Zen and the art of haggling

[Arkaine23]

Behold what can be done with a little wheeling and dealing.

I just sold off several CPU's and some miscellaneous parts to some forums-goers. That'll give me a little more than $100 to spend. And now I need to get 4 CPU's and 1 HSF.

I also have a long-time friend who owes me $20 for a soundcard I sold to him, and he's asking for a reformat/reinstall of windows so I'm calling his debt due, but the work on his 'puter I'm doing for free (because I'm a sucker like that). I chatted with him on aim just a while ago and arranged a time to do the work on his machine. I offered to give him a poor-OCing 1800+ Tbred B for $20 and his old palomino 1600+, plus I reminded him he needs to pay off his old debt to me. So that's $40 and a 1600+ coming my way.

That'll give me about $145 to work with to get 2 tbreds, a palomino and a HSF. Watch the master work....

I'll buy 2x 1800+ Tb's and a galaxy 70mm HSF from newegg for $116 (free shipping on all items). That's taking a small chance on not getting the DLT3C steppings, but its also cheap and I'll risk it. I found someone who'll sell me another palomino for $32.

That gives me 2 new Tbreds, 2 palominos, and a cheap copper HSF for a total of $148. I won't even miss the old Tbred because two of my boards are kt266a's and it'd take bridge-modding to get a decent OC on them anyway, so palominos will do nicely for them. That lets me upgrade 3 of my boxes as follows:

Main gaming rig- Tbred 1800+ @ 2.1 ---> Tbred 1800+ @ 2.3 approx
Dedicated fold box- Pally @ 1.7 ----> Tbred 1800+ @ 2.3 approx
Dedicated fold box- Duron @ 933 ----> Pally @ 1.6 approx
Volcano 2 ----> Galaxy GC88

My friend gets a cheap upgrade:

Pally @ 1.7 ----> Tbred @ 2.1

Details:
I clear out my closet of the following-

Duron 850
Duron 900
XP 1600+
XP 1800+
XP 1800+ Tbred DUT3C (max 2.1Ghz OC)
Volcano 2 HSF
Retail HSF
Creative Modem Blaster PCI v.90

I purchase or trade for the following-

2x XP 1800+ Tbred B (good chance at DLT3C and 2.3+ Ghz)
2x XP 1600+ Palomino
Galaxy GC88 HSF

And I'll walk away with 1.5 more Ghz and will only spend $2 of my own money. In fact, this is working out so well that I might toss an extra $34 in and get a Barton 2500+ from newegg in place of one of the 1800+'s.

Since all 4 of the machines involved fold@home for me, I expect to see about an extra +700 PPW to my username.

And not only that, but through the deals I made selling my old CPU's, I'll have given someone else on Team 32 some vital parts needed to get 2 new machines folding, for about another +700 PPW for the team.


So now I say to you,

Recruit, Borg, Build, and Make Deals on hardware with your Team 32 brethren!

[belorsch]

I hear you Arkaine. I'm switching from quantity mode to quality mode. I have some mb's and cpu's to sell but I haven't sold parts before just purchased them. So I need to figure out the how to's(sell) and how much to ask for what it is I have to sell. Did you somehow give preference to selling to folders or did it just happen that way?

[Arkaine23]

Yeah, I maxed out quantity also- have 3 machines I have to swap nework cables on when they need a WU because I don't have enough ports. Even buying a 4 port hub and daisy-chaining it, I'd still have one machine that I couldn't plug in. So the logical thing to do is sell older/slower parts and get CPU upgrades.

I'm pretty new to selling hardware online myself, since I have been hording all my parts for the last three years. I only setup my paypal a week ago and my heatware 2 days ago. But the classifieds are easy enough to use.

I generally look at what an item costs on pricewatch and then knock the price down some from that. Depends on how quickly I want to sell it of course.... I use the forum classifieds, but I also wind up talking with other forum members on chat programs and irc, or even in posts you can sometimes find people who are looking to build something and PM them an offer on a part. For classifieds adds, you can give a discounted price to folders.

[belorsch]

Woohoo. We just received our new digicam. I should be able to take some pics and post them in the ad. Hope to get something up this weekend.