Finally picked up a 3850 AGP / Ebay story

[slngsht]

As you guys may or may not have known, I purchased a 4670 AGP around Christmas time so that I would have a good video card for PCMark runs on AGP systems. The system I was benching at the time was an Asus CUSL2 socket 370. It only supports 512mb ram, and I was never able to get that card to run on it. I attribute this to the 512mb limitation of the board, and the video card had 1gb ram. Since this didn't work, Redmax loaned me his 5900 Ultra which I have been using for quite a while now. After some time of sitting on the 4670 and researching, I found out that the 3850 AGP was a better card for benchmarking, and since it has 512mb ram vs 1024 on the 4670, it should work on the CUSL2 board.

So I tried selling the 4670 AGP on a few forums without any success. (seems enthusiasts aren't interested in AGP anymore, go figure ) So I ended up putting it up on ebay and it sold for $81. I then immediately turned around and purchased a 3850 AGP for $91 shipped. It arrived and it was completely caked with smoker's tar dust. The heatsink was clogged beyond recognition and of course, it was dead as a doornail. The fan wouldn't even spin up. The seller sold the card as untested and as-is. However, the condition of it was listed as Used but functional. I thought that I was screwed on that deal, so I decided to put it up on ebay as not working/for parts and told the story of the card. I had a couple people message me about it saying that I should file a case with Ebay Buyer Protection. So I pulled the auction and filed a claim against the seller. I didn't know how it would go, but I figured it couldn't hurt to try. I honestly thought that it wouldn't go in my favor since he stated in his description that it was sold as-is with no returns.

After a few days, the case manager for my incident ruled in my favor since it was listed as used but fully functional. So lesson learned, if you ever receive something that's listed functional, but sold as-is, no returns, you are covered by ebay. So in the end, the seller gave me a full refund including shipping costs.

So I turned around and immediately bought a 3850 AGP for $81 and it just showed up a couple days ago and works.

Time to get back to benching.

[Redmax]

Nice follow up to a bad ebay deal.

[NvidiaBunny]

Nice follow up to a bad ebay deal.

I wholeheartedly agree with Redmax! The fact that you were able to get your money back and ultimately get the video card you wanted is fantastic! I know that I'm posting in a bit of an older topic, but I was scrambling to find eBay "success" stories and happened to stumble upon this thread. Obviously, this story proves that you CAN fight back if a transaction goes awry. Ironically enough, I TOO received a video card that was non-functional and I was wondering if I COULD perhaps get my money back. With any luck, eBay may very well be able to help me out.

It seems like you have to take every extra precaution when purchasing and selling items on eBay. You're dealing with regular people who are just trying to make a buck here and there -- not large corporations or local businesses that hire order fulfillment facilities. Ebay "storage" facilities are apartments and homes -- not clean warehouses that store computer parts without mishap. Either way, I'm glad your case was successful. I'm going to file a complain with that one seller now. Thanks, Slng!

[slngsht]

Glad to see that my story could help you out. Let us know how your situation goes.

I was really reluctant to complain about it because in general, I'm not a complainer. I usually get hosed in situations such as the one I was in and I usually don't have the guts to fight back. This time, because I really wanted this rare card for specific purposes, I wanted rectification for it. The worst thing that could have happened was that ebay would have said tough luck and that would have been that.

I did end up finding another 3850 AGP card and I'm probably going to hang onto it unless someone on our hwbot team needs it for some older platform benching runs.

[bhusebye]

I wont buy much off Evilbay anymore. People have pissed me off and so has Ebay. By saying I have to ship items back when all I want is the guy to send me what he was supposed to in the first place. I am like oh no I am not shipping anything anywhere. Guy was calling me names and so forth and Ebay not saying a thing about it. So Ebay can just go kiss my butt I will find my stuff elsewhere. Another thing someone listed a "medical" device on there and Ebay said it was against their rules but the package made it to me. They keep letting them post stuff until someone asks a question they dont find out about it??? Seems odd.

[nilkilla]

My counter story is that I sold my RevoDrive at a buy it now price of $200. I included shippiing, so let's say $190. Then eBay charged final value fee of $18 and paypal got their $9.50.

Anyways, Gentleman buys it from me, shows as being inTurkey, but he provides a New York delivery address and pays through paypal real quick.

The date of delivery he sends me a message complaining that it is in a RAID array(which is what a RevoDrive is, to smaller drives on a marvell adapter card running on the pci-e bus faster than most sataIII adapter cards can run) and that performance is slow.

I send him OCZ's site and their forums and advise him that he should not bench with HD Tune as it will not give accurate results, but that he should bench with ATTO and that the drive works great, I had just taken it out as a boot drive and it was working perfect.

The next day he sends a message complaining that there is obvious soldering on the product and I sent him a defective product, nothing like what I described(lightly used, even packaging was all there including the original box sleeve).

I reply again that nothing is wrong with the drive and if he researched the drive at all that is normal for OCZ's quality and it should be no concern. I advised of a couple of other websites.

Mind you all of his messages consist of no more than 6 words at any given time.

His next message threatens me with starting a dispute through paypal(not ebay where I had the return policy set up...).

I advise him this is unnecessary, that I would be glad to walk him through setting up the drive, or to send issue through ebay.

He disputes through paypal, stating he did not receive what he ordered. I escalated the dispute and gave them copies of his conflicting e-mails(from it doesn't work fast enough, to it is modded, to it doesn't work at all).

They refund him and advise him to ship it back.

He ships it back...from Turkey.

This whole time ebay pushes through their $18 fee even though my money is already refunded, and paypal refunds him $200 and still charges me their fee.

The drive arrives. I plug it in, and sure enough its detecting like 76GB out of 180GB. I get pissed, call paypal and advise them that he has sent me the wrong product(mind you I have made mistake of not having a copy of the serial number at the time of this call, but NCIX did rectify that for me).

I can't really deal with it at that time as I was in the middle of helping a buddy with his computer.

The next day, I go into the Marvell controller's settings, and find that the guy has set it to RAID 1 rather than RAID 0. Fix that, it works fine, even updated the firmware and it performs faster.

The only draw back being he didn't return the box-sleeve and defaced the box all over so you can't tell what's in it.

After 2 weeks of battle paypal and ebay refunded me, and I'm only out the $10 shipping, and a good chunk of tolerance towards humanity.

[DesertOttfam]

Wow--I'm glad I did OK with the AGP GF 6800GT I got ebay just a couple weeks ago then. I HAD a GF 6800GT on my ASUS A7N8X deluxe mobo already, complete with an Arctic 5 cooler on it, but didn't keep an eye on the channels in the heatsink. Oops--it overheated and ate itself. I went on ebay and ALMOST got one for about $60 shipped, but they had seals on the thing that I couldn't get a straight answer on if they were going to cause me problems or not when I swapped that cooler on it (they had the thing warranteed, and breaking the seals of course would have voided it) then I found one for $48--free shipping. Got it, plugged it in, fired 'er up, and has been working just fine. I'm still running the factory cooler on it for now, so no heavy gaming on the machine for me...yet. The system has a LOT of carpfish on it, so I need to get into it and try and figure out just what the sam-hill it is that's slowing that machine down--Athlon XP-3200+ chip with 2Gb memory...nice machine--always has been. I want to keep it up and running even after I get my new system set-up and done, as it's a good system. I may just give it to my daughter for her own once I get the other one up. I don't know. It runs great, and there's nothing wrong with it--oh--it also has 3 HDD's. 1 on the ribbon cable, the other 2 are SATA.

[nilkilla]

i just got my a7n8x back, i'm putting a new system together from scraps for my mother-in-law...so I get the asus board back again