kinds of things for awhile. Now anything ‘rare’ will get snapped up by LTT and the used market for old parts is blowing up.

I mean it would’ve happened anyway, even some other the more niche youtubers can influence pricing pretty hardcore. Doesn’t make it any less annoying though.

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Reason i hated linus doing anything about the g5 power mac cases a kid gutted a xbox360 developer g5 and reddit bout killed the kid was right after linuss “fastest mac pro” he didnt even put a power 9/10 system inside to bullshit “haha modern power mac”

AMD’s alternative reference design for the R9 390X. Not a ton of development history about this one, just a cool design that they only made a couple of and never shipped. Didn’t go to AIBs as far as I know, this card came directly from the Markham office. Runs cooler and much much quieter than the blower reference design, has a shorter PCB and a much more dense VRM layout.

GTX 1070 sample. March/April 2016 with unfinished shroud. Forward shroud has Titan X Maxwell rough textured finish, rear with fan housing in the white entirely unfinished. Running QS firmware from 2017, supposedly used as an internal BIOS test vehicle.

Engineering sample of the unreleased Radeon Pro V7350x2. Dual Polaris 10 with 16GB GDDR5 per GPU, nearly identical to Radeon Pro Duo (Polaris). Slightly different PCB from the others with a custom FPGA on the back.

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would my ipods and cube g4 + crts considered “rare” imo. not yet but i have alot of info and collection knowledge
dunno do yall want me to make a comprehensive post over it ?
should it go here?

You could make a thread about all the older tech you have :smiley: and organize it however.

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