eBay bargains - what's your latest conquest?

[Certificate of Excellence]

$17? I paid a lowly £7 for my 120GB and it wasn't that long ago. How things change. I thought that 120GB drives were going to be phased out as they were getting too cheap to bother with.

They were getting so cheap, I started buying 240gb ssd instead of the 120s for similar if not identical money. I was talking to someone yesterday who said they were buying 120s nib for $13 which is like around 9 pounds. 7 ?!? I never found them that cheap though lol 😆

Now they’ve got us over a barrel.

I did pick up a couple Apple HD5770s from eBay for $20 last week.

 

[weckart]

I picked up 4 MSI 240GB SPATIUM S270 SATA drives for £12 each when Amazon decided to have a pre Black Friday kind of sale. A slight cut above the ususal budget Kingspec/Fanxiang/Patriot offerings. I miss those days. I suppose the suppliers must have been hurting a bit as they can't have made too much on each.

 

[DisraeliGears]

So I celebrated Apple 50 by finding a local G4 Cube

I wasn't quite done tinkering with the G5 iMac, but I'm not really in a major metro and had to jump at the chance for a Cube. It's in pretty fantastic shape except it did not come with the power supply 🙁 I was reading 68kMLA and there were some alternative power supply suggestions there that I'm going to explore.

 

[AdamBuker]

Just got this bad boy that I'm going to hook up to the G5 and run with Logic Pro 8. It's replacing an old analog mixing board running through a Lexicon Lambda. While my current set up works, this will allow me to also have a control surface to control Logic directly. It will make programming automated fader moves much easier. Plus I don't need all the inputs and outputs that my old analog board has. That thing was more suited for mixing live bands than a one-man personal studio.

 

[ToniCH]

Quite a decent looking unit. Need to source a graphics card to verify if the MB works. If not then it might end up being a cool Intel Mac with internal eGPU etc. 😉

And now I found an original GPU for it and also the missing cache dimm. 👍

Next I'll probably need to figure out a hard drive solution for it. I do have some old SCSI-drives in storage but they are often bad after few decades of non usage. Maybe some more modern SCSI-substitute (BlueSCSI or something)?

Also, the floppy drive is missing. I wonder if any old Mac drive will work with this generation of machines (ie. PM 8500-9500 era)?

 

[ToniCH]

While searching for parts to the PowerTower Pro I found a classifieds ad for a box of old PowerMac parts from same period. There were some memory DIMMs I could use and some other stuff too like the floppy drive etc. Among the parts there are also 2 PCI-cards. One is obviously the stock Apple graphics card but the another one was a mystery to me. Well, I was intrigued so I bought the lot for very little money.

Now after serious googling I found the card. Well, this is neat... 😁

Sales pic and what I found:

 

[boswald]

So I celebrated Apple 50 by finding a local G4 Cube

View attachment 2619098

I wasn't quite done tinkering with the G5 iMac, but I'm not really in a major metro and had to jump at the chance for a Cube. It's in pretty fantastic shape except it did not come with the power supply 🙁 I was reading 68kMLA and there were some alternative power supply suggestions there that I'm going to explore.

I still remember the crowd going nuts when Steve flipped it over and pulled everything out by the handle. It made me want one right then and there! I might have to peek around FB and/or eBay for one of my own.

 

[ToniCH]

Made a deal about couple of ZIP-drives which will greatly help with file transfers between my G4 and PowerTower Pro. 👍

Also bought a NIB server grade 146GB 10K rpm SCSI drive for 5€. If it works then great, if not then I didn't lose much. Probably need to format/partition it smaller anyway to have any chance it working in that machine.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I still remember the crowd going nuts when Steve flipped it over and pulled everything out by the handle. It made me want one right then and there! I might have to peek around FB and/or eBay for one of my own.

