Good luck with that. You'll find the computer resellers won't be inclined to do anything other than recycle the lot of it, I suspect.

If you lived around here, I would suggest Kijiji or Craigslist, which I guess would be the equivalent of Gumtree. Perhaps you should look for a local Facebook or Reddit board?

Amibay, maybe? I might buy something there 😀

Sorry that you have to get rid of all that.

Don't sell everything, you'll regret it later. Keep a few of your favorite machines and some spare parts, at least.

There is one machine that I honestly don't think I will be able to sell I put a lot of effort and love into it. Seeking out specific parts to make the ultimate Super Socket 7 build, and then set it up with dual OS and all the best games of the era. K6-3 550Mhz, 256MB, SCSI HD's and VooDoo 2 SLI etc. It's a stellar little PC. I think that one has to stay. Also my entire Gainward / MSI graphics card collection (RED PCB'S!). Loads of ISA soundcards. There's loads I *want* to keep, but I simply can't because now the spare room is becoming a bedroom / playroom, there is nowhere else to put it all. Except the attic, which basically means I will never touch it. Seems a shame, all this stuff would be great to use and bench and build. I can't resign it to the attic, it would be like Toy Story 3.

I'll look into AMIBAY again. I browsed it last year and was impressed although listing this much stuff could be a potential nightmare, needs must. I know it's a very active forum. I'll scan Facebook too and see if there are any vintage / retro gear pages. For some reason, my city doesn't have it's own Craigslist. Even though we are the 7th largest city in England, we don't have one. The neighboring cities all do but they are 50 miles away.

I know once all this is gone I will probably never get my hands on most of these parts again. They are more rare every year. But it is what it is. I had my fun anyways!

Interested to see what you have, I may be interested in taking some of it off your hands.

m1919 wrote:

Interested to see what you have, I may be interested in taking some of it off your hands.

I see in your sig you have the Winfast A350 Ultra (FX5900). I have the exact same card! The one with the big shroud and angled fans. Awesome card it pulled really impressive scores when I benched it, even in comparison to my 9800pro.

I am compiling a HUGE list tomorrow, in a text file. It will take me all day but when it's done I'll post it to AMIBAY or something. I'll write back here to let you know it's up.

The best of lucks in recovering from your knee injury. I got a torn meniscus earlier this year and it wasn't pretty. Months and months of therapy and rehab and I'm just getting there.

I was pretty devastated. Been relatively injury free for years and one daft little jump took me down like a beached whale. I knew it was serious when it instantly tripled in size. Of course I left it alone, being a bloke, for ten days until I went to the doctors and he told me I should have gone instantly. Still he examined it and said I hadn't damaged the 3 major most important ligaments, so it looks like a minor one from the inside leg took the brunt. He also told me it could be a month or more, and theres little they can do because I'm not a footballer etc. The problem is I usually walk everywhere, some days 15 miles on my kids dance class days, and I enjoy walking. Now all I can do is hobble...

It's true that we take our bodies for granted until something goes wrong. I hope I get a full recovery and I hope you do too!

Iris030380 wrote:

m1919 wrote:

Interested to see what you have, I may be interested in taking some of it off your hands.

I see in your sig you have the Winfast A350 Ultra (FX5900). I have the exact same card! The one with the big shroud and angled fans. Awesome card it pulled really impressive scores when I benched it, even in comparison to my 9800pro.

I am compiling a HUGE list tomorrow, in a text file. It will take me all day but when it's done I'll post it to AMIBAY or something. I'll write back here to let you know it's up.

Very cool. I also have the WinFast A380 Ultra, another great card.

kikenovic wrote:

The best of lucks in recovering from your knee injury.

Also this.

Honestly don't sell everything but hold back a few real treasures and two or three systems so you don't get too much regret some point down the road only to rebuy when things are much more expensive.

