What Old Motherboards Should You Bother Keeping?

本站添加: 2026-05-15

[00:00:03]Howdy, folks. If you have a bunch of old motherboards and you're wondering whether you should bother to keep them or not, I have a few things for you to consider. The first one is think about how many working motherboards exist for every CPU that fits in their socket.

[00:00:15]Most people keep CPUs because they're cool little trinkets, but motherboards, they're bigger, they're not as interesting, they tend to get scrapped.

[00:00:23]They also have a lot more parts on them that are more prone to failure. Not saying CPUs can't fail, but motherboards tend to dwindle in numbers as uh they age and therefore uh you can find lots of incredibly inexpensive CPUs, but the boards they go in are incredibly rare.

[00:00:38]Of course, the working part is very important there. So, keep that in mind.

[00:00:42]But even then, that doesn't mean you should keep every board. The boards that I like to keep are what I what I call bridge boards. It's just a term I came up with. And it's essentially a any board that really bridges multiple generations of technology. And I've grabbed this board uh as an a great example of that. This is something I got with a case and some RAM. You know, I bought something for a case and RAM and this was just a board that was in it. Uh and I didn't think much of it and I threw it in the corner, but this board, being even this low-end as it is, this has actually been one of the most useful boards that I have because it bridges several different technologies.

[00:01:16]So, to you know, in no particular order, this board is modern enough that it has PCI Express.

[00:01:22]But it also has PCI, native PCI, not through a bridge chip.

[00:01:26]It's modern enough that it has SATA, so you can use modern drives with it. But it also has a real PATA or IDE interface. And this is incredibly useful when working with old drives. I have uh hard drives that do not support LBA sectoring. They only support the older CHS sectoring. And I've not seen any USB uh IDE bridge that supports that. And so, this is the only way you can talk to those drives on a modern system.

[00:01:54]It also has a real floppy controller, which again, USB floppies are not real floppies. They're just a microcontroller that exposes just the high-level functionality. So, if you want to format a floppy or use a weird floppy format, you have to use a real floppy controller. So again, you need to have that. It also has real onboard uh parallel. It also has real onboard serial. But it's also new enough, it's got, you know, I think this is 100 megabit Ethernet cuz it's a cheap board, but uh you know, it's got Ethernet, we've got USB. Um it's got PS/2.

[00:02:24]This kind of a board and it's actually this one's actually one of those really weird ASRock boards that supports both DDR2 or DDR3 memory. So, that really tells you when this is from. But this kind of board is extremely useful because you can connect very old things to it as well as relatively new things. Um some of them, of course, are going to be running in sort of a backwards compatibility mode.

[00:02:46]Obviously, this is probably PCI Express Gen 2, probably. Uh but this is honestly the best kind of board. Even though this is some I some I think it's a Bulldozer Gen or something CPU. I think it's a what an AM3? Yeah. So, this is probably a you know, it's not a great CPU and it's not even a high-end board. But this is so useful because it has the old IO on it.

[00:03:07]And this is, you know, I would take this board over uh another board with maybe a more interesting CPU on it just because this will actually be the most useful.

[00:03:16]Um because whenever you have old media, um that media, you know, is only useful if you have the ability to read and write to it. And having working hardware uh for that is very important. And having something that you can run a modern operating system on with, you know, modern connectivity like USB and SATA and PCI Express, uh that is worth its weight in gold because it means that you don't have to go through multiple generations. If you don't have a board like this, let's you know, let's say that you you know, you you didn't have, you know, you had a slightly modern more modern board, doesn't have IDE, doesn't have floppy on it, maybe it doesn't have PCI, whatever, then that means you need to you need to have more than one board where you need to go to slightly older generation and then to slightly older generation. So, these are the best to have. Uh I remember even using these at at, you know, at at an old company uh where we we needed to have uh a bunch of new and old generations of hardware connected to a single system for a certain purpose. And you know, it we had one we had one machine that just happened to have uh a bunch of varying IO.

[00:04:17]It's not perfect though. Um like there's no ISA on here, right? So, you you would if you had an ISA device, you know, you would need an an older generation. But anyway, uh I just wanted to uh go over the reasons why um motherboards are kind of not the uh they're not the way they look on the on the surface.

[00:04:35]You have to um you know, not the flashiest boards are not necessarily the ones that are the most most worth saving. It's sometimes down to the the more uh the more odd boards like these that are actually uh they have the most value. So, anyway, hopefully you found that interesting. Thanks for watching.