Firstly you should lay down some definition of rare.

For really rare stuff I'd say:

1. sells for more then when it was new
2. gets listed maybe ones or a couple of times a year on eBay

By that definition I might only have a few rare items out of hundreds by #2 and none at all by #1.

I own a Voodoo 5 5500 AGP 4x Prototype, that is probably the rarest thing I own. The original owner is on vogons here too.
http://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/File:Vood … x_Prototype.jpg

For me rare is hard to find and hard to replace when it turns defective.

I have a few more that will be very hard to replace, especially since i never use Ebay. But I think the rarest is the voodoo5 5500 pci Mac edition in original box.
But it took me a lot longer to find my first v4 4500 and i still never found the v4 pci.

More and more stuff i have gets rare, Things that were very easy to find 4-5 years ago are now unoptainable almost.

I don't think I have anything that would be considered rare by most folks here. The closest would be a Pentium Overdrive 200MMX cpu and Voodoo3 2000 PCI.

For me it is not a PC piece of HW but something else of my computing collection. A SWTPC 6800 (working). A DEC PDP-11/23 (working). A Lear Siegler ADM 3a (working). A Magnavox Odyssey (third production year) (working). A Heathkit H89 (working) for which also I have the CPM disks hard sectored. While I have good coverage in PC world, I have nothing rare really 🙁

Edit: some links.

A ThinkPad 701cs... or two.

kixs wrote:

For really rare stuff I'd say:

1. sells for more then when it was new

This is a great rule of thumb. I've found that in the retro console world, this happens all the time. In the retro computing world, not so much. Even uncommon pieces such as a CIB Voodoo5 PCI probably will not command what it did back in the day. AWE32 cards retailed for around $200 in their heydey, and you'd be lucky to go over that amount today. Even a NIB Adlib card just sold at auction (not BIN) on eBay for less than $200. I have a CIB Creative Music System that isn't worth as much now as it was new.

I recongize that something can be rare without being valuable, but I think it matters how much an item is in demand.

It's either GeForce 7900 GX2 (ie. 7950 GX2 prototype), or P4 EE 3,46GHz "Gallatin" for LGA 775.
Not sure which one is more rare...

I have an IBM 6x86-PR120 (100MHz) and a K6-2 337 (with IBM P/N 38L3054, like this one).

I can't find either of these on Ebay right now, so that's good enough for me.

My own personal PC hardware treasures:

Yamaha SW60XG

Gravis Ultrasound ACE

Turtle Beach Cancun FX

I have 2x original SIMMConns. Sure, lots of *us* have them but the designer came on here and said he only made 500 pieces, so I'd call that rare. 😉

Other stuff - 2xGUS PnP, an ATI Stereo F/X CD (did you know ATI made sound cards??) and a bunch of ISA scientific datalogger / interface cards that probably have a production run in the low thousands but I have absolutely no use for.

Retail hardware:

Club3D VolariDUO V8 Ultra in original box (When I bought this 10+ years ago I knew it would be a rare item, but I never thought it would be as rare as it is today)
AMD K6 233ANR with big K6 logo
NexGen Nx586 P90
Paradise Bali 32 Not sure if it's really obscure but I seldomly see these popping up (and it's a great little 1995 PCI card!).
AMD Athlon '1000' ('Classic' Slot A with Orion core).

Prototype/Engineering sample
Athlon64 1.4GHz ES ('Athlon HX') on AMD Solo 5 test-motherboard
GeForce FX 5800 Ultra 'built-by-nVidia'.
XGI Volari V8
ATi Radeon Mobility M9-P with various debugging connectors, LED's and VGA, DVI + DFP.
3Dfx Voodoo2 6MB

I have more including some special Intel, 3dfx and ATi samples (including ATi Rage 6) but I think the ones mentioned above are in the top list of rarity.

Whenever time, money and patience are 'just right' then ...
Paradise Tasmania3D, PowerVR Midas3, PowerVR Neon250, Apocalypse 5D sonic, 3dfx Voodoo 5 6000, 3dfx Rampage, XGI Volari 8600, Creative 3D Blaster VLB, AMD Athlon XP with external L2-cache, AMD 'Stretto', Gravis Ultrasound, Adlib Gold 1000, OAK Warp 5 ... some much!

For me its my fully boxed Paradise Tasmania 3D

Only two cards are known to exist

The very first laserdisc player ever made

I used to own a prototype, pre-release Sound Blaster CT1320; a boxed 1987 Adlib, and a boxed Creative Music System/Game Blaster, but sold them all last year. I wasn't doing anything with them and they were just sitting in storage, so better to pass them on to others who might enjoy them.

I don't think I have anything particularly rare any more.

Do engineering samples count?

I still got a presumably working ES VC820 which features 3 memory slots instead of the 2 all retailed board got (Rambus turned out to not really work very well with more than 2 memory modules back then), it was even too unstable to install an OS on even when using those RAM terminators.

For the rest I don't think I actually have any really überrare stuff, or it's simply not that interesting.

I don't think I have many rare items.

My Mediatrix Audiotrix Pro is one of them, but the Effects daughterboard for it is even rarer. My Miro Sound PCM20, and probably some more stuff if I put some effort to recall everything I have.

I also had the 24MB AWE64 memory expansion, at some point 3 Turtle Beach Pinnacle Project Studio (complete) and some other random stuff.

Edit: I do have a Powerleap PL-IP3/T too. 😀

Tetrium wrote:

Do engineering samples count?

I still got a presumably working ES VC820 which features 3 memory slots instead of the 2 all retailed board got (Rambus turned out to not really work very well with more than 2 memory modules back then), it was even too unstable to install an OS on even when using those RAM terminators.

For the rest I don't think I actually have any really überrare stuff, or it's simply not that interesting.

Didn't you have a quite rare cyrix 486/586?

The only rare computer item I own is for the Mac Tokamac II FX 68040 PDS card for the Mac IIfx, never seen another for sale.

I do have some 486DX upgrades for an IBM PS/2 model 80 if that counts and some IBM 3363 WORM drives for PS/2 machines.

How about some MIRO Video 20 DT cards (Tsent ET 4000 2MB VLB cards with TV tuner and video capture built in)?