A fun part of retro computing is saving ‘e-waste’ that was headed for certain destruction. These boards can have any number of defects, modifications and more that have to be remedied prior to using them. In the case of the Asus P5A-B Socket 7 mainboard that [Bits und Bolts] rescued from the scrapheap at least one issue was obvious: someone had ripped off the plastic part of the ZIF socket, leaving only the metal pins poking out like an awkward kind of LGA socket.
In addition to the busted PGA ZIF socket there was additional damage, including a broken SMT capacitor and missing resistor. Interestingly, someone had apparently modded the ATX power connector to permanently power on the system by removing a pin and bridging to the power-on signal. Obviously this mod had to be undone by removing the bridge and installing a new pin. After this cracked solder joints had to be addressed, before the tedious task of removing the stray PGA socket pins one by one started.
Exactly what was done to this mainboard and why will likely forever remain a mystery, but at least there didn’t seem to be any serious damage. After installing a CPU it was possible to boot and access the BIOS as well as run a couple of tools, confirming that one more Socket 7 board has been saved from the scrapper.
We can rebuild him…we have the technology….bio-technology…arise FRANKENPUTER!
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-brain-cells-enable-machine.html
billywitchdoctor dot com…one convenient locations
“confirming that one more Socket 7 board has been saved from the scrapper.”
For how long though? What’s the point of resurrecting this old e-waste in the first place? It’s not like it’s got enough power to do much of anything these days
If you view it as a big raspi maybe you see a point.
Problem is that it’s possible such old systems are 32bit, and even most linux iterations insist on 64bit now.
Yes. And the power consumption can’t be ignored. Especially where energy prices are high.
There’s a decent population of retro-PC enthusiasts. Many millennials began their journey in tech in the Pentium 1 era. It’s kind of fun to build the tricked out PC that you wish you couldn’t afford back then, and occasionally play some games from your childhood. Socket 7 motherboards are kind of a cool piece of history too: one motherboard that can run CPUs from Intel, AMD, Cyrix, VIA, etc. We don’t have anything like that anymore.
these articles always leave me asking “why?” Some things are so rare that it’s worth bending over backwards to restore a busted one but i just can’t imagine that these motherboards fit that category…there were zillions of them manufactured, and there’s plenty where no one destroyed the ZIF socket (of all the things!). Pretty sure i have 30 years of computing history sitting in my basement, either undamaged, or with just bad caps.
Though it has been my experience that if you do actually try to use any of them, you’ll find far more subtle problems than someone bashed components off of it. Things where it “works” until you try to actually use it and then you discover actually it hard resets itself every ~30 hours of uptime. And i’d be surprised if this one, after “restoration”, doesn’t also have those kinds of faults..