First post, by Ozzuneoj
- Rank
- l33t
I've been harvesting socketed memory chips from old dead VGA cards to fix other devices lately, and it got me thinking... what else should I be harvesting? I wouldn't really bother with motherboards because its so hard to get the components off of them a lot of times, but cards are fairly easy to desolder components from.
Looking on eBay I see there's a pretty decent market for old DRAM chips, so there's potentially some money in it as well if you find a fairly quick and easy method of removing the parts. I'm thinking a heat gun would probably help. Also, harvested DRAM chips could be tested easily by putting them on an all-socketed VGA card and just running some tests.
Something I've been thinking about lately are SOJ memory chips. Populated SOJ sockets are getting less common, so finding the chips to increase an early PCI card's memory is getting tough... but I've read that the surface mounted chips are actually the same thing and can be desoldered and dropped into SOJ sockets easily. What's the best way to get these off without making a mess of them?
What kind of things do you guys harvest? Are there ever any useful or valuable components on modems or other cards that are generally worthless?
To be clear, I'm talking about harvesting components from damaged cards\devices that aren't worth fixing with the intent to reuse the components before sending the rest to be scrapped.
Now for some blitting from the back buffer.