How the Target Price is worked out

The Target Price answers one question: what has this exact part sold for in the UK recently? It is built only from completed sales. Asking prices, “best offer” guide prices and retailer prices never feed into it.

Where the sales come from

Every week, completed listings on eBay UK are fetched for each part in the catalogue, through the SoldComps sold-listings service. Each sale is stored with its title, price, postage and date, whether or not it ends up counting, so the rules below can be re-applied to past sales when they change.

Only sales in pounds sterling count. Nothing is converted from another currency into a UK price.

Which sales count

A sale counts toward a part only if its title describes one working unit of exactly that model:

Exact model. Titles are matched to the longest model name they contain, so an “RTX 4070 Ti Super” never counts toward the RTX 4070 Ti, and a Ryzen 7 5800X3D never counts toward the 5800X.
Memory size. Where one model came in more than one memory size (RTX 4060 Ti 8GB and 16GB, RTX 3080 10GB and 12GB), the title must state the right one.
On its own. Gaming PCs, laptops, bundles with a CPU or motherboard, CPU and RAM combos, and job lots are excluded.
Working. Faulty, spares-or-repair, untested, “no display”, bent-pin and damaged listings are excluded.
The part itself. Empty boxes, coolers, fans, shrouds, waterblocks, backplates and support brackets “for RTX 3080” are excluded.

Generic parts

Most RAM, storage, power supply and case listings on eBay don’t name an exact model, so alongside named models (a specific Corsair kit, a specific Samsung drive) the catalogue also carries generic entries: “Generic 16GB DDR4 RAM”, “Generic 650W PSU”, “Generic 1TB SSD”, “Generic ATX Mid Tower Case”. These are matched on the facts a title states (capacity, wattage, memory generation, form factor) against real sold listings of any brand. The figure is never a blended average or a made-up number. They follow the same rules as every other part: a real median of real sales, Verified at 3 or more, and “no sales” shown honestly when there are none.

Outliers

A few sales in any month are mispriced: a card sold for a fraction of its value by mistake, or a listing whose title hides that it is broken. With five or more sales, any price outside 1.5 times the interquartile range beyond the lower or upper quartile is set aside. With three or four sales, a price is set aside if it sits far from the median by a median-absolute-deviation test. The number removed is shown on each part page.

The Target Price

The Target Price is the median of the remaining sales from the last 90 days, including the postage the buyer paid. The median is the middle sale: half sold for less, half for more. Graphics cards and processors sell in volume, so the middle of the last 90 days is stable, and one unusual sale moves it far less than it would move an average.

Part pages also show the range of the middle half of sales (the 25th to 75th percentile), which is a better guide to where a listing will land than the single figure.

Verified and Estimated

A Target Price backed by 3 or more sales in the window is marked Verified. With fewer, it is marked Estimated and should be read as a rough guide. With no sales in the window, the page says so and shows no price. PC Atlas never falls back to an older figure, a guess or a category average.

3-month moves

The move compares the median of the last 30 days with the median of 60 to 90 days ago. It is shown only when both periods have 3 or more sales. Rises and falls are shown in the same colour: used GPU and CPU prices move both ways for ordinary reasons such as new launches and stock levels, and neither direction is good or bad in itself.

New prices

The cheapest in-stock new price comes from UK retailer product feeds and is shown for context only. It is never blended into the Target Price. Links to retailers and to eBay may earn PC Atlas a commission, which has no effect on any figure on the site.

Specifications

Specifications are reference-design figures. Graphics card board power is total board power; processor power is AMD’s default TDP or Intel’s processor base power. Factory-overclocked partner cards can draw more.

Graphics card prices · Processor prices · Motherboard prices · RAM prices · Power supply prices · Storage prices · Case prices