Plasma wrote on 2022-06-27, 05:21:

A lot of what is described in this thread is not even scalping, which is why I put the word in quotes. Some people just refuse to acknowledge the increase in fair market value for items which are no longer produced yet increasing in demand.

a good point

as ludicrous as some prices are, and as annoying as it is to be outbid by someone on a great deal only to see that same item offered at double the price by the winner later, i think what actually happened is you got outbid and nothing more

as another observation about new goods and scalpers - the company sets a price it thinks is optimal, ie will sell the target number of units. Naturally that price will be too high for some but it will also be well below the price some buyers are willing to pay. Retail prices are difficult to set in such a way as to take advantage of those people willing to pay more - although in a limited fashion that's what happens when a new product is released, it starts with a high price and it drops slowly.

Anyway, a scalper in this sense is really only focussed on a small group of people who are willing to spend more. if 1000 people are willing to buy a thing for $200 but of them about 100 eager buyers would have bought it at $400 then a scalper, knowing this, can buy lots of things at $200 and sell for double to the 100 eager buyers. they are taking advantage of the retailers inability to fine tune prices by buyer. By doing that however they get in the way of regular buyers and result in delays in supply, invite scams to trick the impatient and generally mess things up!

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185471988030
DFI K6XV3+ sold for $150.
Saw it this morning. Few hours later it was already gone. I'm glad I already got two of these. Three, if Hirsch can fix the broken one.

Another:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384957875437
ASRock AliveDual-eSATA2 auctioned off for 144€.
For those who are wondering why a low budget board which is not that old already sells for more than the original price: It's the very last board to feature an AGP slot.

Saw a 266 Tillamook desktop variant popup on Evilbay for $50 USD... Stupid me didn't pay it any attention at the time as my brain said its just another normal MMX Pentium ...wasnt till a few hours later that my brain corrected itself and told me to go see if it was still up ...nope sold...missed it by 10 mins.

I dont mind losing that as I'm sure another will pop up but it was surprising to see it as a BIN auction rather than a bidding sale.

I've see others go for considerably more at a bidding sale.

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-06-30, 18:47:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185471988030 DFI K6XV3+ sold for $150. Saw it this morning. Few hours later it was already gone. I'm gl […]
Show full quote

https://www.ebay.com/itm/185471988030
DFI K6XV3+ sold for $150.
Saw it this morning. Few hours later it was already gone. I'm glad I already got two of these. Three, if Hirsch can fix the broken one.

Another:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/384957875437
ASRock AliveDual-eSATA2 auctioned off for 144€.
For those who are wondering why a low budget board which is not that old already sells for more than the original price: It's the very last board to feature an AGP slot.

I saw that same auction, actually posted it up here for anyone interested in it about a week before your post, thing is a newer revision of that board was listed a few days after this one for 60 USD ..it lasted all of 20 mins. (turns out I have the AT version of that newer revision, got two of these boards in AT form now so I'm all good)

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-06-30, 18:47:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/384957875437
ASRock AliveDual-eSATA2 auctioned off for 144€.
For those who are wondering why a low budget board which is not that old already sells for more than the original price: It's the very last board to feature an AGP slot.

Yes, I was wondering why it sold for so much. I first thought, "just an ordinary AM2 board, heh, fools". Then I saw the AGP slot and thought it odd to see this on an AM2 board. I looked further and noticed that it only has one PCIe slot, which I think must have limited its usefulness. Were there other AM2 AGP boards with one PCIe x16 and one or two PCIe x1 or x4 slots?

feipoa wrote on 2022-07-30, 05:05:

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-06-30, 18:47:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/384957875437
ASRock AliveDual-eSATA2 auctioned off for 144€.
For those who are wondering why a low budget board which is not that old already sells for more than the original price: It's the very last board to feature an AGP slot.

Yes, I was wondering why it sold for so much. I first thought, "just an ordinary AM2 board, heh, fools". Then I saw the AGP slot and thought it odd to see this on an AM2 board. I looked further and noticed that it only has one PCIe slot, which I think must have limited its usefulness. Were there other AM2 AGP boards with one PCIe x16 and one or two PCIe x1 or x4 slots?

Asrock did a whole range of boards with dual agp/pcie slots, they also had ddr/ddr2 support on the same board. There was even a 775 board that had a riser card that changed it into a 939 board.

These boards were not for top end pcs but rather multi purpose setups that could be upgraded easily.

