Hello

[yakcam]

Hello, just dusted off my socket 478 stuff from back in the time known as the day, bought a few bits and pieces to get it working, mostly second hand. A P4 2.8Ghz a PSU for a tenner, and bit's and bobs and a new micro ATX case, and installed XP Pro, obviously the x86 version, and a nice Nvidia 7880 AGP version which I had from when it was my main GPU, my jaw hit the floor when I saw how much these go for now. I enjoyed it so much that I am just gathering the bits together to do a similar build with socket 775 stuff, so far I have got another mATX board and a Q9550, I do have an old Asus sckt 775 board and a Q6700 which made up my main machine 10 or so years ago, but main board isn't mATX, and the Q6700 although it's quad core I'm guessing I'll get better performance from the Q9550, plus the main board I have already is DDR2, so I'd like the boost from DDR3, I'm looking for a Nvdia GTX 290 if I can get hold of one to give it a bit of period oomph, although I have a GTX 560Ti to bung in it for now. The only decision is XP X64 or Vista X64, I really liked Vista and used it for a good couple of years, so I am probably going for Vista.

[Tripredacus]

Legacy hardware prices are a bit weird. Especially when looking at solds on Ebay. The reason being is that Ebay usage is way down and cannot actually be used as a pricing tool for most things anymore.

[dencorso]

5 hours ago, Tripredacus said:

Ebay usage is way down and cannot actually be used as a pricing tool for most things anymore.

Do you know why?

[Tripredacus]

I can think of a variety of reasons...

1. Ebay and Paypal fee structure situations. There were back and forth with penalising (or not incentivising) regular sellers and Ebay Store owners.
2. Shipping prices. US v Canada being a big one. Another is Ebay not having any unified help list (a lot of websites have this problem) where you have to figure out everything by yourself. Learn as you go, you can't ship to x country because of import restrictions (Looking at Brazil here lol) or there is an import duty.
3. Shipping times. Despite sellers in SEA having clear information regarding shipping... MANY people would buy from SEA and and opt for the cheapest shipping method. That being by boat, which can take up to two months from some countries. People would leave negative feedback on purchases from these sellers because the item did not arrive, at least by when they would expect. What then happens is that many sellers in Japan or Hong Kong (or other places) which tried to operate on Ebay proper could not maintain any benefits because their negative and neutral feedback ratings would be "low"... it was not uncommon (even today) to see high volume sellers from Asia with bad feedback percentage. So over the years, those high volume sellers have left ebay.
4. Economy reasons. There was a slight boom after the 2008 recession in the US, but overall volume went down when economies came back.
5. Their website is terrible and slow.

I also wonder what percentage of high volume sellers were in their 50s when Ebay really started to get going, and ended up retiring. I know a few like this.