Got a parcel in today from a recycling center witch cost me about 100$:
1. A really beat up beige box. I asked for it because I wanted the AT PSU, the MHz display and the plastic front cover. It's pretty bent, but to my surprise the chassis itself is in one piece - it's not bent or rusted. The reset button is missing, but I might be able to 3d print something later. For now, instead of scraping the metal parts I will be storing them. I'll pull out the MHz display and install that in my socket 4 build - it's case has a MHz display but it's not working and a bit on the crispy side.
Here was the biggest surprise - the 486 box had parts in it! My favorite kid of 486 - a modern PCI motherboard. I was so surprised that I wanted to test everything so I quickly pulled it apart and it was full of goodies!
A Lucky Star LS486e Zida 4DPS SiS chipset PCI 486 motherboard with 512KB of L2 cache and a PS/2 header, award bios (witch means the PS/2 port might actually work). It came with a very modern looking CPU cooler, and hiding under that is an AMD 5x86-133.
An S3 Virge video card:
A conner IDE HDD - probably 800MB:
And finally - a Creative CT1350B - Sound Blaster 2.0!
I'm ecstatic right now. I was expecting the case to be empty, but it's full of my favorite types of goodies! And this couldn't have come at a better time since the last lot of parts I bought from this recylcler was mostly defective - it was video cards, and most of them had been trashed around and had missing SMD components. To make it worse one of the cards was a 128bit MSI FX 5600 witch I was really excited to get since the only 5600 I have in my collection is a really low end 64 bit Asus card....
A 128 bit FX 5600 plus the Radeon 7200 and 7500 have eluded me for years. I either can't find any, are defective, cost more then I'm willing to spend, or are on the other side of the world and shipping costs more then the card 🙁 . Pretty bummed about this, especially since a radeon 7500 was the first dedicated AGP card I ever bought. Until then I was stuck with on board graphics and my K6 did not have an AGP slot (VIA MVP4).
2. A white box PC built by (then) pretty big computer reseller. What made them different from the rest of our system integrators is that they would brand the cases, monitors, mice, keyboards and sometimes speakers with their company name: ComRace - witch made them pretty professional looking in my mind. My teenage self didn't know you could just order these from china with your company logo printed on... I actually thought they made the cases and peripherals.
ComRace systems were featured (sometimes quite heavily) in tech publications when I was a kid, alongside the big boys - Gateway, IBM, HP and so on, and I would read the specifications of the computers displayed in said ads over and over. I really loved that a complete Comrace build with all peripherals would have really competitive specs but cost almost half what other brands did.
This particular unit was featured in an issue of xTreme PC - can't remember witch but I'll sift trough my magazine collection and take a pic of the ad. It's a 1GHz duron, sitting on a Chaintech KT133A matx mainboard (7AIA5E) with Athlon XP support. It also came with a LAN card, 20GB Western Digital HDD (the original drive would have been a 8.4 GB Quantum Fireball) and a Riva TNT2 M64. For twice the price IBM was selling an IBM NetVista A20 with a 633Mhz celeron and board video. The comrace PC would have come with mouse and keyboard, a set of speakers and a nice Comrace branded 15" LG CRT. After cleaning it up, I fired up the computer. The 20GB WD drive is full of bad sectors - either from age or from shipping (the parcel was banged around quite a bit) and the fan on the TNT2 M64 was stuck.
I replaced the 20Gb drive with a 40GB Maxtor and the TNT2 with an ATi Rage 128 Pro (Rage GL) and I'm currently installing win98.
3. Asus P4P800-E - i865 socket 478 mainboard. This one came with a 3Ghz pentium 4 and a really cool Silverstone tower cooler. Frankly I bought it more for the cooler then anything else, but it's nice to have another 3Hjz P4 as well.
