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I have a shelf of old parts including a Pentium 4 ATX board with working CPU and some DDR2 I found. I have a dozen or so hard drives that still pass all their S

by zanny 8y ago

I have a shelf of old parts including a Pentium 4 ATX board with working CPU and some DDR2 I found. I have a dozen or so hard drives that still pass all their SMART readings (even if most have old age and wear level warnings). I have a few 10+ year old monitors that look like spoiled eggs with how inaccurate their colors are but aren't broken. I keep it all around as a "if someones board etc dies, at least it works" kind of thing. I have some old GPUs too that still work including some 8800s, an X1800, and a GT 520. If they broke, it wouldn't be worth my time to fix them, but they are still working hardware, even if they aren't the latest tech.

cr0sh 8y ago
I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3 PCI video card I had lying around. I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it. Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...? Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU. I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).

by zanny 8y ago

cr0sh 8y ago

I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3 PCI video card I had lying around. I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it. Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...? Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU. I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).