It looks like a real kludge.

Yeah, they did, although named as PF88 Extreme Hybrid.

They even offer support on their site for the board:

https://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWebSite/Product/Pro … 20-LL-Intel-RR-

Asrock also had a few boards like this, like the 939Dual-SATA2 that could be extended with AM2 upgrade board.

Typical 'Overdrive' type marketing trick: technically there is an upgrade path, but in the end actually using it would be more expensive and worse performing than just replacing the board in the first place (and that's assuming these monsters actually fit into your case...). However for the retro-connoiseur of weird shit, they are cool as hell 😉

Yeah, ASRock had a s.754 board that could be expanded to 939 as well, back in the days when they were into doing weird shit like that (and got a bad rep because of dodgy designs/performance).

That's kinda cool. I wouldn't mind having one just so I could say I have it.

Kinda further out there than the ASRock designs as those were all for the same brand of CPU.

ASRock even had a board that came with both 754 and 939 sockets right out of the box, no add-on upgrade boards required. I have one in my collection, but most of its capacitors are busted, so it's awaiting a complete recap before I can even test whether it works.

The K8 Combo-Z in all its beauty (not my picture):

I have a genuine fascination with things like this, things that have no right to exist and yet do. Their value at the time was questionable, much like dionb has already stated, however the engineering and "just cause we could" philosophy behind them is pretty cool.

Somewhat recently, ASRock made an x299 mITX board that's just insane once you start thinking about it and taking a closer look. Behold: https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/X299E-ITXac/index.asp
Very limited use cases, but fucking hell this is a thing of beauty. Now, if only they made a Threadripper board like that ... 🤣

Garrett W wrote:

Now, if only they made a Threadripper board like that ... 🤣

where do I sign up? 😁