Selling has been really hit or miss lately so good luck :s

nforce4max wrote:

Honestly don't sell everything but hold back a few real treasures and two or three systems so you don't get too much regret some point down the road only to rebuy when things are much more expensive.

Selling has been really hit or miss lately so good luck :s

I'll probably keep the SS7 machine. I found an awesome FIC PA-2013 motherboard with the 2MB cache in a recycle PC and bought six K63-450 CPU's brand new for it so I always had backups. It has everything I wanted to put into a SS7 machine, with brand new V2 SLI, Matrox Mystique and an Aureal Vortex etc. Runs like a dream, and housed in an awesome period case I restored. Scrubbed, primed, painted, waxed, buffed and sealed! Like a supercar! 🤣

But everything else will probably have to go, one way or the other. I was particularly proud of my gainward / msi graphics card collection from the AGP era, with all the red PCB's and awesome heatsink designs. Managed to get one of pretty much every card. Again, they would look great on the wall of my study / office .... if I had one. 🤣

I also think that you should pick one box / cartoon and put the most treasured items in that box. Remember, some of these items can be an investment too 😀

I never sold much, but I still feel that eBay is the simplest way. The retro computing market is tiny, so locally you might have a hard time finding interest.

But yea, though decision to make...

Thanks Phil.

It's difficult to know which parts are an investment. I am slightly out of touch as I stopped collecting a few years ago. Since then only things that have fallen into my lap have made their way into the storage room.

eBay is not an option for me, after someone tried to scam me out of an HD5970 I sold on there some years ago, I had to pull the listing, and as far as eBay is concerned it was a "sold" item and they wanted their percentage. I was forced to close my PayPal account because of this, and have never used eBay since. That HD5970 incident was just the last straw in a series of bad experiences, including a woman stealing a working motherboard from me (and taking her money back via PayPal) and posting me a broken one covered in dust, but in MY original box I had posted her my motherboard in! Again, eBay ruled in her favour, so I was down a motherboard and £45! There were more "incidents" and eventually I gave up on eBay / PayPal entirely. On a plus side, a fella from London ended up buying that HD5970 from me for £250 and simply forwarded me the money, which somewhat restored my trust of people a bit, so it wasn't all so bad.

I'm gonna stick with AMIBAY and local listings I think. It might take some time but with recovering sprained knee, I have time! 🤣

Sounds like a plan 😁

Ebay is a joke for actually selling merchandise; the site is heavily buyer oriented.

I have a massive collection of fairly rare hardware but will never actually do another sale through ebay; the fees are a ripoff. They even include shipping costs with the sale price to bloat the seller fees. Bunch of thieves.

Sold a quad socket-F board on there for 250 CAD, seller fee was around 25 bucks. The next item I put up I just allowed buyers to make an offer and did the final transaction privately. That's probably the last time I'll sell something through that site. Luckily I didn't get burned with the two items I did put up. There's also the listing fees, I got hit with them even when they said I was able to list some set amount of items "free" of charge.

I definitely need to look into selling on amibay. I actually may have an account on there but it's been a couple years probably since I've visited that site.

Iris030380 wrote:

It's difficult to know which parts are an investment. I am slightly out of touch as I stopped collecting a few years ago. Since then only things that have fallen into my lap have made their way into the storage room.

If you have anything dual-CPU, that stuff is pretty rare now and probably fairly valuable. Depends on what you have tho. The majority of my collection as far as motherboards and CPU go are workstation, server grade or high end from almost every generation on Intel and the AMD sides.

Anything dual-GPU seems to sell pretty well, even shitty old cards like the 9800GX2 will move if priced right.

Old Gravis cards and higher end Sound Blasters (AWE64 etc.) seem to go for high prices.

Pretty sure in it's infancy (and glory days) eBay was the best thing since sliced bread. After the downward spiral of Micro Mart, eBay was a true peoples marketplace. But like anything that is a good idea and involved masses of money being swapped around, eventually someone turned it into a shitfest and profited off it. It went downhill fast, and now it is plagued by much the same reasons that Micro Mart and Exchange of Mart eventually packed it : thieves and scammers.

