Quote:
Originally Posted by eXeler0
Well.. Now even ppl in the Amiga community (as opposed to ebay vultures) are asking for €350 for a rev6 060 (which really must be the worst performance /dollar for a CPU ever :-) ) And even old XC early revs have become scarce and expensive..
Problem is of course, even noble Amigans now wont (shouldnt!) sell for decent prices because then vultures will buy them cheap and shamelessly resell at double the price.. so now the cat is out of the bag so to speak..
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There were only a few streams of cpus in to the community in the first place. Chucky's dried up afaik, tbtorro probably has some source and Stachu has a source. People also bought cpus commonly from funkward tech which got outed from a blog and bought empty outside Ebay.
Basically people who for some reason did not buy there cpus at that point and were planning to get a cheap new 060 card have only theirselves to blame to be honest. When Chucky still was selling the cpus frequently he referred to them as unobtanium. When that blog post came out there were like 300 cpus available from funkward tech and it took a month or two for someone to buy the remainder of their stock outside ebay.
Anyway now it seems stachu is the only one selling cpus and even he only has rev5s for sale. The other cpus available are either from their personal stock that are only sold because of the demand or they are from the available old stock sources that are pricey. Stachu doesn't seem to be on a mission to drive the prices down and all the other cpus coming in are from these expensive NOS sources, which pretty much mean that these chips set the price ceiling of the community. It's also easy to see that the community shot itself in the foot with the Heisener frenzy and all it's fall out. It was clear to see that they were dug out from Alibaba and now every vlogger and their friends just started flooding the same sellers with RFQs which resulted in the current situation where it's cheaper to get 060s from the States than from China. Now, I hope that the most desperate people with a lot of money have made their purchases and since no new cards have actually been released this year that the ripples might calm a bit and lead to better prices from China but I would imagine it takes more than a couple of months to have an effect. Still a TF at ~200+350 or a Warp at 500+350 is a good thing for the community as you still would get better cards than available now for a lesser price. With an LC you could get the TF also to compete with the 030 cards which would be a very welcome development.
There have been some sources available even after the Heisener thing and it would be easiest if someone in the community would just make a plunge and buy the cards when they become available but when the prices are in an upward curve it's hard to sell yourself the idea of buying near the new market top let alone finance for it. I think the American ebay seller had about 60 cpus available for 200usd before an OEM purchased most of the stock. I tried to get TF people to buy. There were 100ish(?) rev5s available from funkward tech at about the same time for 100eur each and were probably available for two thirds of that. It's frustrating but I'm sure that the builders don't feel like investing thousands or tens of thousands of euros for cpus is what they want to put their money and time in.
I guess we can only hope that there will be a new or a renewed steady source of used 060 cpus but there's already a lot of connected people who have done it already working on it and there's no results to show yet. If vampires sell at thousands then it's fair to believe that there would be a demand for thousands of 060s should the cards be available. Perhaps some of that can be alleviated through LC cpus but since (as far as I understand) most of the used chips coming to the market are either rev6 or rev5 and the speed of them being available is withering I can't really see rev6 cpus being available under 200 eur again.