Ive always wanted one but have been unable to find one for a good price. I don't have the time to work on a dead one and by the time I do they'll probably be close to unobtanium, so my only option is a functioning one which again, where Im at and what I have access to equates to top dollar if I want one on my shelf lol. There are a few Macs that have worked out this way for me unfortunately but luckily most have been found for very reasonable money if not free to me so blessed in that regard.

My latest eBay conquest has zero to do with computing anything. I picked up a mug that was broken a few years back. Finally pulled the trigger on it - Like this one! Not my auction of course 🙂

I had shared this mug a couple times in @eyoungren 's Two of My favorite things threads over the years before it broke (my oldest was 3 maybe so that would have been 5 or so years ago now. Anyhow, glad to have one back in rotation. Such a fantastic coffee mug - thick enamel, classic Cinci running fat head graphic and made in the USA. There are a few variants of this mug and all are from this maker and of that high, robust quality. Coffee drinkers rejoice 🙂

 

[boswald]

Ive always wanted one but have been unable to find one for a good price. I don't have the time to work on a dead one and by the time I do they'll probably be close to unobtanium, so my only option is a functioning one which again, where Im at and what I have access to equates to top dollar if I want one on my shelf lol. There are a few Macs that have worked out this way for me unfortunately but luckily most have been found for very reasonable money if not free to me so blessed in that regard.

My latest eBay conquest has zero to do with computing anything. I picked up a mug that was broken a few years back. Finally pulled the trigger on it - Like this one! Not my auction of course 🙂

I had shared this mug a couple times in @eyoungren 's Two of My favorite things threads over the years before it broke (my oldest was 3 maybe so that would have been 5 or so years ago now. Anyhow, glad to have one back in rotation. Such a fantastic coffee mug - thick enamel, classic Cinci running fat head graphic and made in the USA. There are a few variants of this mug and all are from this maker and of that high, robust quality. Coffee drinkers rejoice 🙂

For some reason the face of the mascot there reminds me of Fallout.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

lol It is of that cultural era. They’ve never changed him.

 

[conmee]

My latest conquest was getting my money back.

I ordered a Crucial 4TB USB-C External SSD that was slightly cheaper than what I found on Amazon but not such a deal as to raise suspicion. As soon as I got the "shipping confirmation" I knew I'd been scammed. A 6oz SSD should not weigh 10.7lbs according to the spoofed UPS delivery info. You'd think eBay could do a better job when it comes to weeding out scam artists using spoofed/false/fake delivery information. So of course, when the package was "delivered" nothing arrived at my house. Had to go through the eBay process which takes about five days.

 

[conmee]

Ive always wanted one but have been unable to find one for a good price. I don't have the time to work on a dead one and by the time I do they'll probably be close to unobtanium, so my only option is a functioning one which again, where Im at and what I have access to equates to top dollar if I want one on my shelf lol. There are a few Macs that have worked out this way for me unfortunately but luckily most have been found for very reasonable money if not free to me so blessed in that regard.

My latest eBay conquest has zero to do with computing anything. I picked up a mug that was broken a few years back. Finally pulled the trigger on it - Like this one! Not my auction of course 🙂

I had shared this mug a couple times in @eyoungren 's Two of My favorite things threads over the years before it broke (my oldest was 3 maybe so that would have been 5 or so years ago now. Anyhow, glad to have one back in rotation. Such a fantastic coffee mug - thick enamel, classic Cinci running fat head graphic and made in the USA. There are a few variants of this mug and all are from this maker and of that high, robust quality. Coffee drinkers rejoice 🙂

This isn't a conquest post, but this mug brought back a vivid memory...

I remember watching this series on a 4.5-inch black and white portable TV that was in the back office of the credit union I worked at throughout college. I was the Assistant to the Regional Manager (not really, I was just the Data Processing Assistant as they called it, I took care of the nightly backups and offsite tape storage). I remember fiddling with the antenna and dialing in the channel. I could have watched the game from the break room which had a "bigger" 25-inch color television, but I had to monitor various processes running on the mainframe. Miss those green and amber Wyse terminals. 😉

 

[DisraeliGears]

Not PPC oriented, but I found a Mac Pro 5.1, 12 Core through gov surplus for $38, so I just started tinkering with that. My office has gotten absolutely ludicrous.

