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. Unsold listings 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.

eBay does not publish the agreed price when a seller accepts a Best Offer. Those sales count at the listed price, which is the most the buyer can have paid, so a figure can sit slightly above what was really paid.

Which sales count

A sale counts toward a part only if it is one used, 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.
• Used. Sales eBay marks as brand new, opened but never used, or parts only are excluded, even when the title does not say so. Refurbished stock counts as used. Sales stored before November 2026 may have no condition on record, and those are judged by their title.
• 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.

Reading the sale strip

Every part page draws the sales behind its Target Price on a £ scale, one tick per sale, so you can see how tightly they bunch rather than taking one figure on trust. The same marks, without the individual ticks, appear beside each part in the category lists as a bar from its lowest to its highest sale, each scaled to that part’s own sales, with the median as a dot.

The middle half of sales (the 25th to 75th percentile) is a better guide to where a listing will land than the single figure. It is shaded only from 4 sales up, since quartiles of fewer sales describe nothing. “Check a listing” on a part page places a price you type against the same sales and says how many it undercuts or exceeds.

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.

Whole PC values

A complete PC usually sells for more than the sum of the parts PC Atlas can price, because the sum leaves out the motherboard, case or cooler when they have no price. So the PC value checker leads with what complete PCs actually sold for.

The figure is the median of UK sales of whole desktops from the last 90 days, postage included, after the same outlier removal as a Target Price. It uses PCs with the same processor and graphics card where 3 or more sold, and otherwise PCs with the same graphics card, and the page says which. Below 3 sales there is no figure. Laptops, faulty PCs, new stock, PCs with no graphics card and PCs sold with a monitor or desk are left out, and one PC relisted several times on a day counts once. New stock means a title that says so or eBay’s own condition, and a shop’s new build can still count until its condition is on record.

In a test on 1,979 of these sales in October 2026, each sale was hidden and valued from the others. The typical error was 11.7% from the same processor and graphics card, 16.0% from the same graphics card, and 35.3% from the sum of the parts. RAM, storage, the case and condition still move a real sale, so treat the figure as what PCs like yours fetched, not a quote. The sum of the parts is shown separately, with what it leaves out, and the two are never combined.

New prices

The cheapest new price comes from UK retailer listings, with the date it was checked, and is shown for context only. Where a retailer does not say whether an item is in stock, the price is called “listed”. 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