Almoststew1990 wrote:This week I sold about £15 worth of kit on eBay. I then saw a 'spare parts' job lot, starting bid of £15 delivered, and bid on i […]
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This week I sold about £15 worth of kit on eBay. I then saw a 'spare parts' job lot, starting bid of £15 delivered, and bid on it not expecting to get it. Aaaaand I won it as the only bidder 😒 !
Eugh... I can probably cobble together on working PC from this load of junk.... Right? Right guys?
It looks to be a 478 board (or maybe 423 I support, I've never actually seen one?) in the top left;
Reasonably late AGP GPU in the bottom left- any ideas what this is?
Slightly intrigued by the green GPU in the centre- looks a bit like my TNT2 actually..
There is a stick of SDRAM in the centre which suggests one of the boards might be older than S478
Well my pile of junk arrived today. Will the Gods of "used when pulled from a working machine" eBaying shine on me? Or will it be all be faulty pile of poo?
Things didn't start off very well when 'fragile' box arrived rather squished...
Although the seller had at least wrapped it well:
The first of the main bits; a S478 motherboard, clearly cherished by a loving previous owner:
It has a P4 3.00GHz, forgot to get the 5 digit intel code though!
Mystery motherboard. I can't find a model number on it, unless it is literally "Dublin" ? Much cleaner than the last.
This had a Socket 478 1.8GHz P4, and uses SDRAM. I also forgot to get the 5 digit intel code on this, but I remember it being an '01 chip at 1.75volts. Must be an early one!
GPU 1 turned out to be a 5700FX, points to the person who correctly identified it in this thread a few pages back! Again, it was so dirty I'm pretty sure I caught the bubonic plague cleaning it. The dust compacted into almost a cardboard like texture and had to be pulled out with my tweazers (.
GPU 2 turned out to be... I don't know! I Have a feeling it is a GeForce 2MX? No stickers on it and I can't get the enthusiasm to take the heatsink off just yet as I dislike pushpins. Much cleaner, and likely paired with the cleaner motherboard, given their likely close ages. I'll run GPU-Z later...
I also got, as advertised, a load of cables, IDE CD and DVD drives, a 2.5" SATA 80GB HDD, 60GB 3.5" IDE HDD, a PCI modem, a busted and a relatively complete Fujitsu Siemens laptop apiece, 2 powersupplies (both of which work quietly and appear clean, weirdly). The cooler for the other 478 board was present, as was 256MB of PC133 SDRAM for the older board.
Optimistically I cobbled a bunch of it together (instead of being sensible and using a known PSU and GPU) and tried the clean motherboard, after applying some fresh thermal paste. It booted first time, which was a nice surprise!
After cleaning the other board, I gave that a go with the other PSU. This also works fine, although the fan on the 5700FX is busted, very rattle-y and I guess a bearing is 'broken'. Easy enough to replace if I can find a suitable fan! It uses a simple two pushpin mount, hopefully shared by a lot of Nvidia GPUs of this era?
The 60GB IDE HDD Harddrive came with Windows 7 installed with a few enterprise-y programs, I guess for the stockmarket or something. It's lucky I'm not some kind of datathief!
Overall, I'd say that's a resounding success for an untested ebay job lot!
Ryzen 3700X | 16GB 3600MHz RAM | AMD 6800XT | 2Tb NVME SSD | Windows 10
AMD DX2-80 | 16MB RAM | STB LIghtspeed 128 | AWE32 CT3910
I have a vacancy for a main Windows 98 PC
