Old 486 PC price...

[PowerPie5000]

I want to clear some more space (for more miggy stuff ) so i've decided to try and sell my old Windows 95/Dos gaming PC base unit

I've had a look on ebay and i can only find a couple of 486 PC base units being sold in the states at ridiculous prices (between £170 and £221 excluding postage ).

Here are my old 486 PC specs:

CPU: AMD 486DX4 - 100mhz (with heatsink + fan).
Cache: 256kb
RAM: 32mb (2 x 16mb FPM 72-pin SIMM's).
Motherboard: Brand is unknown (model number is JK-042A). It's a socket 3 board with UMC chips and has 3 x ISA, 3 x VLB and 4 x 72-pin SIMM slots.
Graphics Card: 1mb Cirrus Logic SVGA (VLB).
Sound Card: Genuine Sound Blaster Pro 2 ISA (CT1600)
I/O card: I believe it's a Winbond model (VLB) and has the usual IDE, floppy and Serial ports etc...
Hard Drive: 3.2gb Fujitsu IDE drive formatted into 2 partitions.
CD-ROM Drive: Sony 8x speed IDE drive.
Floppy Drive: Standard 1.44mb type.
Speakers: Front panel type with stereo speakers and a built-in mini sub woofer (great sound for a small unit!).
OS: Windows 95 installed with all correct drivers etc... (no disc).

All housed in a standard desktop style AT case with a 200W AT PSU. This PC does not have any of the usual "yellowing" to the case and is in great condition!

Does anyone have any idea how much this could fetch? I know they are quite difficult to find these days (especially the sound card!). I just want a rough price to aim for, Cheers

[8bitbubsy]

The 'Pro' series of Sound Blaster is of the more rare ones, but still not a higly wanted piece of hardware. An SB16 beats it and isn't rare... Five bucks for an SB16 on ebay. If you have a Gravis Ultrasound (not a clone, nor the PnP version) sound card laying around, then we speak highly wanted and a bit rare.

The rest of the hardware is pretty standard stuff. Those Cirrus Logic (probably a GL542x) VESA cards were super common back then and is to find on ebay. The AMD 486-DX4 CPU was also quite common right before (or maybe around the same time) the Pentium arrived. Also easy to find this one.

The built-in speakers are quite cool though, and the machine looks cool :-)

Worth around €15 to €30 I'd say, but that's just my opinion. You can still find something like this at various recycle places, schools, lazy officer's basement etc... And old PCs aren't that highly wanted. Maybe if it was an ancient IBM 8086 (for collectors). The ebay price is sick! They have no idea..

EDIT: LOL! My postcount is 486.

[meega]

"Worth around €15 to €30 I'd say, but that's just my opinion."

I was going to say, not more than £5... Sorry if you were hoping for more PowerPie5000, but I've been given 486's in the past just to clear the "seller's" floor space.

[Allen1]

I can only agree with what has been said, I have 2 486 desktop PCs and 4 laptops. The 486's are great for Eprom programmers that require an ISA slot and fortunately 3 of my laptops do have an ISA slot and I fitted 2 of them with programmer cards, other than those type of examples and old dos or windows 95 type games, they have little or no value.

[DH]

tbh, it'll generally be scrap, but saying that, I have an old 486SX, all I need is the 5 1/4" floppy drive and I'll give it away as a fully working model to my local museum, I'm sure they'll be interested in it

[Predseda]

Here, in our country, these machines are really priceless rubbish, if you sell them for 3Eur, it is a success. Amiga of the same age is valuable, PC is a scrap.

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by 8bitbubsy

An SB16 beats it and isn't rare... Five bucks for an SB16 on ebay.

Depends what model of SB16 as many of them were complete rubbish and had the "hanging note" bug Many of them also used Creative's own FM synthesis chip which was horrible for midi music in games... the SB Pro 2 uses OPL3 sythesizers created by Yamaha which sound much better (some early SB16's used these chips too ).

