This is just what happens to most of the vintage electronics, there is nothing unusual in it. The only somewhat unusual thing is that they are sold on a platform that appears to be aimed at consumers. Usually scrap dealers sell these directly to recyclers in large batches.

Gladly retro computing is nowadays relatively well known hobby and many people who find old parts in their bins and closets put them for sale on these sites before throwing them to scrap bins. But still it is quite certain that most stuff gets thrown away, especially from businesses.

The good thing is that at least in the developed countries things mostly get properly recycled, hazardous waste is handled correctly and valuable materials from scrap (such as gold and copper) get used again instead of ending up on a landfill.

this is excatly pc retro hardware (many pci /agp card ), which it is not easy to selling with fair price of 5-20€ per cards.

Result: i kick many ati vga , some matrox, some s3 , LAN and boring AGP card into carton for selling as metal scrap.

ISA card and motherboard as like 486/pentium hurts more than boring pci/agp card.

Madao wrote on 2025-08-21, 19:27:

this is excatly pc retro hardware (many pci /agp card ), which it is not easy to selling with fair price of 5-20€ per cards.

Result: i kick many ati vga , some matrox, some s3 , LAN and boring AGP card into carton for selling as metal scrap.

ISA card and motherboard as like 486/pentium hurts more than boring pci/agp card.

Thing is - this is a moving target. 10-15 years ago 486/pentium/ISA cards were plentiful, nobody wanted them and they were sold as scrap. 10-15 years from now PCI/AGP cards will be in the same position ISA cards are now. Later/faster AGP cards kind of already are...

Personnally when I see pictures like this, I can't help myself I feel compelled to salvage them. It's like seeing a wounded stray cat on the street...

Maybe you should buy these cards.

286/386/486 hardware isn't indispensable, we have quite good emulators. But PCI/AGP cards will be gone forever. 50 years from now nobody will know about them.

Yeah I thought about it, buy the whole lot, keep what is interesting and sell the rest unit by unit but at that price I'm afraid it's too much of a gamble (+ the headache of selling idk 40 of 50 cards).

On the pictures you can see that some of the cards are badly damaged, with components missing etc.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-08-21, 21:34:

Yeah I thought about it, buy the whole lot, keep what is interesting and sell the rest unit by unit but at that price I'm afraid it's too much of a gamble (+ the headache of selling idk 40 of 50 cards).

On the pictures you can see that some of the cards are badly damaged, with components missing etc.

Agreed. He's asking a very steep price (at least, by my EU standards - CH is always more expensive) and even though I'd be willing to bet there are a few gems in there, a lot will be damaged or incomplete (PCIe VGA cards with missing heatsinks, lots of cards without bracket), and a lot will not work. At 1/10 of the price I'd go for it, but not for this.

Many years ago, I was looking for a C128D and stumbled on a scrapper out in Michigan I think who had a whole large plastic trashcan full of ISA/VLB cards with the gold fingers cut off. This was way before the gold rush days and VLB was still affordable, but man did that picture piss me off.

AlexZ wrote on 2025-08-21, 20:52:

286/386/486 hardware isn't indispensable, we have quite good emulators. But PCI/AGP cards will be gone forever. 50 years from now nobody will know about them.

Funnily, I was thinking other way round about 15 years ago.
I said to myself that 486 era hardware is more precious because DOS software does directly talk to it at low-level.
By contrast, so I thought, all these AGP cards are just a fad and not relevant because Windows games use hardware-abstraction provided by Windows 98SE/XP.
But anyhow, this was in a time when Windows XP still had experimental 3D support in Virtualbox.

Maybe it's just the youtube algorithm but I'm seeing an increase in car wrecking yards closing up and simply crushing everything. Comments often say "I tried to buy xyz but asking price was too much"
Some with old hardware.

I wonder if people are clearing out to make a bit of cash on the side, but don't actually want to be bothered getting the maximum money, just something low effort and quick.

But I do feel your pain

Archer57 wrote on 2025-08-21, 19:39:

Madao wrote on 2025-08-21, 19:27:

this is excatly pc retro hardware (many pci /agp card ), which it is not easy to selling with fair price of 5-20€ per cards.

Result: i kick many ati vga , some matrox, some s3 , LAN and boring AGP card into carton for selling as metal scrap.

ISA card and motherboard as like 486/pentium hurts more than boring pci/agp card.

Thing is - this is a moving target. 10-15 years ago 486/pentium/ISA cards were plentiful, nobody wanted them and they were sold as scrap. 10-15 years from now PCI/AGP cards will be in the same position ISA cards are now. Later/faster AGP cards kind of already are...

no, i don't think this.
PCI ati mach 64 dram, many early Rage video card , ordinary S3 card as like S3 trio 64V2/DX, NiC 8029 , Riva TNT2 M64, Radeon 9100SE, Geforce 4MX440SE, Matrox G200, This is sort of card, which nobody want him for fair price. Why should i hoarding low value card, because it is old,or ? It is great if card will be using.

PC Retro hardware market in europe (germany) is small (!) Test equpiment market is bigger (despite special purpose)

Madao wrote on 2025-08-22, 04:18:

no, i don't think this.
PCI ati mach 64 dram, many early Rage video card , ordinary S3 card as like S3 trio 64V2/DX, NiC 8029 , Riva TNT2 M64, Radeon 9100SE, Geforce 4MX440SE, Matrox G200, This is sort of card, which nobody want him for fair price. Why should i hoarding low value card, because it is old,or ? It is great if card will be using.

PC Retro hardware market in europe (germany) is small (!) Test equpiment market is bigger (despite special purpose)

Yeah, i am not saying anyone should hoard the stuff. Unless someone just has too much space and finds it fun. It will become relatively valuable in time though, just like older stuff did. Partly because it gets scrapped and becomes uncommon. Like even old ISA NICs cost a decent amount of money now - those were considered useless junk just a few years ago.

One more example - mid range FX series AGP cards. Even bad ones, like FX5700LE. This were never good, even when they were new, nobody wanted them for a long while, but now they are valuable enough to be pulled out of scrap and sold separately because people are using them for Win98 builds and it turns out they are quite good for that, with older cards like GF4 becoming expensive. Hell, people are even buying FX5200 nowadays...

$555 for 11 kg of stripped down cards? That can't be right...

Yes, I recognized the Acer Magic S20 sound card in the lower left corner by the back, and it would be a shame to deal with them like this.

The world only needs 1 of each component so it can be passed round the youtubers for endless variations on a "Guys, look what I found" video, complete with thumbnail of moron/shock expression, finger pointing at card with red ring drawn round it...

But more seriously, it is sad to see what was once the latest advanced electronics being destroyed, same with cars that would take only a few days solid work to return them to functioning. That's why though, its about money - and as a rule old stuff just isn't worth much until it's vey very rare, so the process of mass destruction continues until there isn't much left and it becomes uneconomical to recycle etc, what's left then are the collectables (or the forgotten)