Looks pretty good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dz6APiZI1Dk

They cherry pick the known parts, you'll pay a premium for them. They often will not sell classic parts either and put them in their little museum.

RoyBatty wrote:

They cherry pick the known parts, you'll pay a premium for them. They often will not sell classic parts either and put them in their little museum.

What about stuff like 486 & socket 7 boards, cpus, and pci isa cards... are those cherry picked and expensive? What would they charge for a 486 board, Ballpark?

They used to do that yeah, but I haven't lived in Seattle for many years now. But it was a regular stop for me for a long time (the downtown one). I was able to get cases and laptop parts and such mostly, anything of value they ebayed or whatever. It may have changed, you can always visit and see what they have.

I lived in Seattle from 2005 to 2018. The RE-PC in Seattle was quite underwhelming most of the time. It was a tad better in the 2000s before this PC stuff started getting popular.

Now what does impress me is their shop in Tukwila, even moreso AFTER the move to the new building in 2017. It seems when I was there in early 2018 before I moved to Reno , they started catering to our crowd....there was a whole section to the left of the long checkout desk dedicated to ISA cards, AT class motherboards, and so on. Sure the prices were not cheap....I was paying between $15-60 a motherboard, but they had XT, AT 286, 386, 486, socket 5, socket 7, socket 4.....baby AT, Full sized AT (I was drooling over a Full AT 386 board they had). I bought a PC Chips M919 there and some other parts around that time as I was hot rodding my 486.

Another place I've had some luck at was Computer Surplus in Redmond. Run by two older fellas. I got my NEC MultiSync II there for free from their junk bin. I gave them my number for CRTs that would come in at one point. Note...the presumably 486 by the door is not for sale, it's the first computer the owner built.

I visit the Tukwila,WA store weekly its only a few blocks from my work never been to the Seattle store. They generally have a good selection of 486 and up motherboards. Your probably not going to find any well known good retro sound or video cards. I did pick up a Asus P5A there for a good price a few weeks ago.

Thanks for all the input, I'll check out the store in Tukwila,WA.

RoyBatty wrote:

They cherry pick the known parts, you'll pay a premium for them. They often will not sell classic parts either and put them in their little museum.

That's annoying. They have pallets upon pallets and shelves upon shelves of stuff in the back. It seems like if you go through the trouble of owning a large square footage store, you'd want to move inventory. 😒

Thanks for all the feedback, I ended up going to both stores in Seattle and Tukwila. The Tukwila store is definataley the store with all the 386/486/Pentium 1 stuff, LOADS of 386/486 Socket 7 stuff. The only think about the tukwila store is most of the Socket 7, 486 parts don't have a price. Everytime I asked how much, they looked up the going rate on Ebay and ballpacked me a number. I paid $15 for AMD 486 DX2 (the 5V version, which is what I needed). I paid 15 for a K5 PR100 (unfortunately the SSA/5 version), I got a brand new Serial/PS2 Microsoft Mouse in the box, and a new AT Keyboard by PC Concepts in the box. I honestly could have spent days in that store. The frustrating part is seeing how much retro stuff they have in the super large back area, and them saying it still needs to be sorted. They had PILES of AT systems, but not available yet. They did have 2 fully built 386 & 486 systems, but they were asking $125 each.
Funny thing, the Tukwila store had Voodoo 3's but they wanted $100-200 each for them. Well, on my 2nd visit to the Seattle location, I dug through their $2 AGP Video card bin, and what do you know?... a Retail 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card 😎
I was tempted to get a 486 PCI board from the Tukwila store, but he wanted $100.

dave343 wrote:

Thanks for all the feedback, I ended up going to both stores in Seattle and Tukwila. The Tukwila store is definataley the store with all the 386/486/Pentium 1 stuff, LOADS of 386/486 Socket 7 stuff. The only think about the tukwila store is most of the Socket 7, 486 parts don't have a price. Everytime I asked how much, they looked up the going rate on Ebay and ballpacked me a number. I paid $15 for AMD 486 DX2 (the 5V version, which is what I needed). I paid 15 for a K5 PR100 (unfortunately the SSA/5 version), I got a brand new Serial/PS2 Microsoft Mouse in the box, and a new AT Keyboard by PC Concepts in the box. I honestly could have spent days in that store. The frustrating part is seeing how much retro stuff they have in the super large back area, and them saying it still needs to be sorted. They had PILES of AT systems, but not available yet. They did have 2 fully built 386 & 486 systems, but they were asking $125 each.
Funny thing, the Tukwila store had Voodoo 3's but they wanted $100-200 each for them. Well, on my 2nd visit to the Seattle location, I dug through their $2 AGP Video card bin, and what do you know?... a Retail 3DFX Voodoo 3 2000 AGP card 😎
I was tempted to get a 486 PCI board from the Tukwila store, but he wanted $100.

Good catch on the Voodoo i'm jealous.