Used Tech Buyers Guide – Tips & tricks | Budget Series
When you are building a new gaming PC, or upgrading your current one, you want the best value for your money, right? If you’ve got £500 total for a new PC, in the buying new market, that’s not going to get you too much. Maybe an AMD APU system, and maybe just squeeze an SSD in there. Not amazing though. On the used market though, that’s pretty interesting. As you’ll see in the build guide video coming out 2 weeks from when this video goes live, for as little as £200 you can get a pretty great system with some impressive overall results. It’s old, but it works..
This video though, will guide you through the key points to keep in mind when buying used parts – especially ones you can’t test before hand. I’ve also asked a seasoned used tech buyer to give me a hand here, and he’s also got a brilliant video out tonight that will be in the cards above and in the description showing you how you can clean out a used GPU and get extra performance just by cleaning the thing. Anyway, let’s get into our tips.
Let’s start off with what to look out for. First is scams and fakes, especially when it comes to graphics cards. The two main ones to look out for are; crazy cheap GPUs – RTX 2080ti’s for £40, normally using a stock image; and separately unbranded older cards, like this GTX 970 selling for pretty cheap, but has an unbranded cooler on it.
The first is the scam, you pay your £40 or whatever, and you get either nothing, a fake, or a rock in a box. Either way, don’t do it. The second is the fakes, as they are often actual working cards, but have been modified to report as whatever card you were sold, GTX 970s, GTX 1080s, whatever, but are actually much cheaper cards that won’t perform at all in games. Either of these options aren’t great, so I’d stay clear of both.
Next up, when searching for parts, especially for a full build, make sure you are buying compatible parts. If you are buying an old Dell Office PC, make sure you work out which model it is as some pretty old ones will have DDR2 RAM, not DDR3, and may have limited SATA ports for an SSD or extra hard drive storage.
Power supplies are also a big thing to keep in mind. If you’ve bought a PC whole and plan on adding to it – or you are adding to your existing PC, make sure your PSU can handle everything you want to add. The big one people forget is your graphics card, as higher end cards normally have at least one if not two PCIe power connectors that are required for the card to run at all. If you’ve got an old PSU, and especially if it doesn’t have enough connectors, get a better one. This is something that I’d actually recommend buying new since if you buy a cheap old one and it dies, it can kill your entire system.
Also, remember power supplies aren’t all made equal, so even if your PC has say a 500W unit in it, that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. Look for the brand, if it’s unbranded, it’s worth changing – also remember some of those OEM PCs like the dell office PCs use proprietary connectors inside, so you may not be able to replace it.
For making the most of your money, you can salvage parts from old systems, and sell them on afterwards – so if you need some more DDR3 RAM, you could buy an old dell office PC which has 2 2GB DDR3 sticks in it for around £40, sell the PC on for £30 to a friend or on ebay/gumtree and as if by magic, you’ve just got 4GB of RAM for £10. Bargain.
Finally, don’t forget about postage costs. It’s all well and good people like me doing build guides to just “forget” about postage costs, but especially used stuff often have postage costs attached, so include those in your totals to make sure you don’t spend too much on anything and leave you without parts you thought you could get!
Now, remember I mentioned my seasoned used tech buyer? Well, he has a few more tips I think you’ll find useful, so I’ll pass over to him!
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TechteamGB assumes no liability for damage, misuse or misunderstanding of the information contained in this video. Use this information at your own risk. TechteamGB cannot guarantee any particular result from the information contained in this video, and all information was presented as correct as of filming. TechteamGB accepts no liability for information being proven incorrect after the creation of the video, and all information should be taken as opinion and guidance, not fact. This video was not sponsored by anyone, and TechteamGB does not accept monetary – or non-monetary – benefits to alter opinions or results.