Pictured is the Mac Pro, M1 Mini, G4, iMac G5 (non-eyesight), early Intel iMac, and converted iMac monitor. Not pictured are my two G3s, G4 Cube, early Intel Mini, and eMac.

I'm debating taking the shelf out of the desk, I could probably fit the M1 Mini on top of the Mac Pro in there, but I think the eyeroll from my wife would be physically painful 😜

 

[weckart]

My latest conquest was getting my money back.

I ordered a Crucial 4TB USB-C External SSD that was slightly cheaper than what I found on Amazon but not such a deal as to raise suspicion. As soon as I got the "shipping confirmation" I knew I'd been scammed. A 6oz SSD should not weigh 10.7lbs according to the spoofed UPS delivery info. You'd think eBay could do a better job when it comes to weeding out scam artists using spoofed/false/fake delivery information. So of course, when the package was "delivered" nothing arrived at my house. Had to go through the eBay process which takes about five days.

Why do they even bother? eBay won't release the payment if you raise a complaint.

 

[splifingate]

While searching for parts to the PowerTower Pro I found a classifieds ad for a box of old PowerMac parts from same period. There were some memory DIMMs I could use and some other stuff too like the floppy drive etc. Among the parts there are also 2 PCI-cards. One is obviously the stock Apple graphics card but the another one was a mystery to me. Well, I was intrigued so I bought the lot for very little money.

Now after serious googling I found the card. Well, this is neat... 😁

Sales pic and what I found:

*hmm* It would be fun to see what linux sees of this in a regular mobo...

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Today I picked up a NIB USB-c to gigabit Ethernet adapter, a usb2 to de-9 serial adapter and an old floppy disk organizer for a whopping $6 bucks.

I was going to buy a cannon usb scanner because it still had its goofy late 90s era “windows2000 compliant” box lol but it was missing its cables, dccpower brick and software disks. It was only $8 bucks and being a big sucker for original boxes I might still go back and buy it as I have lots of power bricks and usb-a cables but I was really hoping for the software disks it came with and they’re all gone.

 

[alex_free]

just got this for building software for http://tigerports.com

I love the late 2005 Mac mini G4 1.33ghz but my Mac Pro 1,1 2x2.0ghz Xeon dual core can build the same thing in hours versus an actual week. And I have always wanted to see what all the fuss is about with the G5.

This was really hard to find. It’s an early 2005. My requirements were:
* Dual CPU or dual core G5.
* Actual picture of it in Mac OS X.
* Condition USED. not being sold as-is or for parts. Drives me insane all the used listings that have READ FOR PARTS ETC.
* HDD included.

I need the HDD included because Tiger only runs on earlier HDDs with 512 byte sectors. Basically this is the issue:

* Original HDD will work.

* HDDs from 2006-2009 will work.

* Anything from early 2010s and up is an extreme gamble and is probably a 4k byte sector HDD. So a random WD Black from 2015 is gonna crash tiger disk utility. These drives that are 4k sector bytes sometimes do have something called 512e (512 byte sector emulation) at a firmware level like a WD Black, but Tiger doesn’t care and will call your 500GB HDD 3.2TBs and crash.

* (On Intel) even ultra cheap Chinese no-name SSDs appear to work, but you have sata 2 standard there. Apparently from my research a lot of SSDs have terrible SATA 1 compatibility (probably just because it is untested) so only certain, more expensive ones work. I can’t just solve the issue by throwing in a 28$ amazon 128gb SSD and expect it to work. That’s also even more money to put out.

So was this a bargain? Working machine complete and shipped $325. I would have done a 1.8GHZ dual CPU late 2003 even, but none of them fit my requirements. Ideally I wanted a late 2005 dual core (ideally if money wasn’t an object the 2.3ghz MP). I don’t want to mess with liquid cooling systems old enough to drink. Also the premium on these is just insane (900+ USD listings are common).

