I just purchased an Xbox 1 Alpha Dev Kit off of ebay. It doesn't include the HDD or the RAM, but for 35 dollars, I thought 'what the hay', and went ahead and bid. I need to know what type of RAM is installed on the Alpha Kits, and how big the HDD needs to be.
Man,thats one hell of a deal you got there,nicely done:thumbsup: OE is the guru is this subject,also I do know you can install windows on the alpha kit if you want,thats if your lacking the recovery disc.
I actually have a complete breakdown of the parts list for building a Alpha kit as i was going to attempt to build one from scratch, but never got round to it, so i shall dig it out and let you know As far as i know, any HDD will work, but you will need to run the recovery disc on it to install and format it Ram wise, i think its just standard P-SDram, any old 128mb stick should suffice What i find strange is that the one you won has a ATi GFX card installed, as the alphas generally use a Nvidia Geforce derivative, there is a specific one that can be used but i cant recall off the top of my head which particular one it is Also if the one you got does not come with a pci slot USB card, you will need to get one of those as the onboard USB ports will not work for alpha kit usage As well is the sound card using the AMR slot or PCI? as as i recall it should be a AMR slot soundcard Hope that helps DD
If any Alpha kits survived intact, a few of them were actually converted into PCs so the fact it doesn't have an Nvidia card installed isn't that unusual. What DD says however is true in regard to the RAM. It also has an internal Floppy drive, but I honestly cannot remember the size of the HDD off the top of my head, but it was a bog standard IDE type. Nothing out of the ordinary. Well done btw - $35 is a fantastic bargain. Here's the specific Nvidia card Here's the specific Audio card Shows the correct position of components
Here's a link to the full correct official spec... http://oldengineer.com/gallery/v/mxb/axbd/xdkalphawithbits.html Note: that it uses 'expensive' RDRAM, not just any old RAM. ...Also you must use a 20gb HDD, or partition a larger HDD to 20gb EXACTLY, as the recovery bootloader does a byte-by-byte security check to ensure its being loaded onto the correct drive.
Didn't know that about the security check on HDD - interesting. Saw the eBay image and the sound card looks like the correct one.
I just checked and everything looks the same to me except for the graphics card. I have a question though, has anyone ever seen an alpha kit with a front showing the floppy disc drive? I messaged the seller, and he said that it came from the factory like that. Thanks for everyone's help.
OE will surely correct me if I am wrong, but I've only ever seen the Floppy Drive actually INSIDE the casing and the rest of that facade looks like a replacement one to me.
I've only seen them with the Floppy Drive on the inside too, I guess it's the hardware that counts though. The strage thing is that everything else is authentic.
Ouch, yeh someones removed the aluminium front panel, which isn't easy, as it's bonded to the plastic shell! BTW the floppy drive would originally of faced inwards, not outwards.
