I guess items move a little faster these days. The stuff you see stay on there is grossly overpriced.

I hope you're right. I've only been checking on and off for the past couple of days. Maybe I'll start finding great deals again if I get more thorough and systematic.

I'd really like to pickup an I440BX in great or NIB condition though. That's what I'm hoping for right now.

Prices started getting silly around the end of 2016. I don't know what happened that changed things so suddenly.

I used to see GF4 Ti4600 cards on eBay all the time for around $20. Now if you see one at all they are listed in the $60+ range. FX 59x0 cards were also plentiful at around $30, but now you can forget about that.

Voodoo 3 3000 AGP cards are the last good Win9x video cards that haven't gotten stupidly expensive yet. If you are patient, you can still get one for between $30 and $50.

I used to see ABIT BH6 motherboards all the time for $50 or less. Prices on those are crazy now too. Same goes for ABIT VH6T.

The sweet spot right now is socket 775 for C2D systems. Get 'em now before prices on those get crazy too.

Socket 754 and 939 are also still reasonably priced and you can build a wicked Win9x system with those.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Prices started getting silly around the end of 2016. I don't know what happened that changed things so suddenly. […]
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Prices started getting silly around the end of 2016. I don't know what happened that changed things so suddenly.

I used to see GF4 Ti4600 cards on eBay all the time for around $20. Now if you see one at all they are listed in the $60+ range. FX 59x0 cards were also plentiful at around $30, but now you can forget about that.

Voodoo 3 3000 AGP cards are the last good Win9x video cards that haven't gotten stupidly expensive yet. If you are patient, you can still get one for between $30 and $50.

I used to see ABIT BH6 motherboards all the time for $50 or less. Prices on those are crazy now too. Same goes for ABIT VH6T.

The sweet spot right now is socket 775 for C2D systems. Get 'em now before prices on those get crazy too.

Socket 754 and 939 are also still reasonably priced and you can build a wicked Win9x system with those.

depends on the 939 and 754 boards, the good quality ones shot up from around 40-50 to over 100 as well, I got lucky with my epox Nforce 4 SLI board, but the ASUS or MSI SLI boards trend at over 100 for the good models like A8N-SLI32

To me, Socket 754 and 939 exist in that grey area between ultra-high-performance for Win9x and middle-lower-class for WinXP. Fortunately, many CPU options are available to choose a desired performance level.

I just did a quick search for ABIT KV8 (socket 754) and ABIT AV8 (socket 939). Several sales came up for less than $70. While it's more than I would want to pay, I still consider those to be reasonable prices.

Tnt2 m64s can still be had for a few dollars and plenty of em. Start collecting them and have cheap fun.

Motherboards in guaranteed condition with return policies are likely to be expensive. If you're willing to search around and gamble though, you can find things a lot cheaper.
Unfortunately, even the price for untested/as-is boards have also gone up a fair bit just due to shipping expenses if nothing else.
I've seen multiple ISA-era boards in the past month or so for $30-$40 shipped. I bought two such boards, others I left. One of them needs caps for sure, but both are still alive/working.

Last year I think there were still a lot of NOS Intel SE440BX-2 boards that were being liquidated cheaply. A supply like that also has some effect on the pricing of other boards. I don't know what the current state of those Intel boards is, but the massive supply from that liquidator may have run out.

Speaking of, I purchased a Socket 370 board combo with a VIA C3 700A processor, TNT2 M64 (VisionTek) <-- had ghosting with the text and some graphics, D-Link 100Base-TX PCI, and no I/O shield. Luckily, I had a case that has the same orientation for the motherboard.

I got a Pentium 4 HP Pavilion 7955 (early P4 that used the SD-RAM PC-133 instead of DDR since it has Intel chipsets on it) that came with a Riva TNT2 M64 (ASUS V3800M/32M) and that works like a dream. The difference between the ASUS brand and nVidia's version is the ASUS has 32MB SD-RAM, whereas the nVidia one has somewhere between 8MB and 16MB.

Well the economy is improving. People have more money to spend on luxuries. Interest rates are (still) low which also helps.

Edit: Attach chart of interest rates to 2016

That, and eBay takes 10% (fees).

bjwil1991 wrote:

That, and eBay takes 10% (fees).

I think the fees on computer parts is still at 8%.. but paypal also takes a cut AND eBay also now charges fees on shipping which is absolutely stupid.. but they did it because there were sellers that were selling stuff for like 99c and then charging the rest of the price as shipping.

There are also a bunch of sellers on there that post stuff at stupid high prices (3-4x the normal price) that those parts never sell at unless some dummy comes along and buys them without checking the going price for said hardware.

Last I looked it was 10%.
Ebay hasn't been a good place to be a seller for like a decade now.

I can see it if you're just trying to clean out the garage and you don't care what you get for things but other than that it sucks for sellers.
It did not help when they started forcing sellers to take returns that are not valid IAW the stated terms in the auction.
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I noticed Tandy prices shot through the roof within the past eight months to a year.

YouTube, movies, and TV shows, such as Young Sheldon make a huge impact. Even the Tandy systems that'd seen better days or just the bare bones (system only with no keyboard, mouse, or anything) are going for more than what my car's worth.

In fact, Tandy was one of the most popular systems compared to the IBM PC XT and the infamous PC Jr in the 1980's, and there are a few people that are making games for the IBM/Tandy or compatible machines to this day that either support the infamous IBM PC Speaker, Tandy 3-Voice w/ or w/o DAC (very popular sound chip, as it's almost identical to the Commodore 64's SID chip), Adlib, Sound Blaster with voices (DAC), Roland MT-32, and GM.

My luck is sometimes not really good, but, I did get lucky to find 2 Commodore 64s from eBay and a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus at a thrift store last year, and purchased a Lo-Tech Tandy 3-Voice Compatible Sound Card for the PC on eBay, and my PC now has different sound cards, as well as games that support that, from the IBM PC Speaker to the GM/XG Daughterboard on my Sound Blaster 16 card (going to replace with the ES1868F card).

Hmm, lets see...

Re: Why are old PCs considered lame and boring?

As bjwil1991 said above, blame popular movies and TV shows.

Errius wrote:

Well the economy is improving. People have more money to spend on luxuries.

Not in my part of europe.

I remember Pat the NES Punk did a podcast episode that talked about this a while ago, he seemed to place the blame on eBay's "Buy It Now" mechanism. Before that, everything was auction-based and with many people starting at $1-$10 to avoid high listing fees, things ended up selling at a lower market rate. With Buy It Now, sellers can hold out for months with high prices until someone finally bites.

Qjimbo wrote:

I remember Pat the NES Punk did a podcast episode that talked about this a while ago, he seemed to place the blame on eBay's "Buy It Now" mechanism. Before that, everything was auction-based and with many people starting at $1-$10 to avoid high listing fees, things ended up selling at a lower market rate. With Buy It Now, sellers can hold out for months with high prices until someone finally bites.

I know a seller that has been listing some over priced P3 boards since 2 years before I moved here.
I remember when because I bought 2 from other sellers for like $10 @ when I saw his ad.
I moved here in 2010.
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Qjimbo wrote:

I remember Pat the NES Punk did a podcast episode that talked about this a while ago, he seemed to place the blame on eBay's "Buy It Now" mechanism. Before that, everything was auction-based and with many people starting at $1-$10 to avoid high listing fees, things ended up selling at a lower market rate. With Buy It Now, sellers can hold out for months with high prices until someone finally bites.

Buy It Now is nothing new, though. eBay has been more of a marketplace than an auction house for years now. It was already like that when I went through my retro consoles phase in 2012 or so.