Someone explained what I "should have done" regarding listing that HD5970. They said I made a lot of mistakes and left myself "open to scammers" which was why the bidding had spiraled out of control well past what it was actually worth, because the people bidding had no intention of having to pay for it. So I dodged a bullet, but I wasn't willing to slave over listing an item "properly and with precautions". I had a card, I wanted to sell it, I don't expect to be attacked by vultures in doing so. It was unreal, because I had used eBay a few years prior to that and had 40+ pleasant and easy transactions. Something had obviously changed during that time. So as the HD5970 started to hit over £370 in bids (ROFL!), I pulled the card, but eBay sent me an email saying I owed them a stupid amount of money from my "sale". Luckily I had nothing in PayPal at the time so I told them where to go and closed my PayPal account.

Anyways I've been sitting here for two hours now cataloging stuff. A lot of it I have to google to even tell what it is, and honestly I have some very strange and wonderful items here that I have no clue where I even got them. It's meticulous but I'm gonna get it all done. Coffee, cigarettes, music ... anti static bags, bubble wrap, camera, labels, google and DAMN I NEED AN ASSISTANT! 🤣

m1919 wrote:

If you have anything dual-CPU, that stuff is pretty rare now and probably fairly valuable. Depends on what you have tho. The majority of my collection as far as motherboards and CPU go are workstation, server grade or high end from almost every generation on Intel and the AMD sides.

You know I "found" (fml) in the corner of my PC stack a huge server I forgot I even had. Got it some years ago from a stately home that was refurbishing it's offices and it had been sitting in storage for a while. It's a dual XEON 2.8Ghz P4 system (I think...) with RIMMS and 6x35GB 15,000 RPM SCSI drives with the controller cards and everything. It weighs about as much as me.

Other than that I only have one dual CPU system, a Dell Pentium III SLOT1 system with a couple of P3-550Mhzs CPUs. Another giant heavy beast. I can't be posting things like that though. Postage alone would cost more than the machines, no doubt. So they will probably get broken for parts. Which is a shame, really.

Guys, I found a bag of original Windows 95 / 98se / 2000 CD's, in cases with product keys. They all look brand new. Also I found Windows 95 original floppy edition, along with Dos 6.22 originals (4 sets), Windows 3.1 and Dos 3. Are they worth anything?

Iris030380 wrote:

m1919 wrote:

If you have anything dual-CPU, that stuff is pretty rare now and probably fairly valuable. Depends on what you have tho. The majority of my collection as far as motherboards and CPU go are workstation, server grade or high end from almost every generation on Intel and the AMD sides.

You know I "found" (fml) in the corner of my PC stack a huge server I forgot I even had. Got it some years ago from a stately home that was refurbishing it's offices and it had been sitting in storage for a while. It's a dual XEON 2.8Ghz P4 system (I think...) with RIMMS and 6x35GB 15,000 RPM SCSI drives with the controller cards and everything. It weighs about as much as me.

Other than that I only have one dual CPU system, a Dell Pentium III SLOT1 system with a couple of P3-550Mhzs CPUs. Another giant heavy beast. I can't be posting things like that though. Postage alone would cost more than the machines, no doubt. So they will probably get broken for parts. Which is a shame, really.

I have a few machines like that I just bought for the internals alone and dumped the rest. Bagged an SGI 550 with dual P3 Xeon 1Ghz procs, 4x256MB RDIMMs, only reason I bought the machine was for the M29A motherboard, all the rest were extra toppings.

Same situation with my Dell Precision 620 MT, bought it only for the motherboard and RDIMM riser boards. Funnily enough in both the 620 MT and the SGI 550, the machines were pretty clearly dropped during shipping, but the hardware survived.

Lol, half my collection are dual slot-2 boards.