Looks like a decent enough haul, except for the fact that that board is running a SiS chipset. I haven't had the best experiences wih SiS chipsets myself, but being that it's on an ASUS board with a relatively decent set of features, I could be wrong. Aside from that, it sounds like you could assemble a nice early-2000s gaming rig with this setup. You might even be able to run Windows 98, which I find is blazing fast on a P4 system, though you may have trouble getting sound in DOS games, since a lot of P4 chipsets don't support NMIs on the PCI bus.

Keep that graphics card!

Perfect for playing older Windows games with graphics enhancing features turned on. Also: Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow.

Had some trash finds recently myself. Also have yet to test them.

32MB Matrox G450 DualHead AGP
3Com Etherlink XL PCI 10/100 BASE-T4 NIC
16MB 3DFx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP (already have a couple, though)
4MB Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 [S3 ViRGE/325] PCI (already have one as well, but this is a later revision)
IntraServer ITI-6100L PCI SCSI Controller. Wish I had something that used SCSI.

Wish i could find those treasures in my local trash...

Nice finds, swampfox! I really like that G450!

Nice find on the 5950, as for the board I have a copy of that one myself. Going to use it with a northwood mobile someday as it wouldn't be good for much else having only three vrm phases for the cpu.

carlostex wrote:

Wish i could find those treasures in my local trash...

Same, but its actually illegal in my state in the USA to "Trash Pick" this is how strong a hold the e-waste recycling industry has on it, and one of the reasons its so dang hard to find anything Pre-P4 era now. They even advertise constantly to "git rid of your old eLeCtRoNiCs" on Over the air TV.

AlphaWing wrote:

Same, but its actually illegal in my state in the USA to "Trash Pick" this is how strong a hold the e-waste recycling industry has on it, and one of the reasons its so dang hard to find anything Pre-P4 era now. They even advertise constantly to "git rid of your old eLeCtRoNiCs" on Over the air TV.

I'm honestly surprised trash picking isn't illegal in my state. At least, it doesn't seem to be. Then again, I don't find computers at my local dumps that often; I normally find stuff like old keyboards and CRT monitors usually with the VGA cables cut off.

There used to be a local recycling center around here with a decent e-waste pile that my friends and I would often dig through, but it's gone now. D: I'm still kicking myself for not taking some of the cool stuff I've seen there. For a while they had everything from 486 boxes to P4 systems, and even a few oddities like a busted-up Commodore Vic 20. Over time however, they eventually started stripping the systems of parts like hard drives (which I perfectly understand), then even RAM sticks and CPUs. Around the same time, all of the really vintage stuff started disappearing, and eventually the whole place went out of business and got sold to someone with no interest in the e-waste angle.

Good news everybody. I did go ahead and test my trash finds, and everything worked!

The only catch in all this is that the RAM keeps on being detected as 736MB (768MB - 32MB shared with the onboard video) instead of 1GB. Don't know what's going on with that, but otherwise, it all does work.

Look what followed me home from the dump this week...

And a look at the inside...

Haven't tested it out yet, and I don't know the specs, outside of the 2.1GB Western Digital hard drive it has. Looks like a Pentium MMX though. Surprisingly has no 72-pin RAM slots, being a Socket 7 system.

Sweet. And Dell even still has the service manual up:
http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/pro … lex-gxi/manuals

Sincerely i can't find any interest in P4 systems. Early ones were crap and easily beaten by Athlon XP. Then Northwood was a little better but still not as good and stable as Athlon 64. Prescotts were actually worse. And P4's are probably the most common hardware you can find, so no harm done in letting these systems in the bin, specially OEM crap.

As for being illegal trash picking let's imagine this. Let's say you would find an AdLib Gold among the thrash and a police officer catches you right in the moment. What would you do? Explain that it is an extremely rare card and it holds a lot of history and value? Would you pay a fine but at least keep the card? What could be done in such a situation?

carlostex wrote:

Sincerely i can't find any interest in P4 systems. Early ones were crap and easily beaten by Athlon XP. Then Northwood was a little better but still not as good and stable as Athlon 64. Prescotts were actually worse. And P4's are probably the most common hardware you can find, so no harm done in letting these systems in the bin, specially OEM crap.

I might have mentioned this in another thread, but I've gotten to the point where if I see a P4 system at the dump, I automatically pass on it, with maybe one or two exceptions. Athlon XP would probably be the absolute latest I would pick up. Anything newer would vary from system to system.

Good news on the Dell OptiPlex GXi: it works! Here it is with its younger sibling, the GXa, on top:

Specs:

Intel Pentium 200MHz (non-MMX)
Intel 430HX
32MB RAM
2.1GB Western Digital hard drive
S3 Trio 64V+ video
Crystal CS4236B audio
Manufactured April 1997

It seemed to have a bugged installation of Windows 98SE on it, so I have decided to format the drive and put 95 on it.

Sutekh94 wrote:

Look what followed me home from the dump this week... […]
Show full quote

Look what followed me home from the dump this week...

And a look at the inside...

Haven't tested it out yet, and I don't know the specs, outside of the 2.1GB Western Digital hard drive it has. Looks like a Pentium MMX though. Surprisingly has no 72-pin RAM slots, being a Socket 7 system.

One of my favorite proprietary cases. The slot 1 GX1 models make for better upgrading, though.

I don't like those but nice finds, I hate oem p4 crap like everyone else.