sunkindly wrote on 2025-11-18, 02:30:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-17, 20:23:

This Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti reference card in a retail box arrived today and it is absolutely as cool as it looked in the pictures.

This looks pretty neat! What era was that card from? I'm not very familiar with this time period of cards, so I have no reference point.

I know I can look it up but that's boring when someone passionate about their new acquisition probably wants to talk more about it 😛

Haha, fair enough. It's from 2011. Not as retro as most of the stuff here, but in January it'll already be 15 years old. It is an upper mid range DirectX 11 level card which was later given basic support for DX12 features via a driver update years later.

Nothing really all that special aside from the apparently rare Nvidia packaging and the fact that it is complete. Probably makes a solid card for a Windows XP build though. 😀

My first ATi Rage2+DVD PCI with 4MB, before i had only 2MB ones for PCI.

I think this is probably okay since the listing is already over, but can anyone explain to me why this listing got so much attention? It was just listed yesterday and I noticed that in a short time it had half a dozen watchers, and now it has already sold via best offer.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/357933307551

I feel like I'm pretty good at spotting rare or valuable PC parts since I've been doing it almost every day for ~10 years, but this one is just so incredibly boring looking that it's bothering me. What am I missing here?

To me the only things that look even remotely interesting are the processors. The Intel 486DX2-66 with the blue heatsink is cool, and people list them for sale at fairly high prices, but they only actually sell for $30-$40 right now. The others look like a couple of 486s, an early Pentium (probably Socket 4) and I think an Intel Overdrive (not Pentium). They have value, but not that much.

There is some assorted RAM that's useful... and an Oak VGA card that's probably only an OTI037, and it doesn't even have the extra output for CGA\EGA displays.

The rest is just misc networking, modems and controller cards (SCSI, IDE, MFM, CD-ROM) as far as I can tell. Maybe the old laptop hard drives are valuable if they work, but those are such a gamble and are so easily replaced by CF cards these days... I highly doubt it.

I know people are going insane for gold-bearing chips and RAM right now, but not this much... I see nothing that would draw droves of collectors to this lot within hours of it being listed. But I always love to learn new things! What do you see in this lot that you'd actually pay money for?

To me, I see quite a few 8 bit ISA cards in the mix. Just the two Western Digital MFM controllers are nice to have. Not surprised it sold so fast.
Also a 8bit creative (Sigma) DVD/Mpeg decoder (kind of rare), lots of memory, 486/Pentiums. It was a good deal for the lucky buyer

AndrettiGTO wrote on Today, 01:15:

To me, I see quite a few 8 bit ISA cards in the mix. Just the two Western Digital MFM controllers are nice to have. Not surprised it sold so fast.
Also a 8bit creative (Sigma) DVD/Mpeg decoder (kind of rare), lots of memory, 486/Pentiums. It was a good deal for the lucky buyer

I don't know. In my experience here in the US, the value of the lot for retro enthusiasts or resellers is probably under $220 (USD) assuming someone had a use for all of it. And that's the main issue... even for retro enthusiasts hardly any of it is useful, desirable or easy to sell. So unless they took a super low offer (sub $100 + shipping) within 12 hours of it being listed I wouldn't say it's much of a deal, as most of it is likely to just collect dust and be hard to resell.

Hardly anyone has MFM drives these days and there are hundreds of similar controller cards listed for sale at any given time. The other 8bit cards are token ring network, dial-up modems, and CD-ROM controllers... none of which are anything that people are looking for. That isn't really very much RAM at all either. Also, the Creative DVD decoder card is PCI and they are listed for ~$10 with none recently sold. The only other thing that stood out to me is the one 8bit ISA card is marked "Floptical", but I think it might just be SCSI... which is, again, not worth a lot or hard to find.

Basically, it wouldn't take long for someone to find most of this stuff in a couple scrap lots for probably $75 + shipping, maybe less, while also getting a few more desirable items. Even for that I wouldn't personally have found any of this stuff interesting, except for the CPUs... But the issue isn't so much what the lot is worth to me... It's why did so many people watch it and then pounce on it so quickly? I see lots like this listed constantly and they might go a week with one or two watchers and no sale, probably for half this list price. The only ones that get a lot of attention have obviously rare or desirable parts in them. I can imagine one or two people who actually need this weird combination of stuff maybe watching this and making offers, but not as many as there were. I think there were six watchers shortly after it was listed, and I don't know how many more there were when it sold in the morning which was ~13 hours after the lot was listed. I'm just dying to know what all those people saw here. 😅