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G4 533MHz ZIF - $20

I have a full shoebox (including the pin-protecting foam) of ZIF cards from this seller. Not one dud, so far. He is wise to make the disclaimer if he doesn't test them, but that doesn't necessarily presage that the cards come from troubled sources.

de

 
Heh, I hope you're all aware of how computers are recycled in China. We may be contributing to the poor working conditions those people suffer by buying from this guy.

(sorry, just feeling a slight pang of guilt of a minute. I'll try not to let it happen again.)

 
At this remove from the seller, anything that we think or write about his enterprise is otiose. 'We' could be another eBay one-man show. Even if he pulls and cleans the ZIFs himself to save on labour costs, he cannot, at his prices, be considered to be a profiteer. Take the careful packaging and flat-rate postage into account, and his margins are vanishingly slim by Western standards.

de

 
Heh, I hope you're all aware of how computers are recycled in China.
You do know China has state of the art industrial factories for crunching up circuit board for metal recovery don't you?

 
I look at that feller's site every day, the most recent look being at about 0730 today, and damme if he didn't list just afterwards.
Ah. I've signed up for email notification when he lists new items. He lists regularly, but these are the first Mac CPUs in a while.

You can also type in stores.ebay.com/IC-China - this only works if you know the exact name of the store. Adding your country code will list the prices in your currency.

Strange how his '040s are more expensive than the G3s and G4s.

 
040's are a bit harder to get these days. There's still a lot of G3 and G4 machines available for recycling. Not so much for 040 machines. There's also a bit of collectors demand at work in the price of the 040. I usually grab the 40mhz ones whenever I can.

 
... do I need to change my jumpers to use this? (450mhz G3 into a 266mhz beige G3) ...
Not if ...

... Look for the Sonnet realizations of G4 ZIF cards for the greatest stability/versatility.
No jumper-fiddling is needed, but the Sonnet Encore extension is, and it pays to look after your RAM, ROM, VRAM and AV to keep up with the processor upgrade.

de

 
They still make Amigas. They use 933mhz G4's now.
I know, I know.

A good friend of mine uses an Amiga 4000 with an '060 in it. It's his main machine and has been forever. He started on Commodore, then got an A500, an A1200 and finally the 4000 he has now.

I've been begging him to get a new Amiga so he can run more modern stuff. Having a G4 would allow him to run the MacOS emulator. Then he can have access to more modern browsers (Voyager sucks butt), more modern text editors and so on. He would also have ethernet. Ethernet would of course allow for DSL or Cable interweb access. He's on 56K right now. He would also have USB. USB and a MacOS emulator will allow him to utilize much more modern hardware and maybe even flash drives and whatnot.

He could do that now. I have one of those Zorro slot 604 CPU cards. He doesn't want to install it because he says the extensions for PPC support in OS 4 slow down the system or something. I think he's on crack, but it's his box.

What really sucks is that they aren't making any boards right now. Heck if I could get my hands on one of those G3 Amiga boards, I might have a new box and OS to tinker with. That could be loads of fun.

 
The AmigaONE XE-G4s were a complete waste of a good G4 CPU. They should have kept the cost down and stuck with G3/800s.

 
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I know, I know.
A goof friend of mine uses an Amiga 4000 with an '060 in it. It's his main machine and has been forever. He started on Commodore, then got an A500, an A1200 and finally the 4000 he has now.

I've been begging him to get a new Amiga so he can run more modern stuff. Having a G4 would allow him to run the MacOS emulator. Then he can have access to more modern browsers (Voyager sucks butt), more modern text editors and so on. He would also have ethernet. Ethernet would of course allow for DSL or Cable interweb access. He's on 56K right now. He would also have USB. USB and a MacOS emulator will allow him to utilize much more modern hardware and maybe even flash drives and whatnot.
My Amiga 4000 060 has ethernet and USB. Give the guy a break :p

In all honesty it would be a vastly greater saving of money, effort and screwing around to buy him a G4 Mac. They cost next to nothing these days and he wouldn't need anything fancy, just a G4/450 with 10.3.

It's odd you should mention it really I have a friend (actually he's the Chairman of the Amiga UG I'm the secretary of ;) ) who's exactly the same. His main machine is a towered 4000/060 with a Mediator PCI bus board in it and a 36GB SCSI disk. We *gave* him a Mac OS X machine and he still doesn't use it, the trouble is he's getting on a bit and he has problems with fatigue and bad memory so learning OS X is not something he feels he can cope with.

He could do that now. I have one of those Zorro slot 604 CPU cards. He doesn't want to install it because he says the extensions for PPC support in OS 4 slow down the system or something. I think he's on crack, but it's his box.
He's right about the PPC Support slowing the machine down, but I think he means in OS 3.x :p Frankly, unless you want to run OS 4 Classic, having an Amiga PPC card is a waste of time. It accelerates a small number of apps, and some PPC apps are slower than the 060 versions!

I haven't used OS 4 Classic on a 4000 yet (a friend of mine has a 4000/PPC and OS 4 Classic but we haven't got the two to gel yet :p ) but if it's half as fast as it is on a G3 then it'll knock his socks off :)

What really sucks is that they aren't making any boards right now. Heck if I could get my hands on one of those G3 Amiga boards, I might have a new box and OS to tinker with. That could be loads of fun.
I've played with OS 4 on a AmigaONE, I had a A1-XE G4/800 as a loner from *another* Amiga Group committee member (the Vice Chairman) and ultimately it left me wanting something more. Here I was using a computer that out-spec'd my iMac G4 and the OS felt like it was made in the stone age. It's fast as hell but ultimately so out of date it's hardly worth it. It has zero benefit over running 3.9 on a REAL Amiga.

A great number of decisions were made incorrectly with the AmigaONE, and OS 4 was chronically understaffed and received very little financial backing. There are projects underway to bring modern software to OS 4 but it's only available sporadically (either with a A1 board, or for Classic Amiga PPC) and has very few developers. Porting something like Firefox could take half a decade at the rate it's going... by which time it's already totally obsolete.

As a viable proposition for anything, Amiga has been dead since about 2004. It still carries on in the hearts and minds of enthusiasts young and old, but we are not enough to shout about or get any viable business model together. It's not helped by the fact Amiga Inc. are squandering and wasteful of the IP, and are financially incompetent, liars and also corrupt and have gone bust at least 2x.

Ahh the World of Amiga - it's so full of joy ;)

Chalk this up as thread number 2 taken over my my rambling about he sorry state of Amiga...

 
So does this seller not send out emails to confirm that the item has been shipped? Or do they wait a long time before shipping?

I haven't gotten any response from them since I won and paid for the item.

 
I received notification about five minutes ago that my parcel was mailed yesterday.

 
Yeah I finally got mine too. I was getting worried that I wouldn't receive it because my roommate got me temporarily suspended by using my account to bid up her own items. :(

 
Mine arrived at about the same time as Bunsen's. In 15 sales, ic-china has never failed to advise me about posting of an item, so you should be safe, even if further away from China.

de

 
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