Last evening I got a note from ebay stating that the buyer of the motherboard I recently sold wants a refund because it doesn’t work… The note the buyer included stated that he can’t get one bank of ram to register and the VGA port doesn’t work. And, ultimately, because the ad didn’t mention the VGA didn’t work he wants his money back.
Ebay’s rules specify that the ad has to be in error or different from the product delivered to trigger a refund, which is the reason for that last part…
I immediately sent him a note explaining that the Supermicro X12SPA-TF is a very advanced board (which is why they cost $700) and that he would have to reference the PDF on the Supermicro website for ram installation.
Additionally, both my written ad and the Supermicro website I referenced in the ad mention that the onboard VGA is reserved for IPMI and is not a CPU output.
I then sent a second note attempting to help him set up the board, sight unseen, from another state, over ebay’s messaging system…
I mentioned that I just remembered that I had disabled the onboard VGA via the jumper for that purpose (JPG1) and asked him to check that the jumper was on pins 1 and 2 – and even explained where said jumper is on the board.
This is in the manual by the way.
Then I thought about his ram issue a bit; this board uses three 8-pin 12V CPU power connectors; one for PCIe power, and one each for each hemisphere of the CPU which references one bank of ram… JPWR1, 3, and 4 are all required for the board to operate, and there are very few boards that use two CPU power connections, let alone three, so he may not even have a PSU that will support it…
Either way, I’m guessing he missed one of the 8-pins.
So, now I wait.
I read up a bit on ebay’s arbitration process and it sounds like if this guy just doesn’t want to RTFM the default is for ebay to give him a refund and bill me for it. So there is a very real chance that the $700 motherboard I sold for $600 and after fees and shipping netted $500 for, will actually cost me about a hundred bucks and quite possibly a motherboard…
Ebay, of course, makes money on the ordeal either way. So there’s no real vested interest in any of this from their end of things.
Live and learn I guess. I just wish the classes didn’t cost so much.
Listening to "Broken Wings" by Mr. Mister