Is an engineering sample motherboard from Intel worth anything?

[kourama]

I have an internal engineering development motherboard from Intel that was part of a lab cleanout when they closed their lab nearby. AI was raving about how much Intel fans are interested in this kind of thing. It's a LGA1366 board with 3-channel DDR3, special clocking buttons on the board and a 'boot-to-BIOS' switch on the IO cluster (again, according to AI). It doesn't have a CPU or RAM. When I got it the southbridge chip didn't have a heatsink and the heat paste on it was Mesh-Reinforced Phase Change Material (PCM), apparently. After cleaning it off, I could read the ID and it wasn't anything special, just a standard off-the-shelf southbridge chip.

I added it to a lot of vintage PC parts and random junk from my closet on a Toronto local ad in kijiji, but that place is mostly dead. I was considering putting it up on the buy & sell board here, but I thought I'd gauge interest here first.

I saw a lot of messages about scammers in the buy & sell section, so I can take pictures from multiple angles to prove it's legit, or we can just meet in Toronto if you're nearby. If it's just junk, I'll put it out with the e-waste collection stuff.

thanks

[RoGeorge]

Please don't post sell announcement here.  Post in the sell/buy section when you plan to sell something:  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/

Overall, an engineering sample will worth less than any normal LGA1366 motherboard.

Often engineering samples can be incomplete, with large areas not functional (for example when they were produced only to be used for partially test/develop certain drivers and such), or may have hidden hardware bugs to be discovered and fixed only later, in production versions of the same board.

At best, an engineering sample would work normally, except it won't have the normal 1-3 years warranty of a shop buy.

[DiTBho]

in my opinion: no

This seems the kind of thing that either ends up on eBay or Aliexpress ... and I think it might be worth the small amount of money you pay, but it's not worth the time you have to spend working around the bugs or other defects.

They're all the rage right now; I've seen Intel Ultra chips on Aliexpress, selling for 1/30th of the list price.

Bargain? Well ... there are even people on YouTube proclaiming themselves "geniuses" for macking a PeeeeCeeee with these things, but ... leaving aside the fact that they are energy inefficient, to the point that they need to be cooled with a "wall of fans", i.e. giant heatsink with 3 fans 22", something that looks really "tacky" (and needs a custom case, I guess...), I seriously doubt are actually used in production because they're unstable and potentially prone to disaster.

my 50cent 

[kourama]

My primary goal is to get rid of junk, and I will put my lot on the buysellwanted board, but there's no point in loading it up with e-waste. Still, I suppose that's a conversation for the other party on the other board. Thanks for the feedback.

[RoGeorge]

In case you can't sell it, and don't find any use for it, you may want to harvest a few parts before tossing it to recyclable e-waste.

For example, I usually desolder the power MOSFETs (those around the CPU socket), maybe some other components goodies, too, like the voltage regulator coils, connectors, CR2032 battery socket, etc.  Those might come handy for future electronics projects.

[sparkydonkey]

I don't even see any use for that sort of engineer samples either, especially as it isn't a prototype aka nothing unique to actually differ this board from a more stable production board

[Thomas Ballantine]

Probably the most valuable thing is the contents of its BIOS, might be worth extracting

[coromonadalix]

why dont you post a photo   to show us ?

[Haenk]

I assume this was used for CPU testing - i.e. bugged, clocked down prototype/development CPUs. If it uses a standard (release) chipset, the major advantage is: You can likely install and use cheap "ES" (engineering sample) type CPUs from ebay/Aliexpress. *However* - as this is a DDR3 board - those are extremely outdated, and other than "fun" reasons, no one would use these. Might still have some value for collectors though. I would try ebay with a low starting price.