Buying and selling old computer tech

Lately I have been running a little hobby business of buying and selling old computer tech. Mainly graphics cards.

I buy job lots of stuff that are sold “as is”, test and verify them, refurbish the ones that work and strip the ones that don’t work for parts.

Often the cards are caked in dirt and fluff, so I air dust them and clean them with isopropyl alcohol.

I don’t have the electronics skills to fix a card that is dead, but if a working card comes in with a seized or broken fan, or is missing screws or standoffs or brackets, I now have the spares to fix that. And if it is running hot I am happy to re-paste and re-pad.

I had a decent MSI card come in with a broken fan which I bought cheap as “spares or repair but probably works” and it did indeed work and I had just the right fan for it. In fact I had an entire heatsink and fans assembly for it that was in better condition than the one that was on it, so that was a simple swap.

If a low profile card comes in with only low height brackets, or only full height brackets, I also have the spares to resell it with both sets of brackets. I buy the brackets cheap from AliExpress. Some require an extra hole that is not on these cheap brackets so I use my pillar drill (aka bench drill or drill press) and a jig I made to drill the extra hole. I think selling a low profile card with both sets of brackets gives me a little edge over my competitors and makes the card more saleable.

This little hobby business is never going to make me money (although I have registered with HMRC for Self Assessment just in case), but it subsidises my own interests. Basically the stuff in these job lots that I buy which I want to keep is essentially free, and I quite enjoy cleaning up & refurbishing the cards.

For the cards that work, I always thoroughly benchtest them on my test bench PC which is in an open case, so that I can sell them as “Tested and Working”.

Initially I used a Gigabyte GA-Z77M-D3H motherboard, but it died so I replaced it with a Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H.

The Z77 chipset (LGA1155) is ideal for what I do as it was the last chipset to support Windows XP and was the first to support Windows 10. Given the age of some of the cards I sell, showing them working on Windows XP is very important.

Generally I show a card working on Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 10.

Due to the LCD monitor(s) I use I am able to test DVI-D, HDMI (including Mini and Micro), DisplayPort, VGA, and Composite. So I can test pretty much every output on a graphics card, and I always make sure that I do when a card has multiple outputs. I’ve had cards before now where only some of the ports work, so it is important to test them all.

Anyway, if you want to buy any of my stuff then I sell it on eBay and I am addictive_tendencies there

https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/addictive_tendencies