iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I always avoid looking into the forbidden little peekie hole 😳

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Repurposing this TI EPROM chip from a dead 486 board. Into the UV easy bake oven you go 😎

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Another thrift store find. Higher end 2011 era Gigabyte AM3 board. Smelt of cigarettes SOOO BAD. Everything white on it looks yellow/brown. Pass.

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 29/06/2026

My local thrift store had a bunch of these Symbol handhelds. I assume they are barcode scanners with terminal client capabilities? Anyone seen these before?

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This Asus CUV4X's original caps are almost all Rubycon except for these three OST/I.Q branded ones. They don't look bad, but seemed a shame to not be 100% ruby. It got ZLH series replacements. 10V and way smaller too. Will test the OSTs later.

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 29/06/2026

Another 386 board saved just in the nick of time 💥💣

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 22/06/2026

I bought one of the coolest looking early 2000s Lian-Li cases - the PC35. BNIB and arriving today. I plan to build a high-end 2001 gaming system in it based on the original Athlon XP 1800+. Obviously needs RAID0 with those lockable bays :) .. now to find a pair of working IBM Deskstar drives 🫠

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 18/06/2026

Observed behind the glass at the local thrift store. Definitely not thrift store pricing though 😕 The price tag is $599 “without game or expansion” apparently. It was gone when I returned a couple days later so someone must have bought it.

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 18/06/2026

Very nice! I was always curious about these PC104 SBCs and picked one up recently. This one is the Aaeon PCM-6894 - has a Celeron Tualatin chip in it currently. Also came with a PCI riser. Are there any standard cases for these that you know of?

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Is it just me? or does this off-center sticker placement on SO MANY oem AMD heatsinks from this era drive you nuts 🫠

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Never owned a P4 back in the day but starting to explore the platform. Always wanted to try out the earliest socket 423 with RDRAM. Came with a 1.3 (slowest P4 I believe). Hopefully this nasty scratch on the back will be okay. I have a heatsink and retention bracket for it somewhere too.

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It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while a PC shows up at the thrift store near me! …. yeah.

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The second board I’m recapping is this Gigabyte GA-7ZXE. It’s full of the infamous “Choyo” brand caps from the plague era. Even the tiny ones are Choyo. Many are buldging. It’s getting the full Rubycon ZLH treatment.

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vswitchzero @vswitchzero.com · 08/06/2026

One of the boards I’ll be recapping is this Shuttle slot-a board. Full of I.Q brand caps and all failed. Notice how many are angled because the burst from the bottom instead of the vents on top. Lots of crustiness to clean after removal

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Don’t usually find anything interesting at the Thrift store but made a purchase today. Old tower case with an ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard, A64 CPU, two IDE DVD drives and a floppy. Paid $9.48. Is socket 939 retro yet? Was a special era for me anyway 😁

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4/4 And last but not least, the ASUS CUV4X rev 1.03. All the caps look great (mostly Rubycon brand) and it's got one of the tornado style heatsinks on it, which is very neat. The CPU is a P3 1GHz coppermine.

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3/4 There were a few other cards in there, including a Linksys PCI NIC and an NEC based USB card. The sound card is the popular SB Live 5.1.

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2/4 The graphics card is one of the original ATI Radeon R100 models! This one is the Radeon 7200 64MB, which is a mid-range card. Not terribly common and was a good card!

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