I’m a sucker for using things in a way they’re not intended, or modify things to be used in other ways. A while back a couple of different vendors on AliExpress started to sell these mobile socket 1528 cpus on socket 1151 plates and someone called them mutant cpus, so mutant hardware it is.
At the moment the most well known mutant hardware are the motherboards from ERYING but those are really not the first ones. Just the most complex ones
Oh, and of course the x79 and x99 Chinese motherboards that some of them use recycled parts from larger producers. Utterly brilliant. I wouldn’t use them for a production server, but if you’re low on cash and just need something to connect to the Internet with.
Maybe not so much mutant hardware as mutant in the mind is to repurpose thin clients. My mom needs a computer that can show web pages and play youtube movies so next time she need a new computer I’ll just give her a thin client with a mouse, keyboard, and a monitor.
Thin clients are seriously underrated.
Many of them have sata ports on board and m2 slots.
Coming stock they usually have a fair amount of ram but were capable of using much more.
They would easily boot from usb.
So they did have some surprising upgradeability.
Not entirely sure where these comes from, I find them sold as Topton, MiniTree and a couple of other names. These are 144x64x132mm (5.66x2.52x5.2") and you can get them with Xeon 1505M v5 to Xeon W-10885M and they handle ecc memory. 1) That’s a mobile xeon. 2) That’s a mobile xeon on a nanoITX board. (-ish) Trying to find if you can buy just the motherboard.
This motherboard, Minisforum BD77I it’s the same idea as the ERYING but it uses a mobile AMD cpu. It seems like Eyer Tec are the ones who produces the motherboards for Miniforum too.
Mobile Nvidias as graphic cards. (Not news, just adding to the list).
Craft Computing did a review a year ago but it seems like it’s gotten better since then. Now there’s a Frankenstein driver for both windows and linux that support the different mobile chipsets.
There’s similar RX 6600M too that has gotten pretty good reviews.
I’m waiting for Stable Diffusion to get better support for parallel rendering, then my love for mutant hardware will take over and I’ll buy one (or three since I have three x1 ports on this motherboard )
Maybe not mutant hardware, but mutant-ish. The China version of AMD’s RX 580 has slightly lower specs but is really cheap. Some clever person also figured out they could make it with 16GB vram. Might be useful if you’re on a budget and need lots of cram.
Not really mutant, but kind of. PCIe card to m.2 10GbE network card. But I see the point, not uncommon a case having an extra expansion slot. What’s that cable they use though? Is that a SFF-8087?
Just a picture of the adapter from the first post. This combo that gives you two 10GbE ports is $35 off ebay. I think the adapter card was released as GPL. I don’t think the guy behind the adapter made the bracket. It’s really simple but you usually have to pay like $5000+ to adapt the machinery to make them (or hire people who make them by hand).
Did I forget to post about these U.2 to PCIe adapter? There’s 1/2/4 version of them. They look super simple so I assume they need bifurcation support on the motherboard, but it’s a nice way to get a U.2 port, or make your own cache card.
During my undergrad era of peak MXM before it fizzled across OEMs, several companies tested the concept of using MXM for desktop ITX PCs to give it another life and then ITX/SFF moved to embedded GTX 800/900/10 series GPUs.
If you dig a bit online, there are several companies that make laptop dGPUs in PCIe for SFF/ITX but thermally the it’ll be squished more than the reduced bit bus of RTX 4000 series. Performance curve of a mobile RTX 4080 in PCIe is more like a desktop 4070 non-Ti.
I’ve seen several industrial boards that have both PCI and ISA with the last ones being Intel 9th gen, I guess some folks are still using dongles or very old stuff that used midi/gameport in some abstract usage. Strangest usage I’ve seen on ISA slots had been a company that passed through CRT touchscreen via gameport/midi
It seems like those are pretty simple, but they only seems to support MXM up to 3.0. The Nvidia Tesla M6 (8GB) and P6 (16GB) both uses MXM 3.1 so I don’t know if they’d work with an adapter. But you can get an M6 for $25 and x1 PCIe to MXM adapter for $25. Then we just need Stable Diffusion et. al to support parallel generating and we’re rocking
Oh wow, this was even more mutant than the other cards I’ve seen.
That is pretty cool. I recently acquired a nvidia v100 sxm2 module for an art project, but once that display has finished it might be good to put it back to use.
I’m not sure if this will fit your definition of mutant, but there is a lot of interesting hardware at
A lot of edge compute and sensing hardware, maybe something takes your fancy
Again, since I’m the one deciding what is and isn’t mutant hardware, I decide this Alftel board is a mutant. It uses a PEX chip so it’s expensive, and as most things with PEX chips it seems like it’s not in production any longer. The PEX 8619 makes x16 out of x1 through magic and fairy dust.
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