why Asus Rampage III Gene Micro ATX LGA1366 mobo cost so much?

I was talking to my friend and he has his old computer consisting of i7-930, 12GB RAM, and Asus Rampage III Gene Micro ATX LGA1366 mobo. It has been sitting around for a year or so and I mentioned I might buy it to hold me over until ZEN upgrade or something if the price was right.

Well I looked up the specs and the processor and ram have dropped significantly. Processor $45, RAM to $35 or so, but the mobo is worth $300+ on ebay.

As you can see in my sig the last time I built a computer for myself was a Q6600 so I am a little out of date.

Correct me if I am wrong, but for just over $300 I can invest in a 6th gen i5, cheap mobo, and ~8GB of ram. In the end I will have a faster computer.....ie: a few programs that make use of 8 threads of the older i7????


Anyway I offered him $200 for the mobo,proc, ram. See what he says......

most sold listings are around the $225 mark, so a bit cheaper than that, and some went for under $150. I believe the reason would be that I don't remember a lot of good overclocking mATX boards for S1366 setups.

It's not just mATX, they're all outrageously expensive in LGA1366/X58.

Low end boards out of Dell's and HP's run $150+ a lot of the time.

It's crazy I think.

Prices on all 1366 boards have been going up over the past year and-a-half to two years. Used to be back three years ago (or so) you could pick up a really good LGA1366 board for $100-175, now it's more like $170-200 minimum for boards that are junk (but functional junk) a lot of the time and $250-400 for the really good boards more often than not.

You can pick up good LGA2011/X79 boards for less, though the LGA2011 CPU's are outrageously expensive compared to a lot of the LGA1366 4C/8T CPU's that are really cheap.

Well my friend said Ok to $200. Also he said he is to lazy to take parts out so I am getting gfx card, psu and case

well maybe a week or two ago i picked up a RIIG with 920-DO/3x2gb DDR3-1600 for $200us shipped from CA to USA. yea it is interesting how the LGA1366 boards are listed for so much even ones listed as non-working are listed for $50-$75.

New i7 installed.

My friend was to lazy to take the mobo,proc, and ram from case so he just gave me the whole case with extras!

The cpu ended up being an i7-950 and not a 930. Bonus
the case is a SilverStone GD04 HTPC (soon to be on craigslist)
also got a 6950(with dual bios and soon to be 6970)
600w modular psu
400GB WD HDD


The system came with stock heatsink which sucks! I was running idle at 67c in my cool basement (no more than 20c). When I ran prime95 I hit 96c on cores!

Gaming that night I was hitting 80-84c on the cores. Tonight I had a chance to re apply paste with Artice silver 5. At first I applied a thin film as I normally do. Booted to bios to make sure cpu fan was not being throttled (cool & quite setting). Decided to check temps in bios and was hitting 84c. Something is wrong. Pulled heatsink and the copper base is convex enough to only touch the edges. Applied a nice amount of paste to center and tried again. Failed again. Applied even more paste and now temps are 58-64 idle and high 80's on prime95.

The adapter I need for my swiftech water block is on its way from ebay. Never had a stock heatsink/proc combo be so bad. What if a customer was doing number crunching on cpu and had a crappy case. This cpu would be dead. Thrilled I only needed an adapter for my dated water block, always nice to spend $17 instead of $50.

Friend also gave me an older full tower lian li full of 92mm fans. I put my old q6600 computer in there and set all fans to 5v. New home theater pc. So that is awesome.



But wait.....there is more.......There is one more item in which my friend decided he did not want laying around his home anymore. It is a very cool item.......in fact you might say freezing.........


Prometeia Mach II GT Phase Change Cooler!!!!!!!!

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1793




Right now it made to mount to an older AMD. socket 939 I believe. For me to use it I need the length of the cooler to be 3 times as long and modded for 1366, 1151, and what ever zen will be. Any idea how to go about doing this?


-Pinky.

Man, I need to find a friend like yours, lol. Sounds like some nice hardware you acquired.

When my friends have tech stuff to sell or give away it's always super old or dead. Did get a nice dual socket server board off a friend at one point though, it worked, was just really old tech (socket 370 Pentium III Coppermine's (no Tualatin support)).

As older components become more scarce the value of those that remain goes up if there is still significant demand for them.

trents said:

As older components become more scarce the value of those that remain goes up if there is still significant demand for them.

Click to expand...

This!^

The real reason for demand are cheap LGA1366 6-core Xeons (especially X5660) that became available in large numbers from decommissioned servers. That is also why you see the low-end 1366 cpu's for sale without mainboard for negligible prices.