Sanity check, price on completion of a used rig to sell. Your thoughts welcome

[punkncat]

Back in Feb I bought out the NOS and parts that a friend of mine who closed his PC business back in 17 or so had left. All of the desirable stuff went pretty quickly on Marketplace where I have been selling or trading the hardware. I recouped my initial investment, got probably a bit too confident about the items selling, and find myself indecisive about what I want to do next.

One of the systems I thought was standard turned out to be a proprietary board that needed this special front panel header for things like analog sound to work, and front side case USB. I ended up going down a rabbit hole on that one and even listing it for just a few $ above what I have invested is getting zero interest. I allowed a bit of tunnel vision to get the best of me and now I am in a position where I probably will not break even on the haul. I found a use case for this particular PC and it does a nice job in that spot and even with spending too much it is an excellent price point for a used PC on my end.

I have most of the parts for one more build to come out of this. It is a full ATX ASRock Fatality motherboard, one of the K4 gaming, I want to say B150? (I am not looking at it). I picked up a cheap i5 7600 for it, got a cooler in trade, had some RAM that is faster than this mobo can XMP to, and an R5 graphics card that is around the same ballpark as a 1050 or so. I would need a case and a power supply to put this rig the rest of the way together and would be in it for ~$120. As of right now I have $30 invested on the CPU that I have no other use case for. Given the previous experience I am bit reluctant to purchase more parts. I am looking at a sub $60 Morovol case that I have no experience with, and price wise would pretty much have to go with one of the Thermaltake house fire models.

I enjoy doing builds, so if I consider this from an entertainment point of view it may be worth it just to build it for the something to do. Selling it given the age and so on will probably result in my being right on top of the actual parts cost, likely no real profit from it. My SO will probably kill me if another PC appears next to something in the house, lol. I have had terrible luck with CPU/mobo combo and just not sure it would move like that in the way the market here near Atlanta is being right now. Even at a low price, with two MicroCenters nearby and the super competitive used market this is a business model that one way or the other I am going to abandon competing in hinging on this build.

I guess to get to the "opinion" part of this. Would you spend around $120 bucks, your time and effort, to build up a virtually obsolete system that may not sell for just a few dollars more than that?

 

[Ralston18]

I would not spend the money. System could just suddenly fail in some manner.

Per Mr. Murphy it will run fine until the new parts are installed. Then "poof".

Maybe just set the system up as a simple NAS and at least have the system doing something.

Have other backups in place - just in case.....

You may be able, if and as necessary, take parts out as a means to test and diagnose other systems. Likely limited but still an option.

Sooner or later the system will get to the point where further use in any manner is no longer, helpful, productive, or viable.

Salvage what you can and responsibly recycle the rest.

Just my thoughts.

 

[Eximo]

Maybe not for a 7th gen. Just not going to be relevant much longer and competing with all the used skylake and kabylake office PCs out there is going to be tricky.

Maybe just donate the parts to a local charity shop. Not sure about that area, but there are a few around here where you can donate parts or even your time. They give away computers for free to anyone that fills out a simple form. Mostly students and low income families that end up getting them.

A lot of local businesses dump their older equipment on them as a write off. They refurbish, repair, rebuild whatever they can. Wipe the OS and put on