Building a PC used to be a fun adventure — what’s the latest, what’s the greatest, what can I afford? Well, that last question seems to have taken over and sucked all the fun out for a lot of people. [Matt] from [DIY Perks] on YouTube has hit upon a solution that’s brought back the fun, at least for him: recycling! The video is embedded below, and he runs a forum whose thread has more details.
Long story short, though, he’s flagging recycled laptop components as both good value for money and a fun rabbit hole to go down researching parts. The best part, of course, is that you can get a mobo with 32GB of RAM soldered on, and embedded RTX graphics, and a decent processor for about what you’d pay for that RAM on sticks these days. The big hack is getting the dang thing started: he needed to make a single-pin ribbon cable after identifying which pin on the keyboard membrane hit the power button. If you can score a laptop that does not power on from the keyboard, you’ll have an easier time in that regard.
To take recycling further, he shows how to delaminate cracked glass from an old Intel iMac to get a better-than-4K retina screen for nothing but sweat equity. The unit was heading for the bin, and his only cost was the effort it took to extract the LCD panel. Some of us might be able to skip the laptop and just use the iMac; it depends on how much compute is enough for your use case. Maybe a 10-year-old iMac’s guts will do; maybe last year’s gutted laptop isn’t enough.
We have to admit, the oak-and-aluminum all-in-one tripod he makes is very snazzy, though it may have too little brass to be on-brand for [DIY Perks]. The speakers, in case you were wondering, are also e-waste, recovered from an old TV. Perhaps the accent colour should have been green instead of blue!
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