brassicGamer wrote:

There was a GX1 in the garage - should I get it? So far the stand-out item I found was the attached board inside the yellowest case I have ever seen. And although it's a VLB board, all the cards were ISA, disappointingly. I have never possessed a UMC chip though so I'm happy even though the board currently isn't responding.

Your image is crappy but that looks like a Pine PT-429 which I guess is the same as Pine PT-428 but with 4x 30pin + 2x 72pin slots instead of 8x 30pin slots.

Pine is the same as XFX 😀

http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486vlb3/pt428.html

And yes get the Dell GX1

Skyscraper wrote:

Your image is crappy but that looks like a Pine PT-429 which I guess is the same as Pine PT-428 but with 4x 30pin + 2x 72pin slo […]
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Your image is crappy but that looks like a Pine PT-429 which I guess is the same as Pine PT-428 but with 4x 30pin + 2x 72pin slots instead of 8x 30pin slots.

Pine is the same as XFX 😀

http://motherboards.mbarron.net/models/486vlb3/pt428.html

And yes get the Dell GX1

Ahhh... Couldn't find the manufacturer name on the board but the model number was and I found a manual for it. Also, it now works. Hdd remains in its original condition and is very noisy. As the Web page says, it doesn't support DX4.

brassicGamer wrote:

Well the stuff didn't get collected. So this is the stuff I could save from potential dumping today. For free.

Holy crap! 😲

More than "hope you've got a van," it's "hope you've got a large, empty garage!"

Runicen wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

Well the stuff didn't get collected. So this is the stuff I could save from potential dumping today. For free.

Holy crap! 😲

More than "hope you've got a van," it's "hope you've got a large, empty garage!"

A lot of it is actual rubbish. Out of what I have cleared so far I have got a few potentially useful bits. I will pull a full list together of this epic bin-dive at the weekend. I'm hiring a van for the job on Friday. Am just in the prices of setting up an Athlon II system I recovered for my daughter to do her homework on.

brassicGamer wrote:

Runicen wrote:

brassicGamer wrote:

Well the stuff didn't get collected. So this is the stuff I could save from potential dumping today. For free.

Holy crap! 😲

More than "hope you've got a van," it's "hope you've got a large, empty garage!"

A lot of it is actual rubbish. Out of what I have cleared so far I have got a few potentially useful bits. I will pull a full list together of this epic bin-dive at the weekend. I'm hiring a van for the job on Friday. Am just in the prices of setting up an Athlon II system I recovered for my daughter to do her homework on.

I'd still venture to say that congratulations are in order if ANY of that stuff is salvageable. Those big, unsorted hauls tend to be the best finds.

I guess most of you have read my rant about the Italian seller who sold me some "used" hardware which in reality was some stuff he found in a dumpster or at the road side. The stuff has clearly been laying outside it the rain for an extended period of time. As these parts are sort of dumpster finds, just not found by me I will post pictures here and tell what is working and what is not. 😀

First out is what I think is a motherboard from an old IBM 486.

The not pictured CPUs I got in this lot, an Intel SX33 and an Intel SX2-50 both came with bent pins.

Here is the motherboard, it was jumpered for 33MHz so I installed the SX33.

Close up showing the lump of solder by the crystal near the video (I have moved the switches to on).

Some rust.

What I think is the memory belonging to this board (Im not sure as they were removed from the board when I got it).

So what do you think, does the board work or not?

LPX form factor. Certainly looks like IBM, but could very well be another manufacturer entirely.

In that state? I'd be afraid to try it.

I'm no expert, but saying "some rust" in regard to that board is like saying the Titanic is "a little soggy."

oerk wrote:

LPX form factor. Certainly looks like IBM, but could very well be another manufacturer entirely.

In that state? I'd be afraid to try it.

I already did! 😀

The board posted at the first try.

The onboard video is dead, I guess thats why it was disabled, it could also be there is too much corrosion in the VGA connector. I could still see that the board posted as the Num Lock key worked so I installed the riser which I luckily also got in the lot and installed a Tseng ET4000, only cowards use cheap VGA cards when testing potential fire hazards. 😁

I did not try the very corroded memory modules.

The ISA riser with an ET4000

The Post Screen

The Award BIOS

Not for the faint of heart! Congrats on the (surprisingly) positive results!

Runicen wrote:

Not for the faint of heart! Congrats on the (surprisingly) positive results!

Thanks. Thats where my good luck ended though.

