$5 goodwill tower

[Wester547]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

These parts have some serious limitations. I hate to be negative but what you found is sort of the dark era of computing. For some uses it may be fine but to me this system is a reminder of how much computers have evolved without even considering raw performance and capacity increases.

- Ugly white case bezel now yellowed and white cases match nothing today.

- Poor airflow in general with little if any bezel air intake and it depends on a generic fan in the generic PSU as the only exhaust. Eek! It's surprising this thing didn't fail yet, probably doesn't have a lot of hours on it.

At least it has honeycomb-esque vents on the side, which many cases don't have - while the airflow does not look fantastic (and it doesn't have a case fan) I think its airflow could be much worse, like the slim Dell Optiplexes. Of course, it also does depend on how high the fans are spec'd and such.

I've bought a couple of Salvation Army systems, and picked one up one tower from the curb. One had a hideous PCChips mobo, which I swapped with a better yardsale mobo then gave the system to a neighbour. I still have at least 3 PIII Dells that my former employer chucked out. They're solid systems for email and office apps, so I'm going to clean off the private stuff and see if I can give them away. Maybe keep one for the case, and paint it something other than beige.

Someone on this forum (severach IIRC) said he had Dell PIII PSUs drop like "mayflies", but this was back in 2007. My guess (from his description) is that they have Newton Power 200W PSUs (I have one of them) and I've explored them internally. Aside from the Delta sleeve bearing fan in those PSUs and the Infineon chips I can't imagine what would make those PSUs suddenly fail. You could tiff it's the Taicon capacitors (though their quality is a debatable) but I can't imagine those PSUs being shoddily designed enough to fail like that.

[momaka]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

Decent score for $5.

I would say fix/recap the PSU. It may not be that great for a newer PC but for an older 5V -based PC like this one it should be more than adequate. It has spots for 12.5 mm caps on the secondary - that's a big plus in my book. If the fan is too loud and the PSU doesn't run too warm, you can hard-wire the fan on 7 V or 8.9 V.

As far as the Realtek ethernet card goes - IIRC, a long while back I read that cards with such sockets can be used to flash motherboard BIOSes. If that's true, then it's definitely a worthwhile card.

[bassbindevil]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

I've bought a couple of Salvation Army systems, and picked one up one tower from the curb. One had a hideous PCChips mobo, which I swapped with a better yardsale mobo then gave the system to a neighbour. I still have at least 3 PIII Dells that my former employer chucked out. They're solid systems for email and office apps, so I'm going to clean off the private stuff and see if I can give them away. Maybe keep one for the case, and paint it something other than beige.

I guess most old systems are going straight to the recycling yard now, which is frustrating because they don't let you salvage any parts, and I'm sure many just need minor repairs. I've seen surprisingly little computer stuff at yard sales. A couple of PII vintage towers, occasional bits of hardware. $15 for Streets & Trips with the USB GPS was a score. And a bag of misc computer bits for $1 that included 2 sticks of 512M DDR and 2 of 1GB DDR2.

It's fun exploring a "new" old computer system. I took apart a dual-P3 server that was built by a local computer store, and was shocked (though not entirely surprised) to discover that the assembly monkeys had used heatsink paste on top of the stock Intel sink pads. That prevented the stock pads from making proper contact, so it probably suffered badly from overheating. That system also had 7 SCSI hard drives but the only case fan was the power supply, and they didn't remove the drive bay covers to allow airflow over the drives. Needless to say, a couple of the drives soon failed and this $7000 (?) computer was relegated to the computer graveyard storage room since the clueless IT manager couldn't be bothered to fix it. Maybe "clueless" is redundant since only an idiot would have accepted such a poorly designed system in the first place.

[999999999]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

These parts have some serious limitations. I hate to be negative but what you found is sort of the dark era of computing. For some uses it may be fine but to me this system is a reminder of how much computers have evolved without even considering raw performance and capacity increases.

- Ugly white case bezel now yellowed and white cases match nothing today.

- Poor airflow in general with little if any bezel air intake and it depends on a generic fan in the generic PSU as the only exhaust. Eek! It's surprising this thing didn't fail yet, probably doesn't have a lot of hours on it.

