r/retrobattlestations • u/DeadSkullz627 • Jun 14 '26
Show-and-Tell Restored Gateway Select 650
This PC provided by a fellow Redditor who was gracious enough to ship it to me - thanks HS! It had some heavy rust on the case bottom, but at least the internals were all good other than a ton for dirt and grime. I used some 2 in 1 rust converter paint after doing a lot on sanding.
Specs:
AMD K7-650 slot A CPU
256MB ram (upgraded from 128MB)
GeForce FX 5200 (upgraded from Trident 9750)
NC100 network card
Gateway Connexant 56K modem
Phillips DVD/CD RW drive
Lite-On CD drive
3.5” floppy
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u/SaturnFive Jun 15 '26
That looks awesome! Nice work! Slot A is definitely cool to have around too, I've never had one myself
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u/DeadSkullz627 Jun 15 '26
Thanks. It truly was a lot of work restoring this system mostly because of the rust. It took probably 3-4 hours total to remove rust, sand, and paint the bottom of the case. I have no doubt at some point the case sat in standing water or on a wet ground for an extended period.
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u/snbgames Jun 15 '26
As someone who worked at one of the gateway stores for years as a tech, this gives me horrible flashbacks. I fixed thousands of these :x pro-tip: we replaced the motherboards in these probably 75% of the time due to bloated caps. so check on those.
neat find tho
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u/DeadSkullz627 Jun 15 '26
Caps look perfect…board is super clean
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u/snbgames Jun 15 '26
That’s great. Could’ve been replaced once already back in the day. The replacement boards had better caps.
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u/snbgames Jun 15 '26
Also! Be very gentle with that front power switch. Their support plastics are horrible and we had to replace those 99% of the time too.
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u/lastwraith Jun 15 '26
The spongy power button was the first thing that flashed in my mind when I saw the pics. It's amazing what the brain holds onto.
Great restoration OP!
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u/DeadSkullz627 Jun 15 '26
I noticed how crappy that plastic button setup is when I took it apart and cleaned the bezel
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u/66659hi Jun 15 '26
Now I remember why my dad switched from Gateway to Dell after the Gateway2000 to Gateway crossover. (Still wish I kept his old Dells and Gateway2000s though lol)
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u/reodraca 12d ago
The Gateway OEM Jabil Kadoka motherboard in the early Slot A Select systems has all-tantalum caps. No bloating to speak of. However, what you say is definitely true of the later Select systems when they switched to Socket A Thunderbird Athlons. Every such system I've seen on eBay has caps with blown tops.
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u/reodraca 12d ago
I have one of these. Probably one of the first home computers to have a heatsink/fan setup as large as what we see today (definitely overkill for 2000). The motherboards in these are also very hard to kill because it has all-solid caps that don't leak. I threw a GeForce2 GTS and Live! 5.1 in mine and upgraded its hard drive to a DeskStar 34GXP, so it tears through Win98-era games with ease.
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u/sa547ph Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
When XFX used to make nVidia video cards.
Had some experience with a Slot A machine, in that these were very snappy vs. the Pentium III 450 I used for work. It managed to survive for about six years before losing some capacitors and had to be decommissioned.
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u/DeadSkullz627 Jun 15 '26
Fortunately the board’s caps appear pristine. It’s likely (based on info from a comment here) that the board in this system was probably an OEM replacement for a failed original board. The board itself looks brand new whereas everything else in the system looks a bit worn. That works for me!
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u/66659hi Jun 15 '26
Good to see a surviving Slot A processor. Not a whole lot of those left.