Turbo -> wrote:

I was dumpster diving a few days ago. Got these ISA cards. Anyone knows what were they for?

Reset- and power-cycle-proof RAM disk cards, those are nice. Find the drivers attached. (if you want to get rid of one, let me know 😉)

oeuvre wrote:

mayo FTW

Personally, I like the smell of peanut butter when the CPU heats up.

Finally, I found time to go empty the warehouse of a friend of mine, a computer technician. I brought home several cards, but in the meantime I'm checking everything, I wanted to submit the most interesting and curious finding, but cover your eyes because this little girl has been victim of violence, as you can see:

A couple of this boards, it seems to be half audio and other half modem - conditions are excellent, boards seem just out of the original box - one of the two is still closed and sealed in plastic envelope. Have you ever seen this particular model before? Maybe OEM market or something, just looking for some info (half of finding pleasure):

The other boards I've rescued from destruction - nice to find other good old socket 7 and slot mobos, together with spare controller cards:

Found a Dell PowerEdge 830 on the way out at the office... it's ~10 years old so definitely in retro territory. It's LGA775 but only supports Pentium 4 or Pentium D.... no Core or Core 2. I think I'll salvage the optical, floppy, and hard disk drives, the serial card, the RAM... I don't have any need to save the CPU or motherboard and the case is fairly proprietary so will probably end up back in the e-cycle pile.

Also found a 2008-era Apple Mac Mini 2 that I rescued... included (working) power supply, thank goodness. No idea what to do with it though.

RJDog wrote:

Found a Dell PowerEdge 830 on the way out at the office... it's ~10 years old so definitely in retro territory. It's LGA775 but only supports Pentium 4 or Pentium D.... no Core or Core 2. I think I'll salvage the optical, floppy, and hard disk drives, the serial card, the RAM... I don't have any need to save the CPU or motherboard and the case is fairly proprietary so will probably end up back in the e-cycle pile.

Also found a 2008-era Apple Mac Mini 2 that I rescued... included (working) power supply, thank goodness. No idea what to do with it though.

Are the CD drive and hard drives SCSI, SAS, or IDE? Also, the Mac Mini would be a good candidate for a video editor or making DVDs from an old video camera that has the FireWire port.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Are the CD drive and hard drives SCSI, SAS, or IDE? Also, the Mac Mini would be a good candidate for a video editor or making DVDs from an old video camera that has the FireWire port.

This appears to be a more budget-oriented server, so the CD drive is IDE, so definitely worth saving, and HDDs are actually SATA (not SAS) attached to some kind of Adaptec PCI-X SATA RAID controller. Might keep that as well. I don't have any foreseeable use it (I do retro gaming, not retro servers) but might resell it.

As for the Mac, yeah... never once owned a video camera with Firewire port so not useful to me in that regard. Might use it as a retro console emulator (e.g. NES, SNES, PSX, etc).

RJDog wrote:

Found a Dell PowerEdge 830 on the way out at the office... it's ~10 years old so definitely in retro territory. It's LGA775 but only supports Pentium 4 or Pentium D.... no Core or Core 2. I think I'll salvage the optical, floppy, and hard disk drives, the serial card, the RAM... I don't have any need to save the CPU or motherboard and the case is fairly proprietary so will probably end up back in the e-cycle pile.

Also found a 2008-era Apple Mac Mini 2 that I rescued... included (working) power supply, thank goodness. No idea what to do with it though.

Lots of things to do with a Mac Mini (including sell it). 2008 means Intel, so no old school stuff. Generic early OSx stuff. Super cool packaging, actually, drives are a little annoying to replace.

I have a PowerEdge 830 on the shelf, Pentium D 945, it was my media/file server for a while. Well-designed but that loud fan tho... if I kept using it I was going to find another quieter PWM fan to replace it, like a Noctua.

I still have the original 6-port RAID card.

Well two retro things, no pics of the Gateway monitor that came with this yet, but:

Kind of boring, but definitely vintage-ish. Gateway 2000 Athlon 950, Riva TNT2, generic corporate Sound Blaster card, Quantum Fireball 10g drive.

But... that case has a lot of room in it...

Oh, and it's not retro, but the 40" Vizio TV works perfectly, apparently. Even got the remote.

they're cavernous cases and built pretty well actually

I really liked their drive bays, very easy!

