Ever fancied developing your own graphics card? Well, now you have the chance, at least if you have US$1,500 to burn. The Open source OGD1 graphics card is available for pre-order now, and if you're one of the first 100 to place an order, you even get a $100 discount.

So, what is it? Well. the OGD1 features a PCI/PCI-X interface and will work in both PCs and Macs thanks to this, and it has a pair of dual link DVI ports. The card has two programmable chips, a Lattice LFXP10 and an Xilinx Spartan-III XC3S4000; and it comes with 256MB of DDR graphics memory clocked at 400MHz. The RAMDAC is clocked at 330MHz and there's also a Conexant video decoder.

The card's power consumption is meant to be about 20W and it's passively cooled by a tiny heatsink. The problem is that the early cards are sold as "blanks," i.e., they're not functional and require code to be loaded onto them to be able to work; and this is where all the hard work has to be done to make a functional card.

If this is your cup of tea, then head over here to find out more.