The next board I tried was this PC Chips Intel 430VX chipset motherboard. I do not think the BIOS chip belongs to this board but it was there when I got it and any BIOS for Intel 430xx should at least be enough to get some beeps. The board seems totally dead, I tried two differnt pairs of FPM memory, the Pentium 75 I got with the board and also a known to be good Pentium 133. I rejumperd the FSB to 50MHz as the board came jumpered for overclocking the P75 to 100MHz but that diddnt improve the situation.

PC Chips Intel 430VX motherboard.

Then I tried the PC Chips 430FX motherboard that came without BIOS and RTC chips. I think this is the board the BIOS chip that came mounted on the 430VX board actually belongs to so I moved the BIOS chip and RTC chip to this board but it seems just as dead as the VX board.

PC Chips Intel 430FX motherboard.

There are no obvious defects on either PC Chips board except rust, dirt and dog hairs. I guess the BIOS chip could be dead, its not like these boards are worth spending too much effort on. At least not now perhaps some rainy day far into the future when a PC Chips 430FX motherboard with what looks like two real and two fake cache chips adding up to 256KB onboard cache with another 256KB cache added on a coast module is worth a fortune. The VX board seems to have no fake cache chips and two real ones like the FX board with 256KB more added on a coast module, all in all a less interesting board.

Or perhaps all onboard cache is fake but if that is the case they have wasted alot of effort on worthless traces 😜.

What did I get for my 20 Euros + shipping.

A LPX 486 board with dead onboard video.
A working 486SX-33 CPU with bent pins
A probably working 486 SX2-50 CPU with bent pins.
A probably working Pentium 75 CPU.
5 memory modules that probably work and 2 that probably dont.
2 AT PSUs filled with dirt, I will not test these until I have put them in the dish washer.
And the mystery board pictured below.

Member CelGen thought this mystery card with a socketed 80186 CPU was a multiport serial card, I think he was right as the Zilog chips seem to be "ZILOG - Z0803008VSC - Serial Communications Controller PLCC"

If wasnt for the shipping cost this would not have been such a bad deal but I do not like when some sellers sell untested junk they have found as "used" supposedly working items. I will not ask for a refund or give the seller bad rep but I will not buy anything else from this seller.

That board looks like a PCChips M520, one of the few PCChips boards regarded as being actually good. You can easily find the BIOS on the internet, so you could easily test it if you have a programmer.

Skyscraper wrote:

The next board I tried was this PC Chips Intel 430VX chipset motherboard. I do not think the BIOS chip belongs to this board but it was there when I got it and any BIOS for Intel 430xx should at least be enough to get some beeps. The board seems totally dead, I tried two differnt pairs of FPM memory, the Pentium 75 I got with the board and also a known to be good Pentium 133. I rejumperd the FSB to 50MHz as the board came jumpered for overclocking the P75 to 100MHz but that diddnt improve the situation.

I have that exact board on one of my builds. weird case was that I couldn't flash it successfully, so I had to hotflash it on a MSI socket 370 board to be able to get cdrom boot support and bigger hdd I suppose.
apart of that, the board works fine, It's nice to have ps2 onboard. maybe the case for an appreciation thread?

Thanks for the extended diagnostic info - I love how much personality old hardware has. New boards are so... cold. I really hate on LPX boards. AT is definitely my fave form factor. Not your greatest haul, admittedly, but the SX2 softens the blow slightly.

Rescued another PC from the dump today:

As soon as I got home I cleaned the outside of the case with domestos (witch contains large amounts of chlorine and small amounts of peroxide - great for whitening and disinfecting stuff), took the side of the case off and cleaned the dust off the components.

I turned the machine on but it will not post. Mainboard is obviously dead - lots of swollen caps - unfortunately I will not be fixing it for several reasons:
- SDRAM based P4 machines are SLOW, and don't come with a 3.3V AGP slot so I can't even turn it into a Voodoo 3 rig. This one is no exception.
- It doesn't make sense to turn it into a Voodoo 2 SLi rig since I got V2 SLi cards working on socket 939 and LGA775 systems witch are much faster and can run both Legacy (win98) and modern (winXP / win7) operating systems.
- no use turning it into a win98 rig for 1999-2001 games since I have a Pentium 3 machine witch is about as fast.