Yeah (think you mean 754 .... 775/939 would be quite something haha). There was also the Asrock K8 Combo-Z board with 754 and 939 sockets on the board itself.

There were chipsets that might have made it possible, like the Ati xpress200 and some nForce.

ratfink wrote on 2022-07-30, 22:58:

Yeah (think you mean 754 .... 775/939 would be quite something haha). There was also the Asrock K8 Combo-Z board with 754 and 939 sockets on the board itself.

It was a whole socket 939 / chipset on a riser card, you plugged it in and it disabled the Intel socket/ chipset and acted as if it was an AMD board.

One of the coolest weird 775 boards ASRock did.

How many PCIe slots did it have?

feipoa wrote on 2022-07-31, 11:18:

How many PCIe slots did it have?

The one the board came with, These boards were not built for SLI since the AGP bus is incompatible with such a setup, it was also at a time when you didn't need more than one PCIe slot.

I remember there being a demonstration of one of these AsRock 939 boards using some NVIDIA AGP + PCIe in SLI and (I think) it mostly worked. There was only one model of graphics card which worked in such configuration.

feipoa wrote on 2022-07-31, 12:40:

I remember there being a demonstration of one of these AsRock 939 boards using some NVIDIA AGP + PCIe in SLI and (I think) it mostly worked. There was only one model of graphics card which worked in such configuration.

I remember that too and it was ..unique and more of a hack rather than something they would have ever put out commercially(I bet it was emulating the AGP bus via PCIe so they were essentially two PCIe GPUs in SLI), AGP in general didn't like dual GPUs, IIRC ATI tried something similar but couldn't get the AGP bus to accept two independent GPUs on the same bus it always saw one GPU and conflicted with the other, they did get a hack working in the Rage FURY Pro MAXX which was one GPU to the AGP bus but two separate GPUs on card and essentially IIRC did a form of SLI.

I remember a user here talking about a dual AGP board that was at a display show, no idea how they got that working but it too was limited to a specific model of GPU that was modded to work with that one board in a dual AGP GPU setup, would love to see some pictures of that setup.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-31, 02:34:

ratfink wrote on 2022-07-30, 22:58:

Yeah (think you mean 754 .... 775/939 would be quite something haha). There was also the Asrock K8 Combo-Z board with 754 and 939 sockets on the board itself.

It was a whole socket 939 / chipset on a riser card, you plugged it in and it disabled the Intel socket/ chipset and acted as if it was an AMD board.

One of the coolest weird 775 boards ASRock did.

wow i never knew that was possible, mind=blown! 😁

ratfink wrote on 2022-07-31, 14:38:

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-07-31, 02:34:

ratfink wrote on 2022-07-30, 22:58:

Yeah (think you mean 754 .... 775/939 would be quite something haha). There was also the Asrock K8 Combo-Z board with 754 and 939 sockets on the board itself.

It was a whole socket 939 / chipset on a riser card, you plugged it in and it disabled the Intel socket/ chipset and acted as if it was an AMD board.

One of the coolest weird 775 boards ASRock did.

wow i never knew that was possible, mind=blown! 😁

ASRock were the masters of doing weird shit with their hybrid boards during the 775 era, even today they sometimes do odd things but its pretty rare now as specifications are so damn rigid.

Super 386 Chips - 33 MHz with mangled pins and non-working condition listed, sells for $177.50 USD

https://www.ebay.com/itm/394163786275

I wasn't sure what to make of the value because I don't see these for sale very often. Price was too high for me though. I was going to put in a bid for $80, but didn't bother.

TrashPanda wrote on 2022-05-22, 23:51:

LGA 1366 would be as new as I go for collecting and honestly I only want one solid X58 board and a 980x and I would be more than happy leaving it at that.

X58 is about the upper ceiling of what I now consider to be the cutoff for "retro" to enthusiasts in the space. obviously most people here wouldn't consider stuff from 2010-2011 "retro" by any stretch of the imagination, but it's about where the cutoff line is where people start collecting the top tier items. I'd also argue it marks a significant cutoff line about as major as the AT to ATX cutoff line is, as it's the cutoff where motherboards stopped offering a 34 pin floppy connector. (I have seen newer boards with one, the last being roughly ivy bridge, but virtually none above X58 offer one, whereas many below do)

if I were to offer you a suggestion, get a lenovo thinkstation S20 which was their X58 system. they are commonly found free or cheap, have a 34 pin floppy header, have a nice case with a handle that isn't two feet deep like the bigger C602 xeon systems, are easy to find with all the drive caddies, and are reliable. here's one I found in ewaste and kept.