Merovign wrote:

Well two retro things, no pics of the Gateway monitor that came with this yet, but: […]
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Well two retro things, no pics of the Gateway monitor that came with this yet, but:

!GWA1.jpg

GWA2.jpg

GWA3.jpg

Kind of boring, but definitely vintage-ish. Gateway 2000 Athlon 950, Riva TNT2, generic corporate Sound Blaster card, Quantum Fireball 10g drive.

But... that case has a lot of room in it...

Oh, and it's not retro, but the 40" Vizio TV works perfectly, apparently. Even got the remote.

This is the oldest case I have that can mount a rear 12cm exhaust fan by default 😁
The PSU mounting system I found to be a bit odd though.

Very sturdy case. The gray thingy on top may contain some optical disk or manual thingy 😜

Mine contained a Gateway s370 motherboard btw.

We needed to scrap a bunch of stuff at work.. Made a couple saves on the cart that was headed to the dumpster. (all new old stock, or just used in the lab for troubleshooting/testing)

About 25 boxes of brand new Verbatim 5.25" MD2-D floppies, ATI Mach64 ISA 2MB, Matrox G200 PCI new in box, 3COM 56k external modem new in box, and a Headland ISA EGA/CGA video card with dip switches.

Pic of Mach64: http://imgur.com/gallery/aG3hSeJ

Oh, wow. What a nice day that was. ^^^^

wow dude you're the Mach daddy of this forum now

Now I have to go listen to some Sir Mix-a-Lot.

Is the Mach64 ISA that lust worthy? I knew they were sometimes hard to come by because I've been looking for one for a while, but only ever see one on Ebay in a 3rd world country where the seller is trying to get like a grand for it. (lol) But what's the real value? I'm not planning on selling, but I'm curious as to what other people buy them for on the open market.

Kadath wrote:

The other boards I've rescued from destruction - nice to find other good old socket 7 and slot mobos, together with spare contro […]
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The other boards I've rescued from destruction - nice to find other good old socket 7 and slot mobos, together with spare controller cards:

The three Soyo boards (note that I didn't mention the 4th which HAS the BIOS chip) and that unknown Slot 1 board (which I suspect being either an ABIT or a DTK Computer board) look totally salvageable.

A few PLCC32 EEPROM chips (Winbond W29C020/ASD AE29F2008 work best, but YMMV on what you find and Uniflash support) and a spare hotflashing board
(of generally the same era or BIOS socket - I have a P3 that I generally use for flashing) will save them for sure. I'll put up the BIOS for all three boards if you want to put them back on track. (at least for the Soyo boards, that one with the black LPT port I'll need the model number for it)

Oh, also I strongly advise to recap all 4 Soyo boards if you plan to use them. At least three of them (SY-5BT, the two 6BA-III boards and that 6VBA133) have bulging caps, and it would be quite a shame to let them die as Soyo boards were pretty good.

Not really a "dumpster find" but saved from a dumpster - got a couple towers from a coworker.

A slim desktop with a decent looking Socket "A" Asrock K7VM2, with I believe some custom software onboard. Not sure what CPU just yet, 120 GB Samsung hard drive. Board has Windows 98/ME drivers available direct from Asrock, which is nice. Might make a decent late ME machine.

Also an LGA775 based Acer desktop in nice shape. Q6600 and 2 GB of RAM, if the sticker on the front is to be believed. Borderline retro, but I might be putting my spare Geforce 460 into it and making it a super-low-end gaming PC for my wife's nephews. Not sure how much it'll really handle but seems that if I bump it up to a Q6700 and 4GB of RAM, along with the 460 it'll still game decently on low for things that don't require the newest instruction sets.

Pictures to come later, I've only had a chance to quickly see at least the basics of what's there but actually doing anything will have to wait until my son is asleep 😀

Found these in the middle of nowhere today, when we went out to tidy up a thicket in our land plot:

IBM XT clone with 8 MHz NEC V20, ST-225 MFM HDD, no PSU:

A PII/S370 hybrid in a sorry state:

Didn't test XT yet or its components, because I do not have a PSU with a molex KK type connecor, going to build an adapter for that mobo soon, while PII/S370 mobo did post after several tries 😁

^^^ I've heard of cars being left in the woods to rot, but I have never seen computer systems just sitting in the sticks like that. Where in the world is this?

Would be surprised if any of these things work due to water damage, poop, who knows what else...