best cheap/free scores 1.1

[momaka]

Originally Posted by Dan81

Well,guess my Socket 754 system seems to use Flash Player as default player. Maybe the HD3450 has H.264 acceleration?

Interesting.
Perhaps YouTube has only done this for the US website?? I don't know why, but *all* of my computers stopped using Flash as the default player on YouTube about a month ago. This is in both FireFox 24 and Opera 10/12. With newer versions of FF (like 40+), HTML5 has always been default. So I have multiple versions of FF on each PC (I use the portable versions to do that).

Yes, the HD3450 does have hardware H.264, but that's only for Blu-Ray and such, IIRC. Neither my HD2400 nor my HD3870 video cards will do any CPU off-loading on YouTube (or barely any). In comparison, a lowly-low GeForce 8400/8500 will greatly off-load the CPU on YouTube - both with Flash and HTML5. I can watch 1080p even on my single-core overclocked Athlon 64 3200+. Without GPU acceleration, best I can do is 720p and with Flash only.

Not sure how the newer ATI cards stack up.

Originally Posted by Dan81

That's the hard drive.

Some days I have no words for myself.

[SurrealMustard]

Originally Posted by momaka

Alternatively, you can set the SATA mode in your BIOS to ACHI, so it will emulate IDE mode. But that will also limit the speed on your SATA HDD to PATA speeds. I suppose with a regular HDD, the performance drop may not be very noticeable (if at all). But with a SSD, you should definitely use full speed.

Other way around actually. "AHCI" or "RAID" actually allow the SATA bus to run in its native, full speed mode. IDE emulation is what'll allow it to work with an unpatched Windows XP setup and also reduce the performance.

[kc8adu]

swi mx3 pendant.
got a new customer too.
he saw me pick it off the curb and later saw me in the grocery store parking lot.
he correctly assumed that since i picked it up and didnt look like a scrapper that i was going to fix it.is only regrets were that he didnt find me before he paid $1200 for a replacement and pitched a bunch more stuff when he moved shop!

[momaka]

^ You're right. Don't know what I was thinking when I typed that.

[SuperDuty]

Won an Asus Z97-AR motherboard for 50€ on eBay. These sell for 140 to 170€ new : https://www.amazon.com/Asus-Z97-AR-S.../dp/B00KDKUFAM
http://www.materiel.net/cartes-meres...Fe8K0wod4BEH7Q

The ad said it was the motherboard alone with the I/O but I've juste received it and I was pleasantly surprised to find out it came in the box with all of its bundle except the SATA cables. The socket is fine, a couple of light scratches on the PCB, the protective plastic is still on the chipset heatsink, it should work properly hopefully. I only have a Celeron G1820 for it, slower than my old Phenom II X4 but it will do the job for now.

[onex]

scored this HP phoenix for free .was thrown out.
i7
10 gig ram
nvidia gtx 560 graphics card
blue ray burner
1155 socket

thats my wifes
for me a 1156 socket i7
16 gig ram
asus extreme pro motherboard
cooler master 650 watt power supply
cooler master water cooler .
this was all in the rubbish as well .
oh and the lg 22 inch led monitor and phillips 22 inch led monitor on mine and wife has a 19 inch dell led monitor .
people are very wasteful but im happy they are

[momaka]

Who throws away an i7 with 10 GB of RAM?!

Anyways, a few weeks back, I got a Toshiba L505-6906 laptop from some family friends. It works fine, other than the dying 320 GB Toshiba HDD in it. Since my sister's laptop (Compaq Presario CQ62-420, IIRC) just died too, I'll be giving her this one when I put a new HDD in it. The two have similar specs anyways. My sister's (supposedly) dead laptop has an AMD Athlon M320 CPU, 3 GB of RAM, 320 GB HDD, and Radeon HD4200 onboard video. The Toshiba has a Core 2 Duo T6500, 4 GB of RAM, and Intel HD3000 onboard video (if I am not mistaken). I just bought a 250 GB HDD for it, but that should still be enough for what my sis needs. Eventually, I will fix the Compaq too, but I think the Toshiba lappy is built much better. Just opened it for cleaning the other day, and I was surprised by the size of the heatsink in there - it's much bigger than the one in the Compaq Presario V6000 I found last summer, despite both the Toshiba and the Compaq V6000 utilizing 35 TDP CPUs. The Toshiba runs much cooler. Can't get it past 50C at all, even after watching YouTube for a while (and the onboard GPU in that laptop is not doing any off-loading from the CPU, so the CPU is working hard). On the other hand, the Compaq V6000 easily touches 60C after a minute or two of high CPU usage.

So I think this Toshiba lappy is a pretty good score. It does have one Nec/Tokin cap for filtering the CPU, though. But let's hope that doesn't cause any problems.

As for the fate of the dying 320 GB Toshiba HDD, I was able to somehow make it a bit better by splitting the HDD in five partitions, two of which are just full of bad sectors. Apparently, there was about 1.5 GB worth of bad sectors after 58% of the capacity, and then another 3 GB of bad sectors after 62% of capacity. I haven't thoroughly tested writing to the "good" partitions, though. But trying to write to the bad partitions certainly causes the HDD some problems. So I think I have everything mapped-out properly for now and might be able to use this HDD for non-critical use, like testing a new OS install on a PC, or something like that.

