MAN... you know how sometimes you get really bad sellers on ebay? Well, sometimes you get really good ones too.
I sent an offer on a lot of Athlon XP processors recently. They were being sold as-is, for scrap, but the listing had excellent pictures and showed the front and back of them. I didn't see any broken or even bent pins and the dies looked almost entirely intact. The offer was on the low side so I wouldn't lose out too bad if they all ended up being garbage... but he just took it and before I knew it I had a shipping notification. At that point it was too late to send him a message requesting that they be packed in such a way as to protect them... I try not to do that when a price has already been agreed upon, unless it's something really valuable.
I was worried that they'd just show up loose in an envelope or something, mangled beyond saving...
Today they were delivered and holy cow... he shipped them in a nice box, with the CPUs individually folded into an antistatic bag, with most of them packed pin-to-pin with another to protect the pins, and the folded up pack of processors was wrapped in bubble wrap inside the box.
I'm happy to say that they seem to all be intact except for one that wasn't real important.
There are lots of good chips here... lots of 2400+, 2600+ and 2700+ chips, and some other older ones, but the two reasons I bought the lot are right here:
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Not too often I find an Athlon XP 3200+, let alone two of them! I'm really hoping at least one of them works. I have a kind of stupid idea to couple an overclocked 3200+ with a late VIA chipset board and a late AGP card to see how far I can stretch one of these systems into the modern era. At some point the lack of SSE2 becomes a total roadblock, but I'd like to test it out anyway. 😁
To be honest, I misread the one chip and thought it was a DKV4D, which would be a 2.33Ghz 333Mhz FSB model... basically the holy grail of Athlon XPs. This is certainly nothing to shake a stick at though. 😁