Question Legacy Parts

[angeletti]

Hi everyone, my name is Marc and I'm from the Philippines. Recently with the corona virus lockdown happening, I've been going through my old things lying around the house and I've been reunited with my old computer - my first ever computer which I've built from parts I've ordered over ebay and other sites and some locally sourced components.

Needless to say they are in bad shape. I have been combing through sites such as eBay and Amazon recently to find old components such as ram and my motherboard backplate and failed to find someone selling.

I'm writing this hoping maybe you've kept old parts with you with and was hoping to buy them from you so that I could try and boot up my system once again.

at it's core it has a pentium 4 3.4 extreme edition socket 478 processor, mounted on an asus p4p800-e deluxe and was running on 4 sticks of ddr500 pc-4000 hyperx with 512mb each. my gpu is one of a kind, a gainward agp 7800GS+. I believe the drives are dead but they were a pair/raid 0 western digital raptors.

Sadly I only have one ram stick left plugged in and I can't seem to find the others as of the moment. my backplate is gone, my drives don't spin up. my psu exploded (lol) and I'm seeing rust all over the place. I was hoping maybe you can help me track down parts for my system again and maybe restore it to its former glory as a gaming system, something I believe enthusiasts would appreciate.

I hope this is the right place to post my query.

 

[angeletti]

I forgot to attach this. I'll get some more pics later. It's very, very dusty now.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I'm from USA, and I don't know how much PC parts cost in the Philippines, but... I don't think that this would be such a wise decision to make. I know, you have very fond memories of your old rig, but if things are "getting rusty" as you mentioned, then maybe the parts are in too rough shape to re-build, without replacing everything, and if you're going to do that, might as well just get a newer rig.

Maybe just get some perfboard, or the like, and zip-tie your parts to your wall, "in loving memory" of your old rig. Because even if you did rebuild it, a P4 is NOT going to be impressive, performance-wise, any more.

 

[mindless1]

Agreed it seems too far gone, and to me it is not nearly old enough to be nostalgic. However to more directly tackle the issues...

Most people on this forum are not in the Philippines so you may have better luck finding parts at a local computer shop. Often people will bring in old systems and find the cost to repair is too high and abandon the system so the shop has parts to get rid of. Otherwise how about Facebook marketplace or other social sites with local parts listings? Shipping each part at a time could be very expensive, costing more than the parts are worth.

Some heatsinks come with a custom backplate, might that be a way around yours being missing?

Memory should be easiest to find used and cheap. PSU could be replaced with a new one, nothing special needed. Rust, depends on where it is, the electrical contacts should have been gold plated so it may only be cosmetic, but some parts could have a solder flux residue and if they got wet that could cause conductive shorts and need cleaned off, with water and a toothbrush.

You can get IDE to SATA adapters on ebay and elsewhere to run modern SATA drives.