Some of your prices are a bit on the high side, even for Australian standards, and we pay more for these things usually.

Still, it's quite simple, the train is constantly moving. There are parts that are not old enough, but not useful either, they can be had for little money.

But wait too long and items quickly become hard to find. Remember that there are lots of companies doing this for a living, so the buy up stock when it is cheap and then skim the market a few years later.

Cards that a should be cheap right now are for example 8800 GT or 9600 GT. They are too old to be useful but too new to be considered retro.

Also, anything Ultra or Deluxe or Pro will always command a premium. Just go with one or two models below and you'll get a much better price. And don't rule out alternatives. A 9800 Pro might be harder to find, well just go for a 6600 GT instead, which should be quite easy to source.

And counting in bad build quality and bad component quality, wich have resulted in a lot of stuff have died prematurely.
Wich again makes working parts more rare to find, even finding them in good working condition too.

brostenen wrote:

And counting in bad build quality and bad component quality, wich have resulted in a lot of stuff have died prematurely.
Wich again makes working parts more rare to find, even finding them in good working condition too.

IMO constantly rising power consumption and heat output is the main factor in killing more recent hardware. When a GPU like 8800GTX running @ 80-90C is considered the norm, its no wonder they are getting harder to come by.

Those prices are all extremely inflated and entirely unreasonable, where did you even get these number?!? Just comes to show that people don't know how to shop these days and the resellers are taking advantage drive up these costs that much more.

Geforce 256 can be had for less than $10 shipped but is often around $15 or so, never pay more than $20 unless you want or need a particular card.
5950 Ultra shouldn't be more than $50 shipped (max) unless other bidders go fat finger with the bids.
ATI 9800s should never be more than $20 or 30 shipped unless fat finger or something rare.
Mid range Geforce 6/7 agp cards should never be more than $50 unless fat finger or new in box. High end Geforce 6/7 high prices are easier to swallow as many did not survive their original owners due to poor cooling or worse build quality. People need to learn how to shop and if all else find a middle ground between what they want to pay and what the sellers want so everybody wins. High prices keep people out of this hobby more than anything else especially dos era builds!

I even bought a 7600 gs 512 agp for $10 shipped this morning....

Nothing keeps people out of this hobby. This hobby is relatively small. 😀

I purchased a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra (dust buster) brand new back in the day for an outrageous amount for Doom 3 specifically. Lately I checked the price of these cards on EBay and they are crazy. Luckily I still have mine in working order as I only used it until I completed Doom 3, then got a brand new system. If I were to sell I wouldn't feel right to ask for the price point these seem to be ging for. I wonder if these cards had shotty build quality. Mine never seems to go above 65 degrees centigrade. Anyone know what the normal operating temperature of this card should be@

Tommaso72

Well the fx5800 ultra wasn't badly made. They are farely rare because of the extremely loud fan/ bad dx9 performance/ high price compared to the radeons of that time.

So they didn't sell a lot of those and quickly made the fx5900 that was a bit better.

I don't think a fx5800u is worth the high prices they go for but at least it is harder to find one. I recently found a normal fx5800 that isn't that common either and i just paid 10 euro. It works fine.

Re: heat killing modern GPU cards, I think it's wiser to buy models with very good coolers (especially used cards). This is coming from someone who bought 1st gen Fermi (a pair of 470s shortly after launch 😵 ). I would also suggest Quadro cards since CAD or 3D creation apps don't usually crank up the wattage all the time like modern heavy games do, but I'm not sure about cooling on the single slot versions.

It depends, heavily on where you are. I live in the Silicon Valley so leftovers are everywhere. I can get any of the stuff you listed for $3-$5 in the used bins at any of my local surplus places. 😜 You have to accept that if someone is going to go through the trouble of listing an item, and willing to ship it, it's going to cost more than you might expect to pay. But yeah, those prices are way too inflated.

archsan wrote:

Re: heat killing modern GPU cards, I think it's wiser to buy models with very good coolers (especially used cards). This is coming from someone who bought 1st gen Fermi (a pair of 470s shortly after launch 😵 ). I would also suggest Quadro cards since CAD or 3D creation apps don't usually crank up the wattage all the time like modern heavy games do, but I'm not sure about cooling on the single slot versions.

Lead free solder is a real problem with modern hardware and even with amazingly good cooling it is still a lottery if the card is going to hold up these days, just look on eBay and everyone can see all the modern cards that are almost new in box that stopped working. The cheap pull apart fall apart fans on a lot of modern cards doesn't help either, there are heaps of cards with one or missing fans on eBay atm. I agree about Quadro cards to an extent but some of them have been real stinkers when it came to cooling and build quality over the years.

