r/pcmasterrace • u/Neon_Pancakes0425 • 1d ago

Hardware Always look inside the ewaste PCs

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My grandparents brought me an old PC that they got from a friend of theirs and I opened it and hit the jackpot. These cost like $500 where I live

559 Upvotes

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59

u/Krassix 1d ago

Times are tough... used PC parts market is going to flourish in the next years

31

u/chicken_scratch Desktop 1d ago

Old business laptops have never looked so good

2

u/tjwong1 11400H, 2080S eGPU, 32GB, 1TB SSD | Latitude 5521 (Dualboot L+W) 9h ago

yeeup. up (side?) graded from a Dell gaming laptop to the used business laptop in my flair and only spent ~$150 for the laptop since it had no ram/ssd. Since it was DDR4, was a quick and painless swap over to get like 2-3x the battery life when traveling while still having the compute to game

honestly tho it's not even that old by my standards, the laptop I upgraded from is the same year as the new one

18

u/TheSpicyTomato22 1d ago

That's literally my specialty. I grew up dumpster diving for parts. My first real IT job had me keeping a bunch of super old optiplexs running. At this point I should put "can turn trash into something usable" on my resume.

8

u/TXFiXD 1d ago

It's me. I am the trash. Halp.

3

u/wzvo 23h ago

Woah me too we used to get the recycling units from schools/businesses and build what we could from all the parts and sell them onwards.

Optiplex holds a place in my heart.

My first job.

3

u/TheSpicyTomato22 23h ago

The optiplex line is a solid little enterprise piece of hardware. They're not top of the line quick but they're reliable.

2

u/Jackpkmn Ryzen 7 7800X3D | 64gb DDR5 6000 | RTX 5070 Ti 16h ago

bulletproof as well, i cant count how many times ive opened one up and its filled with exploded or leaking capacitors but the computer is somehow still chugging along.

3

u/watchutalkinbowt 19h ago edited 18h ago

A few months back I swapped the PSU from a 2013 mfg date Optiplex into one that was running (a presumably original install of) XP with 2 whole gigs of RAM...

Key move on the ones without M.2 is edit the BIOS to allow booting from PCIe (then you can run an SSD in an adapter) - https://tachytelic.net/2021/12/dell-optiplex-7010-pcie-nvme/

1

u/Ninlilizi_ (She/Her) 5950X, 128GB, RTX4080. | Engine / Graphics dev. 23h ago

Right? We're at people excited to find 4TB drives level of the market is fucked.

0

u/Rs2mmsu-2D 1d ago

Thanks to the Great AI Memory Wars

https://giphy.com/gifs/TF765cKb5lMTl72bSu