Funnily enough, I did none of these requirements with the Mac Pro 1,1 and that turned out pretty ok. It was listed as “used boots and chimes”, description was tenant left this after moving, don’t have display cable. And all the specs were wrong when I did get it (said 2 Xeon 2.66ghz dual core CPUS, 1GBRAM, actually got 2 Xeon 2.0ghz dual core CPUs 12GBs of RAM). But the important thing is it had HDDs. 3 of em actually (but 2 were the dreaded 4k sector ones!). And honestly for less then $200 shipped for that Mac Pro 1,1 with keyboard/mouse I’ll take it.

So plan is to put them side by side under my desk, get free heating in winter, etc…

Also something people might not think about.. if your getting it without a HDD your not getting the mounting screws. That’s another small thing that I just don’t want to deal with.

Something that helped me too is the serial number trick. If you want to risk it, you take digits 3,4, and 5 from the serial (this doesn't work past a certain year, but that certain year is certainly post 2009). Digit 3 = year. Digit 4/5 = week. So like

XX539XXXXXXX
Is week 39 of 2005

 

[MarkC426]

I need the HDD included because Tiger only runs on earlier HDDs with 512 byte sectors.

I installed an mSata SSD in my G4 PowerBook which has Tiger/Leopard/Sorbet Leopard installed….🤔

 

[alex_free]

I installed an mSata SSD in my G4 PowerBook which has Tiger/Leopard/Sorbet Leopard installed….🤔

SSDs are not an issue, its specifically 4k sector HDDs (circa 2010-present). Ironically newer tech is more compatible but the G5 SATA 1 complicates it versus early intel

 

[ToniCH]

So was this a bargain? Working machine complete and shipped $325. I would have done a 1.8GHZ dual CPU late 2003 even, but none of them fit my requirements. Ideally I wanted a late 2005 dual core (ideally if money wasn’t an object the 2.3ghz MP). I don’t want to mess with liquid cooling systems old enough to drink. Also the premium on these is just insane (900+ USD listings are common).

Congrats on the new G5. 👍

But, I have to ask: where do you live and why are the G5 prices there so insane?

0-150€ is the norm here for any model. One can ask for more but they are usually in the listings forever, unless they have something special included.

Also something people might not think about.. if your getting it without a HDD your not getting the mounting screws. That’s another small thing that I just don’t want to deal with.

With luck there might be a spare set of the hdd screws inside the machine. If I remember it correctly there is a place for them somewhere close to the drive bays.

I had a set of weird screws on my desk for maybe 15 years among other small parts. I didn't have a clue what they were for but I had a nagging feeling they are important so I didn't put them away. When I bought my first G5 for a long time I finally realized they were G5 hdd-screws from my brothers old 1.8GHz G5. He gave the machine to me and wanted his HDD, so I took the whole drive and then realized I need the screws but then forgot their existence.

A quick search and I found a pic where the spares are visible:

 

[MultiFinder17]

I was in search of a replacement for my 23" ACD that's finally starting to have some fairly decent ghosting issues and yellowing backlight, so I got myself a 24" LED ACD! Found one on eBay nearly mint, still had its original logo peels on it and is basically flawless. Got it for $170 shipped, which I consider a decent deal on a decent display that'll fit in nicely with the others on my desk at school!

 

[ToniCH]

While I was on holiday trip some stuff had arrived:

- 147GB 10000rpm SCSI HP server hdd (new unopened package, I removed the server caddie), SCA 80 pin to 50 pin SCSI adapter, attached to the drive. No idea if it will work with Adaptec card in a Mac clone but 5€ for a new drive was too good to pass.
- Power Computing PowerTower Pro original 604e 225Hz CPU. This was advertised as Apple PM 7500/100 accelerator. Seller accepted my low offer after I informed what he actually had. I have a G4 cpu for the machine but the original cpu is missing so I thought that this was good thing to have as a spare.
- New Ati FireGL X3 256MB gpu for my G4 MDD, needs flashing. Little gamble again, maybe works maybe not.
- not in the pic: bunch of rom chips and voltage regulators for Sil3112 -SATA PCI-cards for flashing to work in G4 machines.

