What to do with old computer parts

i still have my old pc sat in the corner of a room - i guess its an emergency pc in case mine fatally breaks.
pretty unlikely though!!
it will probably sit there for years until i decide to throw it away.
 
i heard of a company that collects PCB's cards, boards etc, they extract the gold in them, not sure how much htey would give, prob not a lot , interesting that even useless to us, is someone else treasure. actually , thinking about it, it might have been just CPU's , they gold pins.
 
Dogoid said:
i heard of a company that collects PCB's cards, boards etc, they extract the gold in them, not sure how much htey would give, prob not a lot , interesting that even useless to us, is someone else treasure. actually , thinking about it, it might have been just CPU's , they gold pins.
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i remember a report saying 1 ton of ol d mobile phones contains more gold than 1 ton of material extracted from the richest gold mines :p
 
build a pfsense router/firewall?
I did that a few months ago with an old Atom board I had floating about and it works great.
 
Mel_P said:
Just taking apart 3 old pcs (10 years old) to use cases and some parts again.

I have seen such parts (e.g. P4P800 / Pentium processor) on ebay for silly prices but having offered them for donations to charity here the doesn't seem to be a market - even for Linux experimenters.

Is it just the council skip for waste electrical kit? On the internet, recycling firms are only interested in bulk kit and one wanted to charge me £48 just to drop off stuff with them.

New "basic" pcs are so cheap now I suppose?

Mel
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I've used old parts, twice now, to build my local youthclub a functioning pc. Last one was a budget gaming pc to play the likes of Minecraft on it. A few generous peeps on here donated some stuff and sold me some stuff cheap to complete the build. Why not do something similar? Loads of kids would love a minecraft pc to mess about on in a youth club :)
 
Many years ago i built a PC for my parents /family to use and every time I upgrade my main PC the parts from it then upgrade the parents/family PC or my HTPC ;)

So there PC at the moment is
Intel E8500 cpu
Asrock Extreme P67 motherboard
4GB ddr2 (was 8gb BUT one stick failed :()
Nvidia GTX 580
120GB SSD
300GB hardrive
Dell U2410 24" IPS monitor

If I remember right..
 
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Dogoid said:
i heard of a company that collects PCB's cards, boards etc, they extract the gold in them, not sure how much htey would give, prob not a lot , interesting that even useless to us, is someone else treasure. actually , thinking about it, it might have been just CPU's , they gold pins.
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The 386/486 ceramic CPUs are loaded with gold and sort after because it's easy to extract. Less so with modern CPUs. There's still lots of valuable metal in modern electronics but it's difficult and expensive to separate it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU62hh3DBfg
 
dessimpson said:
I upgraded to X99 earlier this year. I've got PC with an i7 3770k, 16Gb DDR3, GTX980 and a Samsung SSD just sat there using electricity. I was going to use it as a steam machine but for the last 8 months it's done nothing.
Determined to find some use for it though :)
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Umm...this might sound like an obvious question, but if you're not using it, why do you even have it plugged in and switched on?
 
There is always a market for old tech. Try eBay for starters.

Personally, with the older computers I have got turned them into a small mini network, in which I play around with/practice networky/IT stuff on etc.
 
I'd be tempted to just bin them. I don't imagine you'll get much for 10 year old PC parts. Much less so on these forums, where most people only seem to be interested in bleeding edge tech.
 
Ive had 2 GTX 580's with waterblocks sat in my desk for over a year. I havn't had the heart to throw them yet but can't really be bothered trying to sell them/paying to ship them off somewhere.

Wish there was a recycle place.
 
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