Yeah I've certainly had that happen too. Still seemed to work fine though, so may not be anything to worry much about.

I also received one CPU in a styrofoam. It still works fine.

I recieved a Intel DX4-100 squashed inside a plastic flimsy cd case and then shoved in an envelope. Opened it up to find several pins bent pretty badly. Had to carefully bend them all back in place. Just hoping it works as I haven't tested it yet.

I understand it's slightly more expensive to send items in small boxes but sellers seriously need to think about how "they" would like an item packed if they were to purchase an item. So far in the last few months I've recieved 2 damaged CD-ROM drives, a damaged hard drive, a squashed pc speaker and lastly the DX4. All sent in padded envelopes! Eff me!

The worst I've seen was a full AT sized motherboard that I received from Germany in a thin padded envelope. There were NOTHING else to protect it than the envelope itself. The envelope had been teared by the sharp edges of the board so some parts was actually hanging outside the envelope completely unprotected. Some of the reset/turbo/LED pins were bent, but miraculously the board worked fine including the RAM and CPU that was attached.

borgie83, Why would you buy a PC speaker over ebay?

Unfortunately I've also experienced some of the same stuff - MB hanging out of an envelope (not even padded), CPU in a CD case with bent pins. In both cases they worked fine after some TLC 😀 I find that if you win an eBay auction for less than the seller expected sometimes packaging suffers as a result.

@vetz, Geez! A motherboard in an envelope. Now that's really bad!

@RacoonRider, it was a replacement for a 486 I picked up for cheap. The original owner had removed the pc speaker for some unknown reason. Was going to just wire it up from the motherboard header onto the sound card but then thought, let's just keep it original.

I once received a motherboard wrapped in plastic. When I unwrapped it, it was ESD partytime -_-
Never got around to test that motherboard though, I just didn't feel like bothering anymore 🤣...oh well

Ho hum I had that too. Motherboard [486 VLB] with graphics card, NIC and FDD/HDD controller, shoved into a box with broken up polystyrene and bits of polythene, no antistatic anywhere, It worked, sometimes, but had a lot of random errors other times. But with old gear, who knows whether the packaging had caused any issues. Annoyingly it came from a seller with 24,000 feedbacks, 99+% feedback...

Worst experience i had was when the seller did not pack the item but shipped it only in its original box and the post office put tape all over the box ruining it fully.

I once sorted through a large box of CPUs with bent pins, and quite surprisingly the vast majority of them proved to be entirely useable once I managed to get them into a socket again. (This was unfortunately a waste of time, as no one seems interested in buying these CPUs except possibly as scrap.)

Previously it has been suggested that styrofoam will be fine if you cover it in foil first.

I got this CPU working:

Don't feel bad. I'd rather have a CPU shipped in styrofoam than have someone just drop it in a plain, white envelope with a first class stamp and no protection at all. (And yes, I've had that happen to me before).

Well I made worse f@#ked up cpus myself. I got a dozen the other week, fumbled with the tray and the whole lot fell on the floor hard. Bent pins everywhere, so bad I don't want to look at them 🤣

vetz wrote:

The worst I've seen was a full AT sized motherboard that I received from Germany in a thin padded envelope. There were NOTHING else to protect it than the envelope itself. The envelope had been teared by the sharp edges of the board so some parts was actually hanging outside the envelope completely unprotected. Some of the reset/turbo/LED pins were bent, but miraculously the board worked fine including the RAM and CPU that was attached.

'Funnily' enough, exact same thing happened to me, although it was ATX and sent from Italy, of all places.... (this was early in my ebay career, wondered why the shipping cost was so cheap... 🤣 )

And, in this case(or should I say, envelope), the board pcb itself had been bent sharply skyhigh almost 90 degrees(imagine the G-force needed to achieve this!) on 1 corner - but nothing useful was located there, and the board actually worked/works! 😲

After that, I have always pestered sellers (with varying luck + some backfires) to explain how they plan to pack/protect certain types of items.

And then there was this dude who shipped a collectable old PC game by putting stamps and address label directly on the game retail box and mailing it....(!)

.

I had the same thing happen with my yamaha db50xg. Seller stuck all the labels to the box and then posted it. Absolutely spewing as when I tried to remove the labels I could see it starting to tear so I stopped. Box is useless now.

Shit thing about buying from overseas is that if something goes wrong, it's almost not worth returning it as the shipping costs are always too high to justify it.

there are anti-static styrofoam blocks, just so you know

I once got one in nothing but an envelope.

Thankfully it's an LGA so, no pins to break, but I was still pissed.