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is it just me, or is this dumb?

J

joecool

Platinum Member
ok, so i just sold an asusp5a board on ebay. guy bid it up to $77! looked at his feedback (minimal - must be a newbie) & he's bought four or five of these suckers, all for over $70! so, now i'm wondering if he knows something about these boards that i don't - is he secretly selling them in japan for $1000s?! i email him & ask. his reply follows:



<< I repair, upgrade, and build computers for members of my office staff and immediate family, and find the Asus Pentium II Motherboards very inexpensive, very reliable, easy to work with in a roomy tower, great in accepting up to 765 of RAM to compensate for slower Processor speeds that don't involve the easily breakable SIMMs trays from Pentium I days, and end up being nice starter machines for someone who's never had a computer before or a nice upgrade for someone who's never had anything since their first Pentium I with 125 speed processors and max 128 RAM.
 >>



now, at this point, i'm thinking this is really dumb. this guy is paying a premium price for mobos that are two generations old, & to make up for it is loading on way more memory than the systems will ever take advantage of. anything over 256mb is overkill on these boards - the os can't take advantage of it, & there are so many other factors that slow these systems down that you'll never see a lick of benefit from the extra mem.

am i correct, or am i missing something here?

inquiring minds want to know ...

joe
 
That board-(in his experience) might make a great "budget" dumb terminal for "non-profits" like community centers.
board = $77
cpu = $5-10
add a little ram, pci video and you got yourself a perfect "thin client machine" for use on a linux terminal server.
Total cost less than $150 per machine.


You can never tell how creative some people are with old stuff.


EDIT: He may have gotten a killer deal on 50 cpu's and ram for those boards off ebay, so he might be stuck paying that much for the boards.
 
Its funny, but thats the board I use to primary use (during that time period). Built quite a few K6-2 systems on it. It was a pretty stable board (even though it has an ALI chipset - Aladdin V). I guess he just wants them because they never seemed to have any mobo issues.
 
You are missing the fact that the P5A can support 758MB memory, and every current OS, and some not so current(as in all Win9x and NT) operating systems can support 768MB memory, and office apps very much appreciate additional memory. $77 is hardly a premium for what remains the most stable and reliable super seven board made. That's about what you would pay for a new board, not a new P5a though as Asus doesn't make em anymore, for some generic board nowhere near the same quality. Let's not forget it supprts processors up 550Mhz, which few of the current new super seven boards can do reliably.
 
well, i know he didn't get a deal on the cpu - he also bought my k6-3 350 in another ebay auction.

regarding the mem, yeah, the os does support it, & yeah, (ms) office apps like mem, but i'm running 512mb in my tbird system & i don't think i've ever seen mem usage go above 50% - you'd have to be multitasking a lot of apps to fill the ram up, & in that case the slow cpu/board/hd would be a bottleneck anyway, wouldn't they?

well, anyway, maybe i'm wrong. maybe this board is worth $75. but considering you can pick up an ecs k7s5a for $55 on newegg, and a duron 1ghz for $50, paying $120 for a p5a & k6 (that's what the total of the two auctions was) just seems kind of steep!
 
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