A couple months ago I was at my local electronics salvage place when I came across a 12 year old server that was so fucked up that I had to buy it, and then spend $500 turning it into a workstation desktop.
Why yes, those cpu fans are zip-tied to the heatsinks. And yes, that is a PCIe USB3 card mounted at a 90-degree angle and held in place with zip ties, because that’s the only way you can fit two PCIe cards in this Tyan motherboard. And yes, that is a blu-ray drive connected via a mini-SAS breakout cable, because there’s like 1 SATA port. The Blu-ray drive shows up in the BIOS as a RAID device, but it seems to work.
And if you’re wondering, under those heatsinks are two AMD Opteron Bulldozer CPUs, with 16 cores and a max clock of 1.8ghz. No it is not fast.
I spent $1000 on this, and I love in a sad sort of way, like it’s a 3-legged cat I found at a shelter.