Inside I found:

- 1.7 GHz socket 478 pentium 4 CPU (probably a Willamette) - probably working
- Intel chipset Gigabyte motherboard with SDRAM and tons of swollen caps - dead
- 64MB Geforce 2 MX400 (don't have a working GF 2 card so lucky me 😁 ) - working
- 1GB!!!! of PC133 SDRAM - 2x256 PQI and 1x512 Kingmax - all working - tested on my P3
- 80GB ATA133 Maxtor HDD - working
- classic beige / dark blue ATX case that was really popular in my country between 2000 and 2004. Really think steel too!
- 450W modern ATX PSU with 2x12v rails totaling 31A and 20A 5v rail and 120mm fan (really quiet)
- some TV capture / tuner card I have no use for
- PCI Intel PRO/100 lan card - these things are fast and work well in win98
- old LG DVD-ROM - works fine
- white NEC DVD-RW drive - seems like It won't read CDs, but reads DVDs just fine.

After a little consideration, I decided to install a KT400 motherboard inside, and turn it into a win98 / winXP rig I will use to benchmark some nvidia cards, from the rage 128 to the geforce 6xxx series. I like the looks of the case a lot. Right now, I installed the following components in it:

- Athlon XP 2600+ (Thoroughbred or Thornton core 256kb L2 cache)
- ECS L7VTA2 2.0 KT
- 512MB DDR333
- Geforce 2 MX400 64MB (the one that came in the case, and the only working GF2 I own)
- 80GB Maxtor
- 450w PSU
- the two ODDs that came with the machine.
- Creative CT4810 - sound blaster 128 PCI

kanecvr wrote:

Rescued another PC from the dump today:

Nice!

A free computer is always the best buy even if some component needs to be replaced. 😀

I got lucky at the dumpster today. Found two computers in great condition, probably from the same person. Neither of the machines required any cleanup.

The first computer was an iMac. At first glance, I thought it was a G5, so I grabbed it and happily skipped all the way home. Upon plugging it in though, I found out that it was a first-gen Intel Mac. A little disappointing, but hey--at least I can throw a real operating system on there thanks to Bootcamp! 😁

Specs:
Intel Core Duo T2500 @ 2GHz. That's Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo. It's basically a dual-core Pentium M, so it can only run 32-bit software.

Radeon X1600 GPU

20" 1680x1050 display. The color saturation and viewing angles on this display are excellent. I think it may actually be an IPS or VA panel, but haven't looked at any detailed specs on this system yet.

2GB of DDR2-667 memory

250GB SATA HDD

OS X 10.6.8. I'm definitely not a fan of OS X, but I think newer versions of the OS were free upgrades for Snow Leopard users, so I'll probably update that. I will definitely install Windows 7 on this machine.

2nd computer was a Toshiba Satellite 100CS. Unfortunately, this machine didn't have a hard drive in it, so I don't really know what makes it tick, other than the 16MB of installed RAM. I believe I have a few notebook drives in the 1-8GB range, so I should be able to get this up and running soon.

This wasn't a dumpster find, but a friend of mine gave me his set of Radeon HD 5770 video cards when he upgraded last month. They're certainly nice to have, but I'll probably just put them in storage for now, since I don't have a machine that needs one of these. Unfortunately, the only motherboard I have that supports Crossfire is the Socket 2011 board in my main computer. I kinda regret selling that old A8R-MVP S939 Crossfire board now!

Standard Def Steve wrote:

OS X 10.6.8. I'm definitely not a fan of OS X, but I think newer versions of the OS were free upgrades for Snow Leopard users, so I'll probably update that. I will definitely install Windows 7 on this machine.

I would leave Snow Leopard on there ... it's probably one of the best incarnations of OSX they ever made. Plus you can run PowerPC apps "near-natively" with Rosetta which isn't offered on anything later.

I think Lion (10.7) is the highest you can go up to on that thing anyway & it doesn't really offer anything more over Snow Leopard, it's really not much of an upgrade. Hardly any software runs on Lion but doesn't run on SL.

As for loading win7 on there, well if that's your thing I'm not going to try to argue you out of it, but ick. 😜

I have a separate post on some of this but got a cargo van full of this stuff a few years back

The only genuine trash find currently in my collection is this Apple IIc, but I didn't find it "recently". I actually found it in a pile of stuff to be thrown away when I was in high school 15 years ago. It was one of the last remaining Apple II systems in the school at the time!

I had to replace the disk drive and I might sometime soon need to replace the keyboard, but otherwise it works quite well. It badly needs a thorough cleaning, which I probably should have done when I had it apart to replace the disk drive, alas I was suffering from a bout of lazyitis at the time. :p

Doing trash picking here is kinda difficult to do. The city I live in has one of those stupid "once you throw it away it becomes city property" clauses, it is literally illegal to pick up stuff put out at the curb for disposal.