Insistance on using blower style coolers is also a factor. They dont provide the cooling needed and have no place on hot, high end cards - yet they were the standard for years and when it comes to refrence models, still are.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

I mean were not talking about collectors grade stuff from the 1990s or 1980's. Were talking about things that most people would scrap.

And what do you expect to happen when most of it is scrapped?

Munx wrote:

Insistance on using blower style coolers is also a factor. They dont provide the cooling needed and have no place on hot, high end cards - yet they were the standard for years and when it comes to refrence models, still are.

Mind if I ask what a blower style cooler is? 😊

You mean those large heatsinks covering the entire length of the graphics card with the very small tiny jet engine-like fan embedded into them? Because I always found that quite a terrible design and always try to avoid those, they have poor redundancy I think.

Tetrium wrote:

Munx wrote:

Insistance on using blower style coolers is also a factor. They dont provide the cooling needed and have no place on hot, high end cards - yet they were the standard for years and when it comes to refrence models, still are.

Mind if I ask what a blower style cooler is? 😊

You mean those large heatsinks covering the entire length of the graphics card with the very small tiny jet engine-like fan embedded into them? Because I always found that quite a terrible design and always try to avoid those, they have poor redundancy I think.

Yup, those. Other than lowering the temps inside the case by around 2C, they are worse than tradicional open-heatsink style coolers in every way - ineffective, hard to clean, noisy, etc.

Stop over paying for stuff, problem solved. If we all our foot down, then the sellers will either stop selling stuff or lower the prices.

I bought 20 odd some video card off ebay for about 35$. Then you have real life deals.
I gotten hole PC for free to 5-10$ from folks around town. Put a want add out or something.
You just have go out and look. Ask around, put a want add out or something. Don't give into over priced eBay listing.

EDIT:
or we could all come together and make a ebay like site just for retro tech stuff and have a rule about asking crazy prices for stuff.

Munx wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Munx wrote:

Insistance on using blower style coolers is also a factor. They dont provide the cooling needed and have no place on hot, high end cards - yet they were the standard for years and when it comes to refrence models, still are.

Mind if I ask what a blower style cooler is? 😊

You mean those large heatsinks covering the entire length of the graphics card with the very small tiny jet engine-like fan embedded into them? Because I always found that quite a terrible design and always try to avoid those, they have poor redundancy I think.

Yup, those. Other than lowering the temps inside the case by around 2C, they are worse than tradicional open-heatsink style coolers in every way - ineffective, hard to clean, noisy, etc.

It comes down to just poor design why that style of coolers don't work very well, lots of holes for heat to escape only to loop back and almost everything is nothing but cheap aluminum and plastic. Heat pipes just don't cut it either as the contact between the pipes and the base or the fins in some cases results poor transfer, last but not least most of these coolers are very low mass so there isn't much to absorb let alone transfer the heat. When done right they work but they could go a lot further such as a central vapor chamber with direct or single volume heat pipes with copper fins.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Stop over paying for stuff, problem solved. If we all put our foot down, then the sellers will either stop selling stuff or lowe […]
Show full quote

Stop over paying for stuff, problem solved. If we all put our foot down, then the sellers will either stop selling stuff or lower the prices.

I bought 20 odd some video card off ebay for about 35$. Then you have real life deals.
I gotten hole PC for free to 5-10$ from folks around town. Put a want add out or something.
You just have go out and look. Ask around, put a want add out or something. Don't give into over priced eBay listing.

EDIT:
or we could all come together and make a ebay like site just for retro tech stuff and have a rule about asking crazy prices for stuff.

I agree, as is it only take a few people to decide the market and create a bubble. Just look at the housing market with crack shacks going for millions in some cities.
Just look at the rates for one bedroom one bath apartments in San Francisco with some easily topping $4,000 or more a month 😲

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere 😵

nforce4max wrote:

Lead free solder is a real problem with modern hardware and even with amazingly good cooling it is still a lottery if the card is going to hold up these days, just look on eBay and everyone can see all the modern cards that are almost new in box that stopped working. The cheap pull apart fall apart fans on a lot of modern cards doesn't help either, there are heaps of cards with one or missing fans on eBay atm. I agree about Quadro cards to an extent but some of them have been real stinkers when it came to cooling and build quality over the years.

Nope, well short of. Old stuff failed in it's days too, but all of it's been ether fixed, RMA'd or trashed or lost to time leaving mostly the good stuff behind.
It will be the same case 10 years from now with the tech we have today. Everything we have today will be fixed for trashed and folks will complain about this new gen of stuff failing at a higher rate then older stuff.
This is not to say that what was around 10-15 years ago failed at the same rate of hardware today.

Jade Falcon wrote:

EDIT:
or we could all come together and make a ebay like site just for retro tech stuff and have a rule about asking crazy prices for stuff.

Isn't this what amibay kinda is about?

If I'm ever gonna start selling stuff, chances are good it's gonna be over there.