^They can do something, that modern hardware cannot anymore.
They work on Windows XP/7, still.
That's something that seems to be missed these days, even in the retro communities : Modern hardware is no longer backwards compatible.
BIOS and CSM are dying off. VGA BIOS on graphics cards will disappear. V86 already is partially broken (VME in Ryzen).
Anything before Windows 8 won't boot anymore. OSes without a certificate won't boot anymore.
No DOS anymore, no Windows 98 anymore, not even in safe mode.
Edit: Or in other words, we're entering a new era of personal computing, for the better or worse.
These old useless graphics cards and slow Celeron or Atom mainboards we used to make fun of will be highly sought after in a few years.
When children born in the 2000s will have developed nostalgic feelings for GTA 3, Portal, Doom 3 and Skyrim etc..
Just like us now who want to play with a real C64, TRS-80 or a hot-rod 486 PC, they will seek out for compatible hardware.
However, unlike us, they will have a hard time finding suitable hardware when the time has come.
Things like Pentium 4, Core2Duo, Intel i3 or a Geforce 5200 or 7300 aren't really much more than old scrap to most people now.
They get shred en masse and won't be collected. Understandably. Because there's no need to right now.
The current OSes don't run well with them anymore and Windows XP is EOL and there's better hardware for it (still!)
Sure, old computers weren't much different in the past. However, they were distingushable, at least.
A C64 wasn't a PC, it was a home computer, so it had special status to people. They knew it's worthless, but also somehow unique.
So a notable amount of them were kept as decoration pieces, as mementos, were sold as antiques..
A, say, Geforce 7300 doesn't have that feature. To a layman, it's just some random e-waste. A budget graphics card, with PCIe, like any other.
Judging by the look, there's no information that says "this card still has VGA BIOS and runs with 32-Bit OSes". Nope.
It's just a piece of PCB, not much different to a piece of electronics found in a broken washing machine.
That's something that makes the difference of collecting vintage hardware back then and now.
A VGA card out of 486 PC looked much more primitive to a Geforce 256 or an ATI Radeon 9600.
It had a different conector, too. The components were "on the wrong side".
All these hints helped distinguishing old hardware from recent hardware.
But PC hardware from the 2010s doesn't look much different to PC hardware from the 2020s.
Unless you're a PC aficionado sort of, I suppose.
This makes creating a Windows XP/Vista/7 in the future much more difficult than building a Windows 98 PC right now.
Because the currently produced hardware for Windows 10/11 will be going to wipeout all the 2010s hardware.
Because, people still using the 2010s hardware are doing so on Windows 10/11 - they don't realize it will be special in the future.
Graphics cards made in the 2010s, with VGA BIOS and VESA VBE still intact, will work the same -on Win 10/11- as the upcoming hardware lacking them.
Because Windows 10/11 don't need them, really. UEFI, neither - it will use GOP, not VGA/VBE BIOS (BIOS/CSM) or UGA (UEFI 1)
- Which in turn 2010 graphics cards are compatible with, too. So there's a point of transition no one seems to notice.
Same goes for motherboards. Firstly, the lack of BIOS compatibility is a big show stopper (CSM removed from UEFI).
But even with the right motherboard, CPUs are becoming incompatible themselves. On purpose.
Windows 7 support was sabotaged in later i-series processor. Skylake was the limit, I vaguely remember.
So it's not possible to use Windows 7 (or XP) anymore, even though the X86 instructions, MMX, SSE, x87 and so on are still available, technically.
AMD did something similar, not just with Ryzen which had a broke VME support, but also through the removal of 3Dnow! instructions.
That's something that happend in the late 2000s already, by the way, and used to be unthinkable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3DNow!
Originally, each new CPU generation stayed compatible with the previous one, as far as the instruction set goes.
Even if functions were proprietary or deprecated, they still were around for not breaking software compatibility.
Even if performance was bad or if instructions had to be simulated by microcode or via BIOS.
For example, the 286 LOADALL was absent in the silicon of 386+ processors, but emulated at the BIOS level.
386 PC BIOSes started providing an exception handler that simulated the 286 behaviour, so 286 software didn't break.
Edit: Or another example. Power supplies (PSUs). I've got a bunch of rusty old ATX 1.x power supplies in the cellar, still.
Originally, I stored them in a box, because I had no time taking them to a recycling place.
Now, I consider cleaning them and storing them in the attic, so I still can refurbish them in the future, once needed.
In my whole life, it never occured me that I would one day collect those worthless ATX PSUs!
Personally, I always drew the line at AT power supplies, merely, for powering pre-Pentium systems.
I never expected those cheap ATX PSUs to becoming incompatible in the future.