 

[alex_free]

Congrats on the new G5. 👍

But, I have to ask: where do you live and why are the G5 prices there so insane?

0-150€ is the norm here for any model. One can ask for more but they are usually in the listings forever, unless they have something special included.


With luck there might be a spare set of the hdd screws inside the machine. If I remember it correctly there is a place for them somewhere close to the drive bays.

I had a set of weird screws on my desk for maybe 15 years among other small parts. I didn't have a clue what they were for but I had a nagging feeling they are important so I didn't put them away. When I bought my first G5 for a long time I finally realized they were G5 hdd-screws from my brothers old 1.8GHz G5. He gave the machine to me and wanted his HDD, so I took the whole drive and then realized I need the screws but then forgot their existence.

A quick search and I found a pic where the spares are visible:

Interesting! This is my first g5 so I’m just trying to make sure I’ll be able to actually use it when I get it for what I need.

I’m close to the west coast in the USA. The one I bought is from California, so not even that far from me. Once you factor in shipping, for a complete system with power cord and from a reputable seller, they are all about this much. Without HDD you can risk it for $200 or so for a worse spec system if you really look, but it’s gonna almost always be as-is or for parts. And anything late 2005 model is minimum $300 pre-shipping.

 

[ToniCH]

Interesting! This is my first g5 so I’m just trying to make sure I’ll be able to actually use it when I get it for what I need.

I’m close to the west coast in the USA. The one I bought is from California, so not even that far from me. Once you factor in shipping, for a complete system with power cord and from a reputable seller, they are all about this much. Without HDD you can risk it for $200 or so for a worse spec system if you really look, but it’s gonna almost always be as-is or for parts. And anything late 2005 model is minimum $300 pre-shipping.

I would guess you guys have 10000x more G5 Macs in your parts than we do here in the Nordics so I was expecting them to be dirt cheap. And so plentiful you do not need to ship them from far away. But, even we do have "plenty" (relative) to choose from, there are always few for sale and indeed they are usually quite cheap. But, outrageous asking prices are sometimes common too but they drop when nobody is willing to pay such prices.

I am guessing that people do not generally see them very useful anymore and the guys buying them are hardline weirdos (hobbyists) 😉 who are in reality quite rare in our small population. On the other hand you might have much higher demand due more hobbyists and that is driving the prices up? Shipping: cost of shipping a such computer here to any corner of the country is max 20-30€ ($35). Maybe double if you want to insure it or ship it as fragile but no point really as the machines are so cheap anyway. In many cases shipping is more affordable than driving yourself to pick it up.

I have 4 G5 towers. First one is a 1.8GHz which my brother gave to me free. Second one is a late 2005 2.0DC which I bought for 15€ and got it shipped across the country for 20€. Third one is a late 2005 Quad which I got for helping an older gentleman to install his newer Mac which he was having some trouble with. He gave me the machine and couple of boxes of other old Mac stuff as a thank you for your help -gesture. The fourth one is also a late 2005 Quad which had bent handles but was otherwise in perfect working condition, seller asked 20€ and I drove 30 miles to pick it up.

And these prices are not super special, not everyday but every now and then you see similar prices. I would say late 2005 machines are usually somewhere between 50 and 100 euros (Quads can be anything depending on what the seller thinks he has - either a super special flagship model or the potential stupid water leak junk). Sometimes they are offered even free if you are willing to pick it up. Like I said higher asking prices also exist but they rarely sell. People are even selling working machines for use in cool PC-builds as they haven't been able to sell them as Macs.

Ps. ebay seems always have much higher prices than local classifieds or forum for sale ads. Patience seems a good idea when looking for one.