Homemade Frankenstein Computer Found

I got a message from one of my regular contacts saying they had a strange computer mounted to a board that needed to be hauled away, so I drove over to check it out. What I found looked like a homemade Frankenstein computer. What the heck was this thing, and did it still work?

Three questions: what is this thing, does it work, and how much is it worth? Let’s find out.

It all started way back a couple of days ago. One of my contacts sends me a message that they have a computer they need to get rid of. This contact works for a building management company and has provided us with a number of machines in the past.

One thing she mentions, however, is that the computer is stuck to a board. Stuck to a board? Uh… maybe she’s talking about a network board. You know, when networking devices like modems, routers, and power bricks are all stuck to a board on the wall to keep them organized.

She sends me another message that they plugged it in and it turned on. Well, that’s a good sign. Then she sends me the picture and I’m like… huh. I did quickly notice the GPUs, however.

Then I remembered watching a video from a channel called “Bits Be Trippin”. In this video, they feature a crypto mining farm in which a number of mining rigs are installed onto boards. It’s an interesting video for sure.

So as far as our first question, what is this thing? It looks like it’s possibly a working GPU mining rig. We’ll take it.

One hour later…

First, let’s boot this thing into BIOS and make sure everything works. So what do we got? After letting it run for an hour or so, the machine itself seems to be working fine.

Let’s put the video cards into a test machine, run them through some benchmarks, and make sure they’re working properly. Well, as far as our second question, does it work? Looks like the answer is a big yes.

So now the real question: what’s all this stuff worth? The GPUs are certainly worth decent money. The other items… maybe not so much.

The GPUs are both AMD Radeon RX 570 8GB cards, which can easily be resold. That being said, these cards first debuted six years ago, so they are from an older generation. We can probably get sixty dollars each for these without too much hassle.

Taking a look at the power supply, this is a GameMax GP650, which is a 650‑watt bronze‑rated power supply. Used power supplies don’t tend to have great resale value in general. That being said, this is a nice‑looking unit, and at 650 watts there is demand for it. We can probably get 20 to 30 dollars for this. Let’s go with twenty dollars just to make it easy.

OK, now for all the other components: the motherboard, CPU, memory, heatsink, riser cards. There’s really not much value there. The CPU is an AMD A4-3420, which is a dual‑core 2.8 GHz chip and is about 13 years old at this point. If you really worked at it, you might be able to sell all the components as a bundle for twenty dollars or so, but we’re not going to bother with that. So let’s mark the rest of this stuff down as zero dollars.

So we paid our contact twenty dollars for the board. We’re estimating sixty dollars for each GPU, twenty dollars for the power supply, and the rest of the components can go into storage as spare parts. Minus the twenty dollars we gave our contact leaves us with a potential profit of one hundred and twenty dollars. That’s not bad.

What are your thoughts on this Frankenstein computer find? Let us know in the video comments and thanks for watching!