I'm having a bad time when it comes to Ebay lately.
Half of the stuff I have bought this summer have been badly packaged and/or with serious faults not described in the auction text.
I can't make return cases out of everything that should be return cases as I soon would get black listed eventhough I'm always honest.
I just let one of the "geprüft, technisch einwandfrei"-stores get away with selling me a P5PE-VM Socket 775 865P chipset motherboard with "issues". The first issue isn't a real issue just an observation, the board was really really dirty with some industrial residue covering parts of it, The dirt was hard to see in the not so great photo. The socket had one of those "geprüft" stickers over it so you could not see the socket pins in the photo. While the pins looked okey...ish the socket was littered with old cooling paste but it diddn't look like the conductive kind.
I decided to see if the board would POST and if so then clean the socket with risk of damaging the pins. I tested the motherboard with a known to be good P4 630 and a known to be good GF3 ti200. When I hit the power button I was greated with smoke and smell pouring out from under the Northbridge heat sink.
At this point I was ready to repackage the motherboard and start a return case but then I though that it wasn't worth it for the 37 euro including shipping as I just started another return case. This German "geprüft, technisch einwandfrei"-store isn't plain evil as it's a third party that does the testing for them. On the other hand the seller I started a return case against is just... well...
I decided to remove the NB heat sink to see what was going on... As it turned out a tiny resistor had literally gone up in smoke. After cleaning the socket I decided to test again and lo and behold now the board would POST... I expect smooth sailing form here on *holds both thumbs* ...
And now for the item which made me actually start a return case (after getting the finger when I contaced the seller descibing the damage).
The motherboard (from the UK) came in a large brown non padded envelope. It was wrapped in 1x platic bag and 1x small sheet of bubble wrap. The letter was shipped as an ordinary untracked letter although I paid for "Royal Mail International Tracked" and told the seller to use a box and package the board with care. I will spare you the details but lets just say it took a month for this seller to post the package at all so I was already at the limit of my patiance... The quality of his excuses for why he diddn't manage to ship the board reached the level of "the dog ate my homework".
Do not package motherboards like this...
...or this will happen.
The heat sinks are alot more misaligned than can be seen in these photos.
The board could very well work but I have just had enough... I will avoid Ebay for the next couple of months.
New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.