[dmill89]

Originally Posted by momaka

Who throws away an i7 with 10 GB of RAM?!

As wasteful as it seems a 2nd gen I7 system is only worth a little over $100 (a well spec'd. Phoenix like that one might bring $200 if your lucky) on ebay,etc. these days, so I can somewhat understand if someone thought it wasn't worth the hassle of selling it and just tossed it.

[Topcat]

Originally Posted by momaka

Who throws away an i7 with 10 GB of RAM?!

The same kind of person that would throw this away...

http://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=17830

[momaka]

Originally Posted by dmill89

As wasteful as it seems a 2nd gen I7 system is only worth a little over $100 (a well spec'd. Phoenix like that one might bring $200 if your lucky) on ebay,etc. these days, so I can somewhat understand if someone thought it wasn't worth the hassle of selling it and just tossed it.

Interesting.

About half a year earlier, it seemed like the i7 stuff used to be much more expensive and the equivalent Xeon workstations much cheaper. For a long time, I was wondering whether or not to get this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-Precisi...0AAOSwvFZW8Y1w
... and I decided to hold off on that purchase, thinking I didn't need it yet and that those would get even cheaper with time. But WTF?! - those workstations are now almost 2x more expensive and the price of the i7 systems has dropped a lot.

^ For $75, that system was a steal at the time, IMO. I should have gotten one. 12 GB worth of RAM should be more than enough for at least another 5 years into the future.

Perhaps YouTube videos made these workstations more popular, as many people had success turning these into low-budget gaming PCs.

[Dan81]

Got this case yesterday. Guess who made it

[goontron]

Originally Posted by Dan81

Got this case yesterday. Guess who made it

Oh, DEER...... Looks like huntin season has started!

[Topcat]

I haven't seen a DEER PSU in years.....

[Dan81]

Originally Posted by goontron

Oh, DEER...... Looks like huntin season has started!

Right!

Fun fact,I actually found a Deer PSU inside. I took it's fan and stored the rest in my closet. This one actually had a 30A rectifier for 5v,but it was still pretty bad. (no PI coils,but spaces are there,Diodes on a Bracket for 12v etc.)

[Barnard]

Have never found anything that great to be honest...best thing would probably be an old table I picked up last year, bit wobbly but otherwise nothing wrong with it.

[Drack]

Originally Posted by Dan81

Diodes on a Bracket for 12v etc.)

Ohh deer

I have something, 2 Mobo's and CPU p4 for 6 bucks a 53 inches lg tv free with blown caps lol, now working ok

[B33M]

Last year I scored a 60" sharp aquos it sitting between the dumpster and dock door of a warehouse. You should have seen my Lil as trying to carry it back to the car. Got it home and it error flashed so I pwr it on with button reset and it came up. Replaced 3 led and voila. Wish I hadn't sold it man it was the nicest TV I've ever owned personally.

[vinceroger69]

Times are certainly changing regarding free stuff on my local free sites here in the uk ie gumtree/freecyle and some facebook groups nothing is being advertised really now about a year ago there was loads of free electronic items nowadays people are selling the usuall free stuff for money as spares/repairs and for way to much money too.

[Dan81]

Huh,I got a semi-broken original Xbox (the HUGE one) for about $2. The EEPROM chip was dead (a 24C02, nothing amazing) and it was missing a HDD. Fortunately,I had a EEPROM chip from a donor board and its matching drive. Soldered the replacement EEPROM chip,connected the HDD and it was alive.

I extracted the eeprom.bin file off the stock HDD (it was a stock HDD that was paired to the EEPROM),built a new drive,and reflashed the BIOS on it.

Not bad for $2,considering that a DVD cost me $0.48 to build a Xbox HD from scratch.

[momaka]

I got two free CPUs last week:

** Pentium 4 SL7EY: 2.8 GHz Northwood core, 512 KB L2, 400 MHz FSB, 68.5 Watts TDP
** AMD Athlon 64 3400+ for socket 754 (ADA3400AEP4AX)

They both had a few bent pins from me carrying them in my pocket in a napkin, but, but nothing that couldn't be fixed. The Pentium 4 works fine. I tested it in my Intel d845WN motherboard after upgrading it to the latest BIOS (P15), despite Intel's claim that only up to 2.6 GHz Northwood cores would work (actually, the manual says only up to 2.0 GHz, as that was the highest available when that motherboard came out). As for the Athlon 64+ 3400+, I don't know if it works yet. I have a Biostar nForce 3 socket 754 motherboard on the way from eBay (with bad caps on the CPU VRM, of course). Should make a nice oldschool setup more or less.

Originally Posted by Dan81

Huh,I got a semi-broken original Xbox (the HUGE one) for about $2.

Nice!
Take good care of that old hardware. In 10-20 years, things like that would actually still be worth something *and* probably still work fine too (unlike the Xbox 360 and One). I say this, because I've fixed lots of modern PCs lately, and I can tell you from experience that modern hardware nowadays is simply not built to last at all. Best it would do is either work until warranty expires or crap out in 3-5 years at best (i.e. when most people get an upgrade anyways).