Oh this is one of the press/review samples. They're the only ones that got the shroud stickers. These pop up on eBay every now and then, but they're not exceptionally common.
Heeeey yeah an even earlier board! What does the BIOS say and what dates are there on the BIOS/ASIC/board? Definitely cool! I still regret selling mine all those years ago.
Speaking of engineering samples...
Here's a neat one I found while browsing eBay. Another early RV670!
View attachment 199900View attachment 199901View attachment 199902View attachment 199903View attachment 199904
This card is warped, scraped, missing parts, and totally inoperable in its current state so no BIOS dump yet. This ASIC is actually from the same lot as my 2950 Pro, but dated a week earlier. That makes this the earliest dated RV670 ASIC yet to be found on a completed board! With a date of 29th week 2007 this ASIC was cut and fused a mere
9 weeks after the 2900 XT (R600) launched to market, and
18 weeks before RV670 itself would appear as the 3870 (ignoring the 2950 phase and rumors from September 2007, I already mentioned all that in my 2950 Pro post ages ago.) That paints a very interesting picture for the end of R600's developmental life; 55nm RV670 ASICs being nearly in ATi/AMD's labs at the same time the beleaguered R600 was still being prepared for its debut. This is mostly interesting as it really punctuates how long R600 languished in development hell starting all the way back in October 2006 with the first delivery of A11 revision chips to ATi. In summary: It took so long for R600 to get to customers that its die-shrink/tweaked replacement on an entirely new unproven node was functionally ready for assembly testing and internal qualification. Imagine the alternate timeline of ATi/AMD scrapping R600 entirely after 6 months of rumors and just shipping RV670 with the original [R600] promised clocks of 800/1000 on a dinky board with that single 6-pin. (Although I kinda think R600s incredible stumble is what led to RV670s success in a way. Even with the same architectural problems, it was shown to be a substantial improvement. Without R600 there to compare to I think RV670 would have been very poorly rated by reviewers.)
Add in ATi's internal turmoil after the AMD buyout and there's probably a hell of a story hiding in there somewhere.
Works great, runs passively the vast majority of the time, with the 140mm fan I stuck to it just turning on occasionally. I used to have two on my CF 4850s back in the day. Still have the second one lying around too, should try to find a use for that as well!
