Where do you find used mainboards?

Framework Laptop 13
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I’ve been trying to find the cheapest cost of entry into Framework-land, and the sticking point seems to be the mainboard. The new DIY is pretty steep and there are no 11th gen i5 refurbs available (and haven’t been for a while). (There are some i7 refurbs currently, but they seem grossly overpriced – for $20 you can get an all new, much faster DIY with a 12th-gen CPU.)

If you ignore that there are no batteries or trackpads available now and pretend it’ll happen soon, you could do a “true DIY” for a decent price… if you didn’t have to shell out $350 for a prev gen i5 mainboard.

I’d hoped I’d see a number of first gen Framework buyers selling mainboards for reasonable prices as they bought Intel 12th gen replacements, but, um, don’t see any here or on eBay.

You can’t all be putting the old mobos into printed external cases, can you?!

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I would love to see a second hand marketplace on the site where we can sell our last-gen mobo’s! :orange_heart:

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Yeah, since they called it “Marketplace” instead of “Store” I always assumed that some kind of 3rd party sales were somewhere in the pipeline … and hopefully not just 3rd party retailers but individuals. Was there anything ever actually said about this by Framework or is reading into the name the only thing we’ve got to pin our hopes on?

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I just upgraded to 12th Gen MB and have a the old one to sell. Hit me up if you’re interested.

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@nrp any plans to open up the marketplace to 3rd party sellers?

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Sincere thanks for the offer. I scored a refurb 11th gen i5 at $600, which seemed like a fair price of entry. But I’m still a little surprised that there’s not a way to trade down. Hopefully up by next year if I can upgrade to 13th gen. :wink:

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