I have a friend that has made some small guitar amps with psu cases. He used salvaged speakers from broken radios and placed them where the fans were; then added the input, circuitry, a 9v battery, etc. He also made some effect pedals in a similar fashion I think.

Dunno, I usually salvage only the fan, the fan grill (if it has one) and perhaps some cabling

I'm not handy with a soldering iron so after I salvage the fan and grill, I usually toss the rest.

fantasma wrote:

I have a friend that has made some small guitar amps with psu cases. He used salvaged speakers from broken radios and placed them where the fans were; then added the input, circuitry, a 9v battery, etc. He also made some effect pedals in a similar fashion I think.

That sounds almost like a work of art! 😁

You could probably rig one as a one-time use defibrillator.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Or should I just bin this thing and not worry about it?

YES. Bin it. Walk away. End the madness.

I've made a few Y cables out of dead PSU wiring. And yeah taken a fan or two.

I also sometimes chop off the 12v aux connector. I've torched these connectors while overclocking before because sometimes they have a poor connection and overheat (melt/blacken). Nice to have a spare for your high-end PSU if you need it.

Dead/discarded PSU's yield lots of plunder. Cables and connectors, input filtering items (chokes, X-caps, Y-caps, MOVs), rectifier bridges, resistors, etc etc. Caps from an aged PSU should be watched with suspicion however, as they tend to degrade after much time and heat.

Any electronic gadget has potential goodies inside, here's part of the loot scavenged from a big old CRT monitor:

Those small threaded nuts and bolts are almost always the exact same size as any push pin that is used in chipset/gpu coolers. 6.3v, 10v, and 16v caps that are not blown can be very handy in re-cap projects.