- The system may not have ever been run in its present config. The case is older than the motherboard and CPU. Someone may have just had a pile of parts and assembled them, and I wonder this also because of the lack of dust.

- PSU might be worth a recap but only for powering this system, not very useful for a more power hungry build. I wouldn't overclock or put a better video card in the system for example, so the power consumption stays low. Also as noted the fan is another early failure point and at the very least I'd relube it now if not replace it.

- If you only need 100Mb ethernet, then the ethernet card is actually the only part of the system with much going for it besides the CPU. Realtek cards weren't the fastest but they do fine for desktop type network access patterns. HOWEVER there is another issue. It's a PCI card, along with the PCI modem, running on a Via chipset which had terrible PCI throughput and latency issues, as well as poor memory performance. Given the Tualatin CPU it might run an old version of office ok but certainly not optimal for a fileserver or multimedia box. I'm being picky, for its era this system was probably the best bang for the buck but in retrospect, corners cut can come with consequences.

- Northbridge doesn't need a heatsink. There are no voltage settings for it AFAIK and you can't put the FSB very far past 140-something MHz if that because the PCI bus is locked at a ratio so you'll have PCI errors and potential HDD corruption if you push the FSB much further than that... meaning, northbridge won't be running much hotter with the small o'c you can get from it, otherwise you're left with 133MHz FSB and CPU multipliers which don't stress the northbridge.

I reserve the right to be wrong.

[lti]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

I would like to find an old computer like that, but the best old computer I can find locally is a low-end Pentium II system for $100. It seems like everyone in my area keeps computers until they are 13 years old and too slow to use for anything except DOS games and expects to get a lot of money for them.

What chips does it use? I saw a DIP-8 package on there and that just screams TDA2822. Look up the datasheets, i'm betting you can feed them 12v no problem and give them more oomph.

I can't see a 5v-only class D chip being used in a cheap attempt at a powered speaker like that is, so it's most likely using the good ole TDA2822/TEA2025 combo, both of which can be run at up to 14v.

It looks like it uses two TDA2822Ms. At least one of them is bridged, based on what I can see of the circuit.

had one of those drive bay speakers in the shop pos.
it was rf sensitive.buzzed when my 220 repeater would transmit and hf ssb would come through loud.unintelligable of course but LOUD!!!
bookkeeper was at it one day and she about jumped through the roof!dammed computer snarling at me!

TDA2822Ms pick up a lot of external noise. I have a set of cheap computer speakers based on the TDA2822M that picked up noise from my computer's CPU fan.

I know the speakers are POS's... I just wanted to see what effect qualitycaps had on the circuit.

I can't do 12V w/o changing more caps... a few little ones IIRC were 6.3V

Those small caps might be in the signal path where the voltage won't exceed 6.3V, even at the absolute maximum supply voltage.

[ratdude747]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

I know the speakers are POS's... I just wanted to see what effect qualitycaps had on the circuit.

I can't do 12V w/o changing more caps... a few little ones IIRC were 6.3V

[kc8adu]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

the only parts i would keep is the mobo,cpu,ram.the isa slot gives it a reprieve from the recycling box.
had one of those drive bay speakers in the shop pos.
it was rf sensitive.buzzed when my 220 repeater would transmit and hf ssb would come through loud.unintelligable of course but LOUD!!!
bookkeeper was at it one day and she about jumped through the roof!dammed computer snarling at me!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

I won't use the speakers in a case but I may replace the 5V molex passthough with a 5V brick and use them as a powered set of mini-speakers (the sound quality isn't too awful bad).

What chips does it use? I saw a DIP-8 package on there and that just screams TDA2822. Look up the datasheets, i'm betting you can feed them 12v no problem and give them more oomph.

I can't see a 5v-only class D chip being used in a cheap attempt at a powered speaker like that is, so it's most likely using the good ole TDA2822/TEA2025 combo, both of which can be run at up to 14v.

[ratdude747]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

Remind me to take some pics of one of the caps I pulled from the speakers. I think it is the absolute worst Rubycon fake job I have EVER seen.

