{"id":557793,"date":"2026-07-19T17:43:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T17:43:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/557793\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T17:43:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T17:43:08","slug":"recycling-laptops-and-imacs-makes-pc-building-fun-and-affordable-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/557793\/","title":{"rendered":"Recycling Laptops And IMacs Makes PC Building Fun And Affordable Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

Building a PC used to be a fun adventure \u2014 what\u2019s the latest, what\u2019s 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\u2019s brought back the fun, at least for him: recycling! The video<\/a> is embedded below, and he runs a forum whose thread has more details.<\/a><\/p>\n

Long story short, though, he\u2019s 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\u2019d 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\u2019ll have an easier time in that regard.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> for your use case. Maybe a 10-year-old iMac\u2019s guts will do; maybe last year\u2019s gutted laptop isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n

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].<\/a> 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!<\/p>\n

Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Building a PC used to be a fun adventure \u2014 what\u2019s the latest, what\u2019s the greatest, what can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[61,60,80],"class_list":["post-557793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}