FS 'Retro' PC - Athlon XP 2400+ with Ano bling!

Analog Kid

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Due to the impending arrival of a second little person in our household I'm forced to move from my slightly elderly desktop PC to a Laptop so the spare bedroom can become a nursery once again. To this end I have split my old PC and listed various components on eBay but I'm left with the basis of a decent PC which I can't ship easily. It's an Athlon XP 2400+ which is a 2Ghz chip, it has 1Gb of Crucial DDR RAM and a Samsung CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo drive fitted. There is a box of spares which contains numerous cables, screws and the driver disks for the various components. It would need an AGP graphics card and a hard disk to get it running.

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It's an entirely home-grown affair based on a Gigabyte GA 7N400 Pro 2 motherboard which does just about everything you'd want an Athlon XP board to do, dual-bios, onboard SATA, IDE RAID, 5.1 surround, Digital audio outputs, Ethernet, 6xUSB 2 and 2 Firewire to name a few.

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The processor is cooled by one of Zalman's trick Aluminium/Copper 'Flower' coolers, the separate fan is supposed to increase reliability by isolating vibration from the heatsink and processor and is connected to a Zalman speed controller. The aforementioned Ano bling is visible just below, keeping the North-Bridge chip from melting!

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The case is a Jeantech 'Butterfly' which basically means that both sides can be opened in order to gain access to the board and other components, it is lined with Akasa acoustic foam in order to try and keep the noise down and has Zalman case fans at front and rear.

It's cost me a fair bit over the years what with all the Zalman kit but as with all technology it's not worth a lot these days so £30 although I don't know about shipping as I don't have a box suitable at the moment.
 
Having had a rummage about, I've got an old ATI AGP card which should be OK as a starting point which would mean it only needs a disk and an operating system. I'll chuck it in and see what happens.
 
Scratch that, it's the wrong sort of AGP so it won't fit the 8x slot on this motherboard. If I can find one that will work OK I will chuck in a hard drive and stick Ubuntu Linux on so at least it's a functioning PC. There will also be a keyboard included.
 
OK, £30 will now get you the above PC complete with 80Gb Maxtor IDE Hard drive and a GeForce FX 5200 graphics card. It has a clean installation of Ubuntu Linux 10.something (I'll check the details and post back later) as I don't have a licence available for a Windows OS and includes a Logitech keyboard which I get a pic up for later.
 
Monitor and mouse are the only two things, I'm currently running it on our LCD telly as I sold the monitor a couple of weeks ago. The Ubuntu operating system comes with Open office for word-processing and such like and Firefox for browsing the web. I don't know whether it has support for broadband modems or similar but I'm using it with my router at home with no problems.

I'm going to see if I can adapt a suitable box for shipping purposes from the cardboard I have stashed in the loft, I don't know how much a courier is likely to cost but hopefully it will make it easier to shift.

Ubuntu is version 10.04 LTS 'Lucid Linux' for those who are interested although I see that there is a more recent release available. Details are at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/desktop
 
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