Any AMD FX series CPU’s that have more than 4 cores (though this one may not be so good since a modern ryzen 3 will outperform an FX8320 in many cases)
Any AMD Opterons that use the same bulldozer/piledriver architecture as the above chips and have more than 4 cores
Pitch:
Anything with the name Pentium, Celeron, Core Solo/Duo/2
Anything that uses a socket 771/775 and older
Any AMD chips with the word Athlon, Duron or APU in the name(Ryzen excluded)
Any CPU that supports DDR2 or lower
GPU:
Keep:
Radeon GPU’s no older/lower than 6800/6900 series
Nvidia GPU’s no older/lower than GTX680 series
Pitch:
Radeon GPU’s Older/Lower than 6700 series
Nvidia GPU’s older/lower than GTX670 series
Any FirePro/Quadro made before 2011
Other stuff:
Cases:
can be reused i suppose, no real problems here apart from aesthetics and airflow
PSU:
Pitch anything lower than 450W or anything that doesnt have an 80+ rating
Ram:
Pitch DDR2 and lower, ECC and non-ECC
Mobo:
Pitch anything that accepts DDR2
Pitch anything with PCIe Gen 1
Pitch anything with socket 775 or lower
Pitch anything with Am3 or lower (AM3+ is excluded)
Pitch anything with an AGP slot
Pitch anything with IDE or Floppy headers
Storage:
Pitch sata hard drives lower than 500GB
Pitch any drives with IDE
Pitch 30/60/80GB SSD’s, theyre old and will probably fail soon
For gpu on the radeons I wouldnt keep anything lower than 7850, nvidia would be anything below a 660, roughly equal to your list its just that I think I can get by at lower settings to make these cards viable.
One person’s trash is another’s treasure… might be worthwhile to post what y’all are planning to literally throw away and waiting a week to see if a forum member could use it.
even if 450W is slightly overkill, it means that the PSU wont heat up a lot because of low power demands, you have tonnes of headroom for something more like a GPU, and overall you’ll get more efficiency from it. Typically extremely low and extremely high PSU usage are both inefficient power wise but 40-70% usage tends to produce the least amount of waste power.
Thats why i suggest pitching the old PSU’s. Also anything without 80+ rating is basically trash as well
I have a couple of IDE DVD-rom drives that read Gamecube and Wii disks, A 12 year old Mac Pro with 64Gb DDR2 ram, a CRT monitor that does 2560x1440@75Hz, some very old PC simm memory modules that work in Atari STe’s, IDE’s for PS2 network/HDD adapter…stuff like that
Age isn’t the only factor if the item is still useful in some way,
Not that most old PC stuff isn’t soulless garbage landfill fodder.
I’m one of those, I still keep my first PC running (an Abit VP6, dual pentium 3 Coppermine 1GHz, 2GB 133MHz SDRAM).
I would love to get older stuff or replacements for an HP Vectra 486.
But I agree with most people here, Pentium D/Pentium 4 are and always were junk even for retro gaming when there are better athlons or Pentium M/Core 2 Duos around.
Anything newer than 1st gen Allendale Core2Duo is very much useable for everyday or office use if you know what you’re doing with the software.
too old for me depends on what I’m doing. If I’m making a facebook machine for someone, a Core 2 machine from the side of the road is ok. Anything better than that and I start needing Sandy Bridge. 1366 xeons are nice and cheap but unless you have a 1366 rackmount server lying, Sandy Bridge in general is just much faster.
In terms of gaming workloads (which I put between casual use and workstation workloads), I use the following criteria:
Dual cores or higher: If it can run heavy emulators like CEMU without issues, it’s still useable.
Quad cores or higher: If it can run PUBG at decent framerates, it’s still useable.
With both of these, in my experience using anything older than Sandy Bridge has resulted in bad performance issues on the intel side. With CEMU and Dolphin emulators, from what I understand anything from AMD that isn’t based on the Zen architecture will choke because the emulators require very high IPC. If you have an i5-2400 or better you should be able to play pretty much any game that isn’t a botched, overpriced AAA title. I don’t know what special sauce Intel introduced with Sandy Bridge, but it’s managed to remain relevant far longer than anything else before it.
Monitors… I’m quite jaded. I love my 1440p AH-VA monitor, but I still consider any Trinitron CRT a better deal than any LCD of the same resolution. If I find one at a garage sale, I’ll probably buy it. I got a 19" Dell Trinitron at a yard sale for $10. I tried playing Ori and the Blind Forest on it and because the game’s rendering is tied to the refresh rate of the monitor, everything felt smoother, faster and more responsive. Going back to an LCD for that game was awful.
If you ask the people running computers on a nuclear sub or a business. If it works dont mess with it.
It your a screaming hippy that wants to say your device is the most power efficient even though your old device was better TCO. Then spend the $$$ to brag.
If a device works then its good. Have to have a backup plan and a replacement plan. While it works but why replace it.
Should be worth mentioning that “works” and “does the job” are not the same thing. Whether something does the job is objective and can be measured. This is important when deciding when/if to upgrade.
Power is not cheap; at least not everywhere. This is an incorrect blanket statement.
Older hardware is more expensive to keep running; usually.
For example, my companies data center costs $1,000,000 each month in power. If new hardware comes out that will save on power and be less than the current allocated budget, then its worth upgrading.