The only advantage the SB16 had was 16-bit audio which to be honest did not sound much better than the SB Pro's 8-bit audio... and most old Dos games do not support 16-bit audio (apart from the later Dos games from 1996+ such as Quake, Carmageddon and Duke Nukem 3D etc...). Also the SB16 was not fully SB Pro compatible for older games

I believe the SB Pro is the best audio card for those old Dos games and even better if paired with a Roland compatible wavetable midi card

Anyway so i suppose a 486 does not have much value then. There are only a couple on ebay and they are listed for quite a bit! Here's an example and 6 have been sold : http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NCR-3230-486DX...item2ea03178d5

EDIT: I sold an old Compaq base unit on ebay a few months ago and it had a 99p starting bid and if i remember correctly it sold for £105! A bit more than i expected! I cannot provide a link to that particular listing as ebay deletes them if they are over 90 days old. That base unit was nothing special either:

Compaq Deskpro 4000
Pentium 200 MMX
64mb PC66 memory
4mb S3 Virge DX PCI
4mb Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 PCI
Creative Soundblaster AudioPCI 128 (Ensoniq 5880)
10gb HD

[meega]

Originally Posted by PowerPie5000

EDIT: I sold an old Compaq base unit on ebay a few months ago and it had a 99p starting bid ...

...

Compaq Deskpro 4000
Pentium 200 MMX
64mb PC66 memory
4mb S3 Virge DX PCI
4mb Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 PCI
Creative Soundblaster AudioPCI 128 (Ensoniq 5880)
10gb HD

I bought better than that for 99p a couple of years ago, a Packard-Bell 300MHz Pentium II complete multimedia setup, from 1999/2000, with 19" monitor and original "tied-to-hardware" install media including full Microsoft Office. The seller had reformatted and reinstalled everything, demonstrated it working on collection. It was about £1400 when new. He thought it was a bit of a shame to simply throw it in the tip, so listed it for peanuts and didn't even expect it to sell.

It had 2x256MB of Crucial PC100 168-pin ram in it, which I ripped out and fitted into my 1997 Fujitsu Pentium MMX machine (again a complete setup, similarish spec to your base unit) that I had been given for free by a friend in 2004/5. I still have the Fujitsu, it's cute and easy to work on, I'm quite attached to it for no particular reason (even though I don't use it now).

[Bloodwych]

Nice example of an old PC PowerPie - man you've been offloading some quality stuff recently!

I love these older machines and had a quite nice collection myself that I picked up from ebay when the auction site was flooded with this stuff for like 99p per item. Some time in the early 00's I think. Really enjoyed creating DOS boot configs for games and boot menus/disks which went into Windows 3.1 and 95/98. It was fun playing around in DOS.

Then I decided I had too much stuff and could use dosbox for older games, so gave it all away:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=25292
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=40800

I had some nice items, like the SB32 AWE cards with RAM slots fully populated with 8MB for wavetable's. Unfortunately, it's hard to say what these things will fetch these days. Really suprised you managed to get £100 for an old P200 Compaq - you can get Shuttle SFF machines and even dual core PC's for the same price!

PC's depreciate so fast!

My oldest PC these days is an AGP x800XT PE, Audigy2 ZS for EAX, 2GB rig which I use for Windows 98/XP games. I kind of cheated however as even that has a 775 dual core E7200, thanks to VIA's last chipset which had hybrid AGP/PCI-E support.

Oh well, hope you find it a good home. It looks like a nice example from the era.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by PowerPie5000

Depends what model of SB16 as many of them were complete rubbish and had the "hanging note" bug Many of them also used Creative's own FM synthesis chip which was horrible for midi music in games... the SB Pro 2 uses OPL3 sythesizers created by Yamaha which sound much better (some early SB16's used these chips too ).

The only advantage the SB16 had was 16-bit audio which to be honest did not sound much better than the SB Pro's 8-bit audio... and most old Dos games do not support 16-bit audio (apart from the later Dos games from 1996+ such as Quake, Carmageddon and Duke Nukem 3D etc...). Also the SB16 was not fully SB Pro compatible for older games

I believe the SB Pro is the best audio card for those old Dos games and even better if paired with a Roland compatible wavetable midi card

Anyway so i suppose a 486 does not have much value then. There are only a couple on ebay and they are listed for quite a bit! Here's an example and 6 have been sold : http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NCR-3230-486DX...item2ea03178d5

EDIT: I sold an old Compaq base unit on ebay a few months ago and it had a 99p starting bid and if i remember correctly it sold for £105! A bit more than i expected! I cannot provide a link to that particular listing as ebay deletes them if they are over 90 days old. That base unit was nothing special either:

Compaq Deskpro 4000
Pentium 200 MMX
64mb PC66 memory
4mb S3 Virge DX PCI
4mb Orchid Righteous Voodoo 1 PCI
Creative Soundblaster AudioPCI 128 (Ensoniq 5880)
10gb HD

that one you linked to on fleabag is quite nice. I prefer the custom cases like that

[Bloodwych]

I agree Paul_s, custom cases remind me of the A1000. But who would have thought they would go for that much?

