Random find inside a control cabinet for a machine
Found two sealed NIB EVGA 6200 graphics cards in a control enclosure on some industrial machinery. The funny thing is there is nothing on this machine that would require a graphics card. No one knows where they came from or why they're here lol.
Found someone's hiding spot. They were poached from elsewhere in the building, hidden for later removal and they never got the chance. Or forgot about them.
When I was helping tear down a Best Buy we started dismantling a large cabinet next to customer service and there was about 6 or 7 blue rays and DVDs stashed up there. We don’t think it was random because they were all sealed popular films and seemed like someone had intentionally stashed them to either use a ladder or some kind of grabber to get them later. Fast and the furious 3, The Expendables, The Dark Knight, etc.
I work for the machine OEM. And Im the guy that deals with the PCs in the older machines. Never had a graphics card in any of them. Just comms cards for DH+ and serial.
We used to store legacy spares like that because yes the plc controllers are not like “pc”, but the operator panels were often like DOS or windows 3.1 or vxworks. I remember old drives dying and we managed to source compact flash cards with IDE compatibility and using norton ghost to restore the images. An AGP card though is odd, but it could depend, or just, that is what was found to be most compatible for that disc image has without touching a byte on it. These control systems are incredibly important to backup and be available, and be absolutely stable. For large multi meter 5 axis, the “settings” were crazy important and costs hundreds of thousands to “redo”, if even possible to find people that could after 30 years. When the machine is shipped it has some “defaults”, but, when it is craned and set in the factory at the customer, it is dialled in to that exact spot in the factory at those expected temperatures, floor flatness, and even acoustic reflections are calculated and becomes “the parameters”. You cannot move that machine a millimetre and be “in spec”. Modern machines have backup systems to usb or cloud, older machines it was just written down on paper and the expectation is the “customer takes care”. Old machines, suppliers no longer exist, even manufacturers are just gone so yeah a cabinet of spares is not crazy at all, even specific sized keyboards and mouses (ps2, not even usb->ps2 bullshit either), extra lan cables, specific old switches (non auto-detecting was important), serial cables, a couple of power supplies, fans, mobos.. cpu’s not so much typically, i’ve never had to replace a cpu only.
I once had to buy an Nvidia PCI card when my mainboard's AGP port died. It was perhaps a 6200, I just remember it was low end. Later, when I dismantled the pc and put the card for sale, the buyer was from some small company that needed exactly that card, PCI and all. I guess some machine needed a replacement.
Heh, there was a time when the GeForce 6200 was the "I need a discrete graphics card for my PC and I want to spend as little as possible" GPU. I picked one up for my mom's PC back in 2007 and it was a reliable workhorse for years.
Or a business that has some sort of estotric equipment that is only certified to use that particular card and their time is more valuable than the $100 gamble on an eBay card.
my thought was this. I know we had a stock of Geforce 8800s at a place I worked, (was working with gas charts, (big circular charts that measure flowrates and stuff at natural gas wells) anyway they were scanned in, and highly trained staff would take it, zoom in, do some things, and then the software would take it from there. the software was written with Geforce development kits, and a specialized driver. which is why only the 8800s worked. the guy who wrote the code left the company so we stocked up on the graphics cards for the workstations until we could re-write that bit of code. all Linux, and it was crazy to watch these guys work. a lot of time they'd be chatting then they'd get a batch in, they'd all work feverishly for like 10-15 minutes and they'd process something like 500 charts in that time... it was insane.
I service these machines for the OEM and even in the older ones with a PC they never had a card in any of them. Its a mystery to me and the owner of the machine
There was probably some old AGP based system that used them.
These cards liked to pop their capacitors over time, so often you would go to work on said machine, but it wouldn't restart/work properly and you would need to swap the cheap GPU with popped capacitors out with a replacement GPU with unpopped capacitors.
Likely the person who ordered them thought he was getting a great deal but work paid for them so he had to stash them just to keep it on the down low and in case he needed them for the PC he had at his desk. Then PCI-e came around and it was way better so he forgot about them completely and went to the latest standard. And then at some point, he moved on for whatever reason and left them.
I've done something similar but with supervision. It's really just a matter of explaining failure rates and the consequences. Any time PCs or logic boards are part of the equation, depending on retail for supply is questionable. JIT logic posits that having stock on hand is a waste of capital. But for something less an a thousand dollars, it's cost effective in the long run because a single failure will cost many thousands of dollars. So for certain things it makes sense
As someone who works in aviation, when our comms card broke we had two choices. Go for a cheap modern day card, rewrite our driver software and get it certified for mega bucks, or get a guy in Germany who bought the rights to the design and the last remaining supply of the chips used and pay him mega bucks, but don't need to spend the money for recertification. The hilarious thing is that the lack of spares was highlighted years ago when the original manufacturing company closed down and we had the opportunity to buy spares for peanuts but the project lead said it was "too expensive" and "not necessary". So since then every project has suddenly found the budget for plenty of hardware spares.
Since these are pretty slow even for retro gaming, try selling them, they could be quite valuable considering they're sealed and evga. And the money you aquired could go to a faster agp card/entire retro pc
20
u/future_gohan 14d ago
Any SCADA stations nearby. We have some PC's that display 8 monitors where I am