Let's talk about used hardware! (OR building a top-tier PC on a meager budget)

2016-01-29 by vertigo

Anyone who knows me personally is sure to be familiar with my passion for searching Craigslist and eBay for good tech deals. It's a bit of an obsession. The very same people will also be the first to point out that I'm one of the worst when it comes to computer issues. Crashes, freezes, and other random hiccups are fairly common for me on nearly every system I've owned. So what's the deal, is used hardware just crap? Are you better off spending a few extra bucks to build your next gaming rig with factory fresh parts? Absolutely not, and here's why.

When you've fallen as deep down the well as I have, passing casual PC user, power user, and hobbyist and landing straight on the obsessive "enthusiast" level, you've reached a point where using the hardware to play games or what have you is no longer your primary source of motivation. Personally, the entertainment value isn't what the PC is capable of from a usability standpoint anymore - it's what I can do with the hardware itself. Overclocking, crazy builds, and gaining that extra 1000 points in 3DMark are all way more exciting to me than sitting down and playing Fallout 4 for six hours straight (not that I don't do that as well, on occasion). Really, it's directly comparable to that guy who's always working on his car - and never driving it. It's not about your commute to work, it's about making it truly yours, and tinkering, endlessly, to get everything just so - only to tear it apart the next day.

So what does this have to do with used hardware? Well, first off, I wouldn't have had the opportunities I've had to learn about technology without it. Trips to the Goodwill to pick up aging Macintosh LC IIs, tearing apart broken VCRs and salvaging parts for use in other projects, and combining boards from broken TVs to build a single working one are all things I've only been able to do because I, and my dad, both loved to tinker with things as I was growing up. It's astonishing what you can achieve with some junk, a few hours, and half a week's worth of tip money. It's invaluable experience, and learning the ins-and-outs of a variety of electronics can save hundreds, even thousands, in repair costs. It's just easier, and cheaper, when you can fix things yourself.

Alright, fair enough, you might say. But if used stuff is so great, why do you have so many problems with your PC? Well, I can assure you it's not the hardware. It's not the build. It's not Windows being crap (usually). It's just me. Currently, my main PC is built as follows:

Core i7 4770K (overclocked to 4.5ghz, craigslist, Noctua cooler from craigslist)
Radeon R9 290x (core 1100mhz, ram 1350mhz, craigslist, H50 watercooling)
Radeon R9 295x2 (core stock, ram 1500mhz, as-is from ebay)
Asus ROG Maximus Gene (refurbished)
16gb Crucial DDR3-2133 (running at 2400)
Samsung EVO 840 250gb (craigslist)
Samsung EVO 850 1tb (craigslist)
Sentey 1000w PSU (not enough wattage at all for 100% load, cheapest I could find new from Amazon)
....And miscellaneous other fans/cables, most of which were from Amazon.

Pretty legit right? Most of this was pieced together between 1 and 1.5 years ago, and I recently rebuilt it in a Bitfenix Prodigy M and added the 295x2 (A very tight fit). It's hard to calculate the true cost since some of it was bundled together, and a few parts were sold along the way, but as it stands the parts in the system cost less than $1500 all together. That's about as much as just the 295x2 was selling for a year and a half ago. And all of it works perfectly - assuming I don't push the clocks too hard, which I absolutely do (4.5 isn't 100% stable, for example). That's the source of my issues; I can't be satisfied with just using the machine stock, or settling for an "okay" overclock. I've got to tinker with it, I've got to change things. I've got to spend hours playing with BIOS settings to see if I can shave a second off my boot time. And because I see my computer as a never ending working in progress, just like Catserver, I'm okay with the occasional hiccup. When problems do occur I often know just how to correct them, because I know just what caused them due to the time I've spent becoming familiar with the system. Finally, I would never have been able to afford a PC like this without buying most of the parts used, and because of that effort I've achieved a pretty insane price/performance ratio, which itself is something to be proud of.

I guess this brings me back to my main point. Used hardware - is it worth the effort? Is it worth the savings? Absolutely, but you've got to have a passion for it, and you've got to have patience. Buying a new PC all at once from Newegg can be nice, but at the end of the day you'd be better served by saving the money wherever you can and putting into into what matters most. Sometimes you might strike out, maybe that GPU that seemed too good to be true was bad after all, but it's all part of the experience. If you're willing to put in the time to learn the details of overclocking, or trolling used sites for deals, you can end up with a truly fantastic machine - and learn a bit more than you would have otherwise on the way.

ALSO: Check out the Scrapyard Wars series from LinusTechTips if you want some more examples of this. Even with exorbitant Canadian hardware prices it's astounding what they can build on a small budget, which furthers my point. You don't have to have a lot of cash to build an awesome system!
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