Story of getting a big bargain on buying PC ( 4 PCs for $33.5)

Paraselene · May 27, 2017

TL;DR Our university is having a garage-sale sorta thing, and since the officers know nothing about computers and such, I ended up getting a very good deal.

Here's my story (sorry, not much pictures)

My university is having it's 90th anniversary this month, and for that the officers decided to have a "charity" sale
Since there's quite some old computers that has already been replaced by newer ones, and they don't actually wanted to stash them away in some random storage in campus
They decided to sell them away literally dirt cheap, and only students and faculty could purchase them in limited quantites.
And since there's so many of them, they didn't bother testing all the stuff and just sell them as "not confirmed working" condition

Simple pricing :
For every monitor, ~$3.32 (exchange rate and stuff), limited 2 per person
For every tower PC, ~$13.25 if already tested working (boots into XP), $3.32 if not. 1 per person

Since you couldn't check what's inside the case, or whether it's working or not, it sorta became a gamble, with little bet and large possible payouts

So I had 3 of my friends over to get in line, and get numbered tickets for me of which you need to checkout.
After I went in, I decided the monitors are bad deal since they're all 19~21" 4:3 TN panels, it is cheap, but it's both hard to use, and even harder to sell
So I focused on Tower PCs. I soon found out that I had a real advantage, hardware knowledge.
Being in CS major, I kinda get used to all those naming and timing of the hardware (like lots of people here)
So I walk-through all the PCs (40 in total), less than a quarter of them are custom build machines.
A characteristics of OEM machines, they all have those "Powered by intel" "Core 2 Duo" "Core 2 Quad" stickers on them
And also, since they didn't bother to tear the barcode on the machine off, a quick scan and google search came up with the model number, thus the chipset

I filtered out those C2D and Pentium 3/4 machines, which narraow down to about 20ish
Also during the process I found a Lenovo machine that barcode literally has "i7950" in it, and I took it instantly without blinking (that's seems to be the only one newer than 775 chipset)
After that I took 2 machines with Core 2 Quad on the front, and has a graphics card by looking at the PCI-E expansion slot (both from ASUS)

All looks pretty great at the moment, then I saw this strangely looking custom tower PC that caught my eye

A pretty decent after-market case with a celeron sticker, and Powered By ASUS sticker on it.

So I thought, a celeron? Who still uses a celeron. And also this PC looks like nothing from ASUS
While saying that I found out the front panel looks strange, and opened it
This is what I saw then

I was stocked, I didn't even check if there's drives in it, and took it to the checkout
My hunch tells me if there's a hot-swap drive bay, there must be a RAID card

After taking all 4 PCs back to my seat, I started to check the for-mentioned PC
This is what it looks like after poping every bay out

Jackpot, the drive bay was fully-loaded

Albeit a bit old, but 4 x 640G WD drive is still decent

And with hope I pop off the side panel

Voila, definitely a Raid card in there, some e-sata extender on the very bottom,and a very old ATI graphics card from ASUS
And a very decent ASUS P5K PRO motherboard
PCIE from left to right : Graphics, GbE NIC, RAID controller, e-sata connector

Booting into the bios, confirmed it's a Celeron E1200.

========No more pics===============

So I take apart the i7 PC, and no surprise, 8G of DDR3, and 2x 1TB drive, nothing special
Then the third, C2Quad, turns out to be Q9500, 4g DDR2, 2x 1TB drive, and an 8800GT
Last, Q6600, 4G DDR2, and 1x 500GB drive

Final total : $33.5

Sum up: If your nearby college / high-school / etc... is selling this kind of stuff dirt cheap, why not take a look?
You might find someting that really surprise you (Disclaimer : YMMV)

P.S. I finally salvaged everything from the Q6600 PC, and just install them all onto the celeron PC, exchanged the CPU, and install a fresh Linux on it
That's when I realized it also comes with a 30G OCZ core v2 SSD as the boot disk with win server 2003 on it. That's plenty for Linux.
So technically speaking I only have 3 PCs now, but whatever LOL.