You need to spend a lot of time looking through badly labeled offers, and be willing to buy from sellers with no reputation.
replyI searched "AMD EPYC 7532" and there are a ton of listings for $150-$200. Are you just regretful that it wasn't like this when you were shopping parts for your homelab?
replyI got a 7551p plus motherboard and ram for about 600 bucks from China this January. I may have overpaid but it works great, and gets the job done.
replyGet a QC type chip and roll the dice, that's how I got mine. The biggest cost for me is disk and to a lesser extent ram, the chip itself was relatively cheap.
replyNot for a CPU but earlier this year I bought a Thinkpad workstation off eBay for $500. It's a machine from 2020 and when it was new cost $5,700.
replyI see this for pretty much all hardware out on eBay, just go back 5 years and watch the price fall 10x.
Has eBay fixed their "and then they ship you a box of rocks" problem?
replyI feel like there was a five year span where everyone I talked to said buying or selling electronics on eBay was a nightmare, so I'm a little curious if I need to re-evaluate my priors.
Yes, it’s extremely rare to be stuck with a broken/wrong/missing item as a buyer on eBay. Selling is quite risky in some ways because eBay will nearly always side with a buyer. Every missing or broken thing I have purchased has been refunded or replaced. On the other hand, 3 things I have sold were claimed to not arrive. The only case where eBay decided in my favor was when the buyer had signed for the package in a literal USPS office :)
replyMy understanding is that eBay sides with the buyer on all disputes, to the point of ridiculousness. So you should be fine.
replyThe real issue is being a seller and solving the "and then the customer claims I shipped them a box of rocks" problem.
Yep selling is way more risky. Ebay might be the most safe (refund wise) marketplace for buyers… I have more trouble with amazon.
replyYou don't get that with used old stuff, you get it with unrealistic low prices for new stuff.
replyA 7532 CPU is now ewaste for all the datacenters out there 1/10 of original price is reasonable, but the latest Nvidia GPU for 200 bucks is obviously a scam.
> Has eBay fixed their "and then they ship you a box of rocks" problem?
replyI've personally never had that problem after over a decade and hundreds of purchases on eBay. I've had some defective parts, but never outright fraud. IME eBay favors buyers.
TheServerStore.com often has good deals. I actually bought a brand new 64-core EPYC 7702 server with 256 GB RAM and 8TB NVMe storage for about $3K fully assembled earlier this year.
replyEpyc7000+MB+256GB-512GB RAM (from china) usually starts at 800 euros + import tax
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