There’s nothing more exciting than finding electronic rubbish on the side of the road.

This morning, while leaving for work, I noticed a PC sitting out the front of my home.

It had been raining overnight and the machine looked wet.

More importantly, I could see two DVI ports occupying the space above two expansion slots.

Double-width video card!

Unfortunately I was already running late, so I had to leave it there.

When I got home, it was somehow still waiting for me.

I brought it inside and started pulling it apart.

The power supply contained a delightful cockroach infestation.

It went straight out.

Then a lizard fell out of the computer and ran away.

Excellent.

A wet or contaminated mains power supply is not something I want to energise without a proper inspection, and this one had already provided more wildlife than any PSU reasonably should.

The machine is difficult to date exactly from the surviving parts, but most of the major hardware sits around the late-2000s to early-2010s period.

The useful hardware appears to be:

  • Gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2P motherboard
  • Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400, 2.66 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, 1333 MHz FSB
  • Gigabyte GV-R577UD-1GD Radeon HD 5770, 1 GB GDDR5
  • 2 x 2 GB DDR3-1333 RAM

No hard drive was included and the optical drive was badly corroded.

The CPU cooler is the familiar Intel push-pin design.

I have never been particularly fond of convincing those clips to lock properly.

Still, for a machine retrieved from the side of the road after a night in the rain, there is an impressive amount of potentially useful hardware here.

Not a bad deal for the price of free! ;)

Sources