How we calculate used PC part prices
Every value on our market-price pages is built the same way. It is worth knowing how, because it tells you how much weight a number deserves — and where it stops being useful.
Completed sales only
Every figure comes from completed eBay sold listings for one specific component type — prices buyers actually paid, not prices sellers are asking. Asking prices are freely invented; sold prices are not. A part listed at $300 that nobody buys is not worth $300, and averaging that listing in would say it was.
Filtered by product class
Sold listings are collected on a rolling schedule and matched to a specific component type, with a product-class filter so that closely-named but different hardware never contaminates a figure. Laptop SO-DIMM sales stay out of desktop memory. ECC server memory stays out of consumer memory. This matters more than it sounds: the names are nearly identical and the prices are not.
Outliers discarded, not averaged
A mispriced bundle, or a listing that was really two graphics cards sold together, will wreck an average. Those sales are discarded rather than averaged in. What survives is the ordinary middle of the market, which is the only part of it that predicts what you will pay.
Smoothed across weeks
New readings land Saturday morning and are blended into the existing series, so one unusual week cannot swing a value on its own. Each result is stored as a dated observation, and everything on a component page is computed from that series: the current value is the most recent observation, the 30- and 90-day figures are the means of the observations inside each window, and the recorded range is the lowest and highest values ever observed.
Both averaging windows end at the most recent observation rather than at today, so a category that has not been re-scraped in a few days reports an honest window instead of quietly shrinking.
What these numbers are not
A published value is a market value for a working, complete unit in ordinary used condition. It is not our asking price for a specific unit on our shelf, and it is not an offer. A part with a dead fan, a missing bracket, or an unknown history is worth less than this, and we would rather say so than let a single number do work it can’t.
They are also averages, not guarantees. Any individual sale can land well outside the range for reasons no dataset can see — a desperate seller, a local pickup, a bundle that included something else.
How often it updates
Readings are added weekly, on Saturday. Some weeks a category barely moves and the weekly report says so; that is normal, and a flat week is information too.
Using our numbers
The series on each component page is published as a CC BY 4.0 dataset. Quote it, chart it, or cite it — a dataset nobody may quote cannot be checked, and a price nobody can check is worth very little. Attribution to Get PC Parts is all we ask.