the board above'd be my own X58 keeper, ASUS sabertooth X58 I found in some random PC that got sent to ewaste. these are very uncommon and X58 boards all need the thermal pads and paste redone now.

the next major "cutoff" looking forward will probably be the one between LGA 1150 and LGA 1151, as LGA 1150 chipset boards are the last which generally offered a TPM header off the LPC bus.

gerry wrote on 2022-06-27, 10:46:

Anyway, a scalper in this sense is really only focussed on a small group of people who are willing to spend more. if 1000 people are willing to buy a thing for $200 but of them about 100 eager buyers would have bought it at $400 then a scalper, knowing this, can buy lots of things at $200 and sell for double to the 100 eager buyers. they are taking advantage of the retailers inability to fine tune prices by buyer. By doing that however they get in the way of regular buyers and result in delays in supply, invite scams to trick the impatient and generally mess things up!

to me a "scalper" is someone who takes advantage of low supply and steady demand within a niche, corners the supply, then raises the price up significantly to force people with demand to have to pay the higher price. an example would be say, this ASUS C-P6S1 slot 1 to socket 8 adapter which is popular among a niche of people building dual pentium pro systems on slot 1 motherboards.

because the socket 8 is no longer produced and is rare, a couple of individuals bought up whatever supply remained globally in warehouses etc and have cloned these cards, and now sell them for roughly $100 apiece. your only other sourcing option would be to remove the socket from Pentium Pro boards, which are generally expensive and almost any that were defective have long since been scrapped.

another part example are 5V 16MBit x 1 FPM DRAMs. these are used in two systems: the Macintosh IIfx, and GVP 68030/68040 accelerator cards for zorro bus Amiga systems. the Mac has a 32 bit wide address and data bus, and uses sets of four 64-pin SIMMs to get 32 bits - four times 8 bit width with 8 DRAMs per SIMM, as these are the only chips which can be used that are electrically compatible. because these chips are so esoteric, they are now nearly nonexistent and cost roughly $1.50 apiece to purchase, meaning building a set of four 16MB SIMMs for 64MB will run you a minimum of about $45-50 just for the DRAMs.

using larger sized DRAMs doesn't work as there are no 32 x 2, 64 x 4 or 128 x 8 DRAMs out there which are 5V and have a pin count that matches all of the necessary address lines on the original SIMMs. and using smaller DRAMs requires increasing the SIMM height, but the Mac case lacks the clearance, and the Amiga boards don't recognize any other configurations.

libby wrote on 2022-08-01, 02:30:

gerry wrote on 2022-06-27, 10:46:

Anyway, a scalper in this sense is really only focussed on a small group of people who are willing to spend more. if 1000 people are willing to buy a thing for $200 but of them about 100 eager buyers would have bought it at $400 then a scalper, knowing this, can buy lots of things at $200 and sell for double to the 100 eager buyers. they are taking advantage of the retailers inability to fine tune prices by buyer. By doing that however they get in the way of regular buyers and result in delays in supply, invite scams to trick the impatient and generally mess things up!

to me a "scalper" is someone who takes advantage of low supply and steady demand within a niche, corners the supply, then raises the price up significantly to force people with demand to have to pay the higher price.

yes that would fit too, basically a person who buys up a stock of something and then sells it at a price people are willing to pay

willing doesn't imply happy to pay at all, but if people are buying at the higher price then the 'price is right' in some manner, whatever we think of the scalper in question and the manipulation of supply

in the example you gave - I'd just forego the fun of having it, a shame but there are so many other ways of getting a computer to compute that it really doesn't seem worth $100 to this one thing

Here's another listing I was watching. A Cyrix DRx2-25/50 with factory heatsink sold for $280 USD. That was WAY more than I would have guessed. Normally the DRx2-33/66 was the rarer and more sought after.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/195243090185

There has been an increasing trend in the omission of "condition" values in the eBay listings. If an item is not listed as, "broken for parts", and has dash-dash (--) in the condition field, is it returnable for "not as described" if the item does not work? Logic would suggest that such an item would be not returnable, but does anyone have any real-life experience in being able to return such an item using eBay's Money Back Guarantee? Obviously, the seller is not listing the condition as "parts, not working" because this looks a lot less attractive to potential buyers compared to "--". However, the ambiguity in "--" may still lead some buyers to seek a return.