A couple days ago, Aurora showcased an interesting eBay listing for a prototype of a PS Vita, up for sale for $20’000. This prompted a lot of replies from folks in the community who pointed us to other peculiar listings for consoles.

Console prototypes can be interesting in some cases, as they can ship with slightly different functionality from the retail models. In the case of the PS Vita, this meant support for SD cards and an HDMI outputs. This sometimes can mean unreleased versions of the system firmware, additional RAM, or more.

One such example is this PS3 prototype, which on the surface does not seem anything different from a typical PS3 slim, except for the Model code (DEH-GH2000JS-D) and the fact this it clearly states on the back “not for sale”. We’re far from the $20’000 asked for the PS Vita prototype, then again this particular PS3 model does not look very different (in design or functionality) from an actual PS3.

Another example (and this time, reasonably priced) are those regular PS3s which were allegedly used by the military, for a cluster of Cell CPUs at an affordable price (see Condor Cluster). Honestly though, there’s probably nothing special about these consoles except the fact that the hard drive’s missing.

Last but not least, this alleged prototype of a PS3 Super slim (code DEH-ML00AK-G) has a pretty original, if bulky, look. For a cost of about $5000, it easily makes it to the “let me sleep on it” list for impulse online purchases.

I of course cannot guarantee that any of the items listed above are what their sellers say they are. If you are actually considering buying some of these from eBay, make sure the seller is serious!

Thanks to everyone who’s been sending those our way, keep’em coming!