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by Bloodwych

Really suprised you managed to get £100 for an old P200 Compaq - you can get Shuttle SFF machines and even dual core PC's for the same price!

The people bidding on that old Compaq wanted a nicely balanced Windows 95/98/Dos machine with full legacy support. It was great for those early 3D games but i was not expecting it to sell for much and the final sale price was a big surprise! The buyer liked the system

I still have another old system that i will be keeping for use with my old Windows/Dos games:

Pentium III 650mhz Coppermine CPU (old slot-1 type).
Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard (slot-1)
384mb PC100 RAM (3 x 128mb).
40gb Maxtor HDD
DVD/CD drive
64mb ATI Rage Fury Maxx AGP graphics (i think this was the first dual GPU gaming graphics card).
2 x 12mb Voodoo 2 PCI graphics cards in SLI (3DFX had SLI way before Nvidia ).
Yamaha XG PCI sound card with full SB Pro compatibility for Dos using an SB link cable attached to the motherboard.

I will be keeping this system for a while for playing those old games that refuse to run on Windows XP/Vista/7

[Bloodwych]

Nice PowerPie - BX boards were legendary, plus the Rage Fury Maxx - I used to crave one of those! A slot PIII too! So strange they decided to make those slot CPU's - they required more parts and materials!

Looks like I should have kept my old PC stuff longer - that machine I was trying to give away in 2006 was kitted out with a boot menu I created from scratch. It booted into several DOS configs, had all the right DOS drivers including slow down programs for older games, Win95b and Windows 98 SE. It played every game under the sun plus had a quality midi wavetable in the SB16 8MB RAM!

But no one wanted it. Stripped down the parts and sent them to Scrappysphinx. Looks like I could have got a few pennies for it on ebay these days, especially with some pictures of the games and boot menu, since no one bothers to list old systems anymore. No guarantee though.

Still, at least I didn't chuck it on a skip.

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by Bloodwych

Nice PowerPie - BX boards were legendary, plus the Rage Fury Maxx - I used to crave one of those! A slot PIII too! So strange they decided to make those slot CPU's - they required more parts and materials!

I wonder what would happen if you fed one of those slot cpu's into a NES/Sega Master System?

[Paul_s]

when we were scrapping old systems around 2000/2001 at work we came across some pretty archaic stuff. There were some green screen 286's I remember that still fired up! Dunno why I didn't ask if I could have them.... probably in land fill now I appreciate older system more now than back then.

these were the one's!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Vintage-IBM-Pe...item19bb56d325

booted up no problems at all

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by Paul_s

when we were scrapping old systems around 2000/2001 at work we came across some pretty archaic stuff. There were some green screen 286's I remember that still fired up! Dunno why I didn't ask if I could have them.... probably in land fill now I appreciate older system more now than back then.

these were the one's!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Vintage-IBM-Pe...item19bb56d325

booted up no problems at all

Wow now that's an oldie! Might have been powerful enough to run Commander Keen

[PowerPie5000]

Originally Posted by Bloodwych

Nice PowerPie - BX boards were legendary, plus the Rage Fury Maxx - I used to crave one of those! A slot PIII too! So strange they decided to make those slot CPU's - they required more parts and materials!

Looks like I should have kept my old PC stuff longer - that machine I was trying to give away in 2006 was kitted out with a boot menu I created from scratch. It booted into several DOS configs, had all the right DOS drivers including slow down programs for older games, Win95b and Windows 98 SE. It played every game under the sun plus had a quality midi wavetable in the SB16 8MB RAM!

Just think how much these systems would have cost back then! And now people just throw them away which is probably the main reason why it's difficult to find good old 386/486 machines .

[gilgamesh]

Why would anybody want that (besides legacy periphery)?

[Paul_s]

Originally Posted by PowerPie5000

Just think how much these systems would have cost back then! And now people just throw them away which is probably the main reason why it's difficult to find good old 386/486 machines .

There are hardly any on eBay. No wonder they make a bit. Deffo going to be on the look out now!

I think we have some new old stock Pentium II Celeron 266's at work! They are quite neat machines, it'll be like the NOS Amiga Technologies 1200's!
I'm going to look tomorrow and ask if I can buy it (think we only have the one!). Built like a tank and have the custom case - they are Fujitsu ErgoPro e365 iirc. We also did the big brother x565 which were double the size! this is bringing back memories now.

[cosmicfrog]

intel had to had to put the processor on a card as the cache ram could`t run as fast as the processor, BX motherboards