Join The Club
To badly paraphrase two Billie Eilish songs, when the party ends, where do all of the big tech PCs go? There are a few places that hardware can end up, beyond simply adding to the world's mounting piles of e-waste. For instance, one Redditor who works as an HVAC tech claims to have found a PC likely belonging to ex-AMD CEO Rory Read in a customer's basement.
Posting to the AMD subreddit earlier this week, user gazicoldfur shared pictures of what appears to be an Xigmatek XEN6329 Mini-ITX cube chassis covered in well-wishing signatures. One of the silver scribbles stands out, reading, 'To Rory, All the best from Team AMD, Lisa Su' (via Tom's Hardware).
Besides the handwriting here being comparable to Dr. Lisa Su's signature on some special edition Ryzen chips, a number of other details point to this genuinely being Read's parting gift. Gazicoldfur claims that the box they found it in looked like it had never been opened.
They write, "There was padding paper and foam holding it in place, plastics, shrink wrapped copies of Microsoft Office, and a Windows 8.1 installation CD-ROM. The computer itself is completely dust free—even the power cord was never unwrapped."
The customer, employing gazicoldfur's boiler installation services, had apparently bought the box at an auction years ago. The Redditor writes, "[He] used to own a computer shop and had a LOT of stuff downstairs from when it closed down in 2016. He said I can take whatever I want. I happened to notice an unopened AMD box."
I think i have Rory Read's (former CEO of AMD) PC from r/Amd
Hence, they've since cracked the AMD box open and shared pictures of its guts. The prebuilt features what is likely a teeny-tiny, Sapphire-supplied ITX variant of the AMD Radeon R9 285, which would date it to around the time Rory Read stepped down as CEO in 2014. Why Read seemingly never used the PC, and how it ended up at auction is anyone's guess.
What's also unclear is the current value of what some may consider a museum piece in hardware terms. That aforementioned cube chassis alone could set you back $1,000 on the aftermarket, to say nothing about the full prebuilt's most likely one-time owner. I personally enjoy a good vintage find, but that doesn't extend to hardware (much less GPU drivers of old). So, if it were me, I'd pass this on to a collector—for the right price.
1. Best overall:
HP Omen 35L
2. Best budget:
Lenovo Legion Tower 5i
3. Best high-end:
Corsair Vengeance A7500
4. Best compact:
Velocity Micro Raptor ES40
5. Alienware:
Alienware Area-51
6. Best mini PC:
Minisforum AtomMan G7 PT
