My eBay bargin

[Evil-Dragon]

Was browsing through eBay today thinking about building a machine from old used parts. I decided on a budget of £50 to try and build a machine of at least 2Ghz and possibly 512MB of ram. I already had a case, an unused PSU, hard drive, cd-rw drive and some old 133Mhz SDRAM ram. So all in all i just needed a motherboard and a processor really.

Soon it became apprent to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to build a machine for that cheap. Processors on ebay are expensive and so are the motherboards (not to mention they are really tacky mb's!)

I decided to have a quick flick through the prebuilt systems in hope of finding a decent spec in amongst the old 500Mhz P3 and Celerons. Things weren't going well up to the £45 mark, most were pretty slow and not very decent at all. Then i found this little beauty sitting in among the old P3's and thought "What a bargin!"

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.d...MEWN:IT&ih=005

Now consider this, a P4 2.4Ghz costs in the region of £25 (and then £4 P&P) http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Intel-P4-2-4Gh...QQcmdZViewItem
A motherboard will cost about £15 with postage costs and then a stick of RAM will cost at least £12 with postage costs.

All in all it would cost you about £56 and you're not even getting an XP Pro license.

I'm pretty chuffed with my bargain, it's pretty small so it's not like a monster like some of my other machines and i get a free XP Pro license to allow me to have a valid license for my other XP machine on the floor (which truth to say is not valid!)

There's another 6 of those machines left if someone else in the UK is interested in a bargain.

[Virus-X]

nice bargain you found there mate

i would have bought one of those if i never bought these two 863mhz p3's
they cost me £8 each hehe dont think i have room for another one either

[Evil-Dragon]

I'm still trying to work out if i've bought an ML3 Flex or a VL4 Flex (i'm hoping it's a VL4 because it's a better spec and faster RAM)

We'll see what the seller says in response to my e-mails.

[Evil-Dragon]

Seems that bargains aren't always good it seems. Received the machine today, hard drive cage is missing and clips on the case are broken. Truth to say i've emailed the seller with a "I'm not happy" email.

Turned out the machine is the Powermate VL4 Flex after all. I just hope i can get the damn thing exchanged for another machine in better condition.

[AMD-USR_JL]

Today's WOOT looked like a bargain to me. A 3800 X2 with a gig of ram, 200GB SATA 7200RPM HDD, Geforce 6150 LE, a 9 in 1 card reader, and other stuff (CD/DVD, PCI-E..). All that for $360 USD.

I also like the sites discountpc.net and refurbdepot.com

[Evil-Dragon]

Turns out they won't exchange, they'll send me the hard drive cage through the post.

I was hoping to make use of the XP key on the COA but i can't seem to get it to work on my 2nd home built machine. Is there some mechanism that prevents branded oem xp keys from being used on unbranded machines?

[Bender10]

I think you must be running the correct SP for the 'key code' you are using??

Anybody confirm this?

[Beerknurd]

Today's WOOT looked like a bargain to me. A 3800 X2 with a gig of ram, 200GB SATA 7200RPM HDD, Geforce 6150 LE, a 9 in 1 card reader, and other stuff (CD/DVD, PCI-E..). All that for $360 USD.

I also like the sites discountpc.net and refurbdepot.com

I thought it was good too, but then I noticed 3 things.

1) Refurb

2) Compaq

3) AMD Athlon 64 3800+ (Not an X2)

If you want a cheap cruncher, look up Dell AMD X2 3800+ on Ebay. You can get a brand new full system with a operating system shipped for around $400.00.

[AMD-USR_JL]

Wow, those people at WOOT are tricky.

You can really get a tricked out 3800+ X2 system for 400 dollars on Ebay? I'm gonna have start looking for bargains there then.

[Beerknurd]

Try This

Here are some...

The cheapest right now is about $450, but keep your eyes open. You can probably get a 4200+ pretty cheap now too...