What do you do with old hardware?

Either you buy a new pc or decide to upgrade, What do you do with the old hardware? Do you sell it, keep in the closet for five years before it gets recycled or do you give it to family?

I keep parts around if i suspect a newer parts of failing for testing in other pcs. I do throw out some hardware if its really old and has no use. Although i do keep some old hardware that i consider rare and not replaceable. Any PC from 2000-2008 i trash completely because they are too fast for running my DOS correctly, but too slow for running windows to my liking. I have an old pentium 500mhz and k6 400mhz PCs for running pure dos gaming if I want.

so basically PC motherboards i have from 2000-2008 i have trashed. I have an AMD 3000+ and AMD 2100+ cpu and motherboard in gonna toss out when i get to it. I'm gonna keep the case though incase i need it for something. In total i've trashed about 6 pc's completely. I had two 386sx pc's, and one 486dx pc i trashed a few years ago because they were useless to have around anymore. Also through out some 120 megabyte hard drives which were slow, and loud as crap.

I've trashed all my clunky crt monitors, but i never toss out lcd monitors... and never will, i find them useful and you can never have too many.

I also have an old 486 laptop i got in 1992 or 93... dunno if i'll ever trash it since it doesnt take any space up has a 3.5" floppy drive which is pretty over powered.

I usually give away my old hardware to people that want to game or need better stuff and I can give them that upgrade for free. It makes me feel good about myself and im helping people play some good pc games.

Throw it in the closet and maybe find a use for it later or just give it to my dad/brother. Just yesterday I threw together a pfsense box again. Never thought I'd use it again with the nasty nanobsd compatibility and poor ipv6 /60 support. But I just put it on a new vlan and used it for openvpn behind the openwrt router, works nicely for v4 only. A 2006 qx6700 still has a lot of power; much more than the 800mhz cpu inside my wndr3700 which maxed out at about 30 mb/s for aes-128.

I do tend to throw out hardware that is made for gaming and makes a lot of heat. e.g 3870x2(why would you want this?)

I try to use the hardware in something else if I can, otherwise it just sits. 10-20 years from now I'll probably bag it up and chuck it in the dump.

Whenever I upgrade I always sell my old part.

Whenever I sell my old graphics card for a new one I'm always able to get bare minimum $125 since I upgrade it pretty often. Whenever I upgrade sockets I just sell the old motherboard/CPU as a combo (once again im always able to get at least $125). I've sold old monitors to help pay for new ones (for example I sold a crappy 5 year old TN panel for $70 and only paid $70 out of pocket for a nice Dell IPS).

Still got my GTX275 sitting around. Nobody wants to buy it :(

I have an old dual core 2 duo and 9500GT setup I am going to give to my son for Minecraft and Warthunder.

So in other words I keep it for a few more years.

Use it for folding?

This card would be good for professional applications like rendering maps.

Most of my former PCs have been given to family. My current PC will be replaced with another and if i cant find someone to take it, it will probably be donated at Goodwill or school. I dont like throwing away computer hardware in the trash.

I mostly give it away.

Recycling is also smart. With China controlling so much of the minerals we need in computers, recycling what we already have is a good thing to do in my opinion.

Keep some as back up, give away some, sell some. All depends on what it is.

Don't have a spare PC that is new enough to support or power it.

I gave my first computer to the recycling guy, or whatever the politically correct term is :). We have 4 computers now, but I'm the only one with AMD and DDR3 so I sold my old CPU and RAM, and I gave the old GPU to my sister. I realize it's definitely better for me to buy midrange parts and sell when they are still under warranty.

I usually try to sell everything on Ebay. I sell almost everything, but occasionally something will sit around for a long time. Right now, i'm actually staring at my ATI 9800 XT card. I really loved that card when it came out , remember tearing up some UT03/04 on all jacked up settings with that baby. Shame it's an AGP card, I would throw it in my work desktop, which would have to be better than it's integrated graphics.

Your current one does not have two PCI-e slots?

The F(at)H program can be setup to only use a GPU for folding. Sure it draws some power, but it doesn't stress the CPU much.

My motherboard is cheap and crappy and only has 1 PCI-E.

I also don't have the necessary connectors on my PSU, even if it could handle the extra 200w from that old card...

Sell it even for a really low price.

I got no use for it.

i dont actually have a lot of old PC hardware at the moment.

If i can get my old PC (which still has some gaming chops) and monitor sorted though then i will stick a linux distro on it and give it a proper run with some gaming.

generally i dont tend to upgrade much. i buy high, keep it for years then replace the whole tower. so i havent had much in the way of parts. but when i do have parts or an old PC they tend to go to friends or family members. i would rather see it get used rather than sitting in a closet. same with old consoles/handhelds/phones etc. mind you i make sure the new PC is working before i give the old one away :P.

if its broken then i take it apart for a gander then its off for recycling.

sell on ebay?

Hand me down.

The most state of the art stuff belongs to me*.

Older stuff gets farmed out to family and kin. I also keep stuff that I deemed I got my money's worth.

*Except laptops. I have an $800 ASUS gaming lappie while the wife has a $2000 Sager she doesn't even game on. The wife has stuck with the Sager brand since 2001.

I sell the old hardware or give it away to a friend if they are in need. This is what most people I know do.

I give it to friends or family members. They typically have terrible computers.

Ebay, craigslist or Amazon.

My last monitor and graphics card I sold locally on craigslist (no fees and I got the cash upfront). CPU/motherboard combo I sold on ebay but the time before that I sold it on craigslist. Most of the my parts from two builds ago where sold on Amazon.

usually sell on ebay. if i can get $20 for something it's still better than chucking in the trash