Parts Advice please! Building computer from donated systems.

[Daniel]

Hi There,

First post for me. I will be building a computer using old systems. I
will build it at a non-profit computer recycling/donation center in
Portland Oregon (www.freegeek.org). There are about 200 used systems
that I can choose from. The used systems are all ATX with Pentium 3s.
The Pentium 2s get recycled. First I will choose a
case/motherboard/cpu and then add the cards and drives. Questions:

1. What case/motherboard/cpu brands should I look for? What should I
avoid? I was told to stay away from Dell, Gateway and HP as they are
not the best for rebuilding. Note that most computers are at least two
years old.
2. What sound and video cards should I look for? We have boxes of
cards to choose from, from two to five years old.

After attaching all the components I will be installing a Linux OS.

Any other advice would be appreciated.

 

[John Doe]

After attaching all the components I will be installing a Linux OS.

Will you be running a server?

 

[Paul]

Hi There,

First post for me. I will be building a computer using old systems. I
will build it at a non-profit computer recycling/donation center in
Portland Oregon (www.freegeek.org). There are about 200 used systems
that I can choose from. The used systems are all ATX with Pentium 3s.
The Pentium 2s get recycled. First I will choose a
case/motherboard/cpu and then add the cards and drives. Questions:

1. What case/motherboard/cpu brands should I look for? What should I
avoid? I was told to stay away from Dell, Gateway and HP as they are
not the best for rebuilding. Note that most computers are at least two
years old.
2. What sound and video cards should I look for? We have boxes of
cards to choose from, from two to five years old.

After attaching all the components I will be installing a Linux OS.

Any other advice would be appreciated.

You do realize there are at least 10,000 different motherboard
models. The best thing for you to bring with you to the
recycling center, is a computer geek. Actually, I'm surprised
the people at the recycling center won't help you out. They
must have a pretty good idea what is good and what isn't.

I would look for a motherboard with an Intel chipset on it.
The 440BX chipset was a stable chipset for its time. There
are probably a few 815 chipset boards that would work also
(but they have a limit of 512MB total memory). There are
some VIA chipsets that take more memory, but one of the
Southbridge models has a bug in it (disk to disk copy
problem). But identifying the chipset, based on the
motherboard part number, is not an easy job. Try to find a
motherboard with a 133Mhz capable FSB, and a processor to
match. So, a 1GHz processor with a 133Mhz FSB would be a
good choice.

If you select "Socket 370" here, which is one socket used
for a P3, there are 562 motherboards listed here. And this
site is nowhere near complete.

http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/index.html

For sound cards, I think it is safe to assume, that anything
truly worthy, will be put in a "special box" for fund raising.
You'll probably find a lot of old Creative Sound Blasters and
the like. Probably any of those will be good enough for
listening to music. I would definitely try to get one
sound card, as an AC-97 motherboard sound solution doesn't
have the same noise floor performance.

With regard to the Dell/Gateway/HP side of things, make
sure the motherboard has a slot for a video card. Built-in
graphics suck, and an AGP slot would be a better alternative.
You will need a video card for it, but you can always find
an upgrade later to fix that, if the card you snag is not
good enough.

This page has charts comparing the performance of the video
cards. These charts compare the 3D performance, which is
meaningless unless you are a gamer. For a number of years
now, the 2D state of development is such, that all cards
have good enough 2D performance. Only built-in graphics,
which uses main memory bandwidth, is going to be inferior.
So, start with the 2002 charts and work up the page, and
familarize yourself with the models.

http://www.tomshardware.com/site/vgacharts/index.html

This chart is meant to demonstrate, that there was overlap
between generations of video cards, so in fact some of the
older cards still have impressive stats compared to the
bottom of the line modern cards.

http://web.archive.org/web/20050305...ykuly/zestawienie_GPU_2/skala_wydajnosci.html

In any case, you really need a geek with hardware experience,
to sort through this stuff. If you have no experience with this
stuff, they'll all look good

HTH,
Paul

 

[Charlie Wilkes]

Hi There,

First post for me. I will be building a computer using old systems. I
will build it at a non-profit computer recycling/donation center in
Portland Oregon (www.freegeek.org). There are about 200 used systems
that I can choose from. The used systems are all ATX with Pentium 3s.
The Pentium 2s get recycled. First I will choose a
case/motherboard/cpu and then add the cards and drives. Questions:

1. What case/motherboard/cpu brands should I look for? What should I
avoid? I was told to stay away from Dell, Gateway and HP as they are
not the best for rebuilding. Note that most computers are at least two
years old.

I don't know about Gateway, but Dell & HP tend not to be very good for
upgrading or customizing.

Asus boards are good, in my experience... but there are lots of good
brands and models. I guess you want an AGP slot if you have AGP cards
to choose from. But I'll bet you've got a lot of boards with
integrated video, and a lot of PCI video cards of various quality.

2. What sound and video cards should I look for? We have boxes of
cards to choose from, from two to five years old.

I have an 8mb Jaton PCI card that I like a lot. I got it in the
original box for about $5. It works well with Dynebolic, DOS (with
caveats) and Windows. It has a trident chipset.

Maybe you can find a Matrox video card from a graphics dept. They are
professional quality cards, well-regarded. I have never found a good
one at a price I wanted to pay.

Sound cards, I don't know. Whatever works with Debian Linux.

After attaching all the components I will be installing a Linux OS.

Any other advice would be appreciated.

If you are going to use any PCI cards, get pci.exe from Craig Hart's
page, along with pcidevs.txt. Then use a DOS boot floppy to run it
and find out about various cards installed in an open testbed.

ISA modems seem to work better, for some strange reason, but if you
pick a newer board it probably won't have any ISA slots. Someone will
no doubt warn you about the PCI winmodems, which require Windows.

OEM machines often have no-name PSUs. The good ones are usually
heavier than the cheesy ones. Test voltages carefully, and when you
find a winner, take the cover off and blast the fine dust out.

I looked at the www.freegeek.org web page. Is this going to be your
own personal freekbox? Sounds like a lot of fun. The Linux class
alone would be worth the ticket.

Charlie