In a desperate attempt to get me to take Xeon Phi seriously, Intel once sent me a free Xeon Phi server. I still have the thing, but because the boards were passively cooled, the server fans sounded like an F-14 (edited) trying to take off from an aircract carrier when I booted the thing up. I ended up extracting the Xeon Phis and using them in consumer cases with a much quieter fan blowing on them. It also weighs a ton, but I digress...
To be more pedantic, he said "trying to take off". I think an F-15 pilot who somehow found himself on a carrier deck and had to (try to) take off wouldn't hold anything back in the power/noise department. :)
I worked in oil and gas (Halliburton) for 12 years.
The amount of stuff we got in "for review", "for test", "preview", etc. was simply amazing. Even pre-production gear a lot of the times. I found a pair of Tesla cards just sitting in a box in an office I cleaned out one day... and I know we got a system with some Phi cards in it when they came out.
The most interesting thing I ran into was when cleaning out a facility after a move, we found a Dell Itanium-1 box that not only did Dell not want back, they wouldn't even admit to making it in the first place... It ended up going home with one of our devs...
Nice thing about being a sysadmin was that we would get "video cards and such from our developers who had just upgraded to the latest and greatest - and the stuff they were throwing out was only one or two years old.. so our own desktop workstations built with cast-off parts were pretty nice.
It wasn't really the sysadmins that got free stuff - it was department managers / tech leads, etc, that would get gear in for review to see if it fit with our workflow, processes, etc.
Us sysadmins just had to install/maintain it, and occasionally would "profit" when it was retired and the company/vendor didn't want it back.
Managed to build an entire multi-node NetApp cluster out of spare and retired parts one day when we were bored. Our NetApp rep said "I didn't see this, I don't know it's here, I don't know it exists, as far as I care it's a bunch of spare parts you just happened to put in a rack..." :D
