I found a seller on eBay. He has been auctioning R9 290s and they have been selling for around 150-300ish. It just seems too good to be true. I'm afraid it might be stolen goods. He has 17+ positives and 0 negatives.
I picked up 2 used 290's on ebay when all the coin miners were dumping them for cheap. Both of them still run great, but as with pretty much everything, your mileage may vary.
It's risky, but ebay almost always sides with the customer in a dispute. In most cases, the worst you can expect is some lost time and some disappointment. Just make sure that the listing is crystal clear, so you don't end up with a $200 picture of a GPU.
I would stay away personally, but not because of the price, the R9 290 ASUS DCU2 is horribly cooled, the cooler is taken off the nvidia equiv instead of being redesigned and the temps with these cards is almost always 85-95c
I once bought an SSD. The seller had sold like 60 so I thought sure why not. Later I got an email from eBay saying the seller was a fraud so me and everyone else who had bought one got their money back.
=/ Just make sure you have alot of airflow, since those DCU 290's run VERY hot and sometimes can throttle if not enough airflow. I had one that I had to take the cooler off of and ghetto watercool it with a x41 cooler, after that it worked great and ran monster cool!
Pay with paypal and you'll have buyer protection. If items are dodgy you make a claim, you get your money back seller gets a bollocking. If its payment by direct deposit you will have a harder time apart from negative feedback. My guess is that they are RMA returns of a store. With the impending release of the 3xx series they gotta move em somehow. Either that or the seller is lying and they're miners. ~ That quantity anyway...
I just bought an XFX R9 280X from a seller on ebay. I'll share my total experience when it comes it.
So far, I have to admit, I don't blame you for being wary. Even though I bought via Paypal, I'm still really worried that I just threw $140 into a blender. :\
I once bought a cheap Chinese timer relay off Ebay :P I was a little worried I was just throwing $5 out the window but sure enough it got here and is functional to this day