Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage
151 points by speckx
by left-struck
2 subcomments
I was in a Hard Off (Japanese used electronics store) just a week ago and found 10s of 8GB DDR4 ram sticks for around 1600 yen each (something like $10 USD). Some were ecc but others looked like ram modules from office pcs or something. It was in a rural area but still I would have thought they knew about the price hike. I guess not. Anyway I didn’t buy any so idk if they were working.
by wrxd
5 subcomments
I'm all for re-using old but still perfectly usable hardware. Hopefully this will also lead to some optimisations on the software side
by xnx
2 subcomments
The upside of high prices (GPU, RAM, disk, etc.) is existing resources get better utilized.
by nobodyandproud
3 subcomments
I hung on to my 15 (?) year-old Intel motherboard, CPU, and 16 GBs of RAM; mostly because of e-waste guilt. I cannot believe this has value but here we are.
I also wish I built a new gaming rig during the summer last year.
by freetime2
3 subcomments
I have an old PC that I built that I’ve been meaning to take to Hard Off. I wonder if it would if it would be better to sell the parts individually, or as a single unit. For reference, it has a Ryzen 9 3900x, 64 GB DDR4, an RX 5700 XT graphics card, and 512 GB NVME.
Probably not worth much anymore, and I’ll probably just sell it as-is to save myself the effort of taking it apart. But Hard Off occasionally surprises me with how much they pay for a piece of old gear.
by lazylizard
0 subcomment
why do they want old ram or hard disks or vga cards? lets say i got ddr2..what use is that unless u have a core2duo?
by ekianjo
0 subcomment
They want to buy it from you for peanuts, is what is missing from the article. Softmap buy your stuff at 1/10 of the actual original value and then sells it back to people at 5-6x what they bought it for.
by ktallett
3 subcomments
I have never found Japan the home of gaming pc's anyway. It isn't quite like Seoul in that respect. I have shopped in Akibahara frequently in the last decade and noticed some PC gaming exclusive shops pop up and also go, including range of stock varying.
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