Good news about older laptops

While the vast majority of even core 2 duo laptops have gone to the scrap I thought I'd share some good info. Obviously besides hard drives and ram...I am finding good use for T and P series CPUs. A regular buyer of mine has told me they are particularly useful as ASIC (application specific integreated circuit). I do not know specifics, nor do I particularly care. Pretty much any Txxxx or Pxxxx laptop cpu with 2.0GHz or higher speed qualifies.

Another thing, and I know it's a bit of a stretch, but be on the look out for Intel Centrino-N wifi cards, those have value too. they call them micro PCI form factor, about the size of two quarters side by side.

I thought this would help you guys out who are stripping laptops for cost effective reasons. If you have anything to add that isn't the obvious like screens ram and hard drives, feel free to add it.

This is even more of a stretch, but for some laptops, check the value of the hard drive caddies. Garden variety Dell Latitude D630s won't have value there, but older Panasonic Toughbook caddies can be worth a lot of money.

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Originally Posted by armygreywolf

Another thing, and I know it's a bit of a stretch, but be on the look out for Intel Centrino-N wifi cards, those have value too. they call them micro PCI form factor, about the size of two quarters side by side.

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What would one do to sell such items? Are you, or is anyone else on here buying those? I've stripped quite a few laptops recently and have a small box containing the wifi cards and touchpad circuits. I just set them aside because of the high gold content on those pieces.

You'd need to at a minimum figure out the makes and models of the wireless cards. They look pretty similar. The Centrino wireless cards were made by Intel, opposed to cards made by Broadcom or Atheros. I don't know off hand what models were Centrino-N cards, though.

I'll leave the rest to Armygreywolf. Laptop wireless cards are not anything that I currently deal in.

I thought I'd generate some interest, get some other people who do the buying around her to chime in on anything they might be looking for and then we could all point people in the right directions. I plan to update my list COMPLETELY on thursday to be as comprehensive as possible (and printable).

Centrino-N says exactly that right on the sticker. I am going to pull one and take a picture for everyone. I prefer this for personal laptop refurbs because centrino-N is the most reliable, longest range version of wifi available for laptops imho.

Centrino is just a marketing name Intel used for Intel mobile CPU + intel chipset + Intel wireless on the same machine. So a Pentium M/Core/Core2 etc. can be Centrino chips.

Laptops are pretty easy to store. Whenever you find a mint working one remove the main battery (stored separately in a cool dry place at 80% charge if it takes a charge) and store the machine on a shelf for ten years then try Ebay. ;)
Heck even the harder to find AMD chipped laptops might be worth something when AMD goes bankrupt in the next 5 years.

Well that figures. I just package up 200 lbs of laptops that were not valuable enough to sell as parts on ebay. And now I read this. That's alright though. They are going to a buyer cause I am to lazy to break them down.

I find anything that has a windows vista operating system or newer that would have come installed on it will sell on ebay for a minimum of $30.

I just sold a Dell Studio XPS with no battery untested for 104 bucks.

Some XP machines are just as new, if not newer than a lot of the Vista machines. Home machines tended to get more of the "Shiny" stuff (Including Vista) than the business machines, which stuck with the tried and true Windows XP after Vista was released.

AMD serves a very valuable purpose. Without them, what do you think would keep the prices of Intel CPUs down. The AM3 architecture is dated, and the last two new PCs I built are Intel machines. But, if AM4 is a good socket, I'll gladly go back to the red camp....

AM4 architecture looks to be a door buster. Do some research it looks like they are going to run DDR4 on individual channels for each slot, instead of pairing. It would also mean you could run registered ddr4...and if you thought X99 was fast...oofta.

I don't normally dismantle laptops, but often get incomplete units, and if the CPU is easy to pull I remove them. I did have very good luck selling the T7xxx series CPU's on ebay. I usually put them in lots of 10, and they always sell. Certain iMacs have the same CPUs also. Now I know why they sell so well.

This is a situation where I can sell them above market on ebay...for the most part. The guy who wants them is building miner rigs. I have no idea how he is changing a core 2 cpu to an asic chip except to guess he's taking advantage of its ability to handle thousands of threads at once....kind of the trademark of the centrino and core 2 architecture is that they sacrifice efficiency for ability to process off the bus as fast as it can be fed to the cpu. If I had to guess how I would say he is doing it...pre and post numerical processing, texas instruments makes a rather excellent math co processor rated at less than an 1/8th watt TDP each... take a standard 12 inch finger card PCB and you can probably load 10 or even 20 CPUs and another 8 co processors then flip it over for all the memory...a miner rig is for the bitcoin stuff, which is steadily eclipsing what the average user can hash and still turn a profit against their electric bill.

I'm really hoping that AM4 is a good architecture. I'm an AMD fan, but my last two builds have been Intels- AM3 just can't compete. If AM4 is as good as I think and hope it will be, I'll gladly go back to the red team.

Interestingly enough, I've been able to run ECC on my last AM3 build, and the two Intel builds (I think H97s, but I'm not in front of one of those machines to check). I'm sure it disables the ECC capabilities, but still. I have some sticks of PC3-10600E, and they're not worth nearly as much as the desktop sticks are, so why not?