And yes, the two other larger caps were pretty bloated... When I recapped them I used a taller can size and in order to make it fit those two caps were soldered to a daughter board that I wired to the existing Cap locations.

I won't use the speakers in a case but I may replace the 5V molex passthough with a 5V brick and use them as a powered set of mini-speakers (the sound quality isn't too awful bad).

[rilski]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

@ratdude

That is a good buy for $5. It can still run Linux for the heck of it.

Nice find!

[stevo1210]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

I used to buy goodwill computers for $10 or so back in the day, a long, long time ago. Basically just ended up sitting in a corner of the house doing nothing... so I threw them all out or gave them away as I moved house. Nowadays, I'll pop into good will but I'll never ever pick up a computer. No joke when I say this but my "junk" now bellows in my wardrobe... and they are all Pentium 4's/PentiumD's or Core 2 Duo based computers... just waiting to be scrapped. I guess my iMac does everything I need... for now.

[ben7]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

something like that at the goodwill computer works in DFW would go for $50

[Uranium-235]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

something like that at the goodwill computer works in DFW would go for $50

[JohnLWG]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

Great post! I love parting out older systems when the owner decides to sell rather than pay for repair. Theres parts that sell that surprise me. I/O panel covers and floppy drives for one. I don't go further back than Pentium 4 though. and the towers are definitely a "back burner" project that sit until I have nothing else to do.

I just parted out and listed 6 different towers over the weekend. The hard drives and fans went first (which covered my initial investment). We'll see how the rest does.

I hate to see working electronics end up in the trash when someone may be willing to pay for a just a piece of it. That's my version of being "green!"

[mariushm]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

You got it right with the board, it's a Shuttle.

The modem IS an Intel solution .. they made quite some modem chipsets back then. But, I think it's somewhat of a software modem design.

Anyway, intel's site is a pain and as they reached end of life you'll have a hard time finding anything about them. Apparently they may have been sold by intel as Xircom:

http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-007689.htm
http://www.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-007689.htm

Anyway. For 5$, you have quite a catch there. Very nice. The video card is usable.. could even sell it on eBay for about 10$, psu can be reused (seems good with all the filtering)... hdd is never a bad thing to have..

[ben7]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

That is quite an interesting compy find!

And LOL, is the stacked-choke in the psu a first!?

That is soo cheap too, my goodwill store here will sell amplifiers and things like that for about $30! And you are not guaranteed a working amp either!

[ratdude747]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

That's a Young Year PSU. You got a good one with the full input protection circuitry populated. I tried to re-cap one that like that once, thing blew a fuse when I plugged it in. If the speaker outputs on the back panel are horizontal, then it's pre Pentium 4. Not worth even $5. Too fast for a vintage gaming system, too slow for modern use. Also, that VRM looks too puny to put a serious Tualattin chip in there like a PIII-S and the chipset is a VIA.

According to shuttle no revision could do the 512k tualies. Yeah, its pre pentium 4 but I did intentionally beef up the vrm caps.

I personally prefer the via chipsets anyway. The damn intel ones are capped at 512mb, ali AFAIK didn't make a tualie chip, and SiS chips just suck.

Keep in mind that I mainly bought this for the HDD. Anything I get from the other parts is icing on the cake to me.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

and the chipset is a VIA.

I have dual Tualatins on a VIA chipset and there's nothing wrong with that. I even have a VIA-based PCI SATA card on it, because it didn't play well with the Silicon Image one i had.

[mockingbird]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

That's a Young Year PSU. You got a good one with the full input protection circuitry populated. I tried to re-cap one that like that once, thing blew a fuse when I plugged it in. If the speaker outputs on the back panel are horizontal, then it's pre Pentium 4. Not worth even $5. Too fast for a vintage gaming system, too slow for modern use. Also, that VRM looks too puny to put a serious Tualattin chip in there like a PIII-S and the chipset is a VIA.

[larrymoencurly]

Re: $5 goodwill tower

The closest thing I found at a local Goodwill was a barebones box with no CPU heatsink, no cards, and maybe no RAM. It had a Socket 462 motherboard that had been recapped with Sanyos, and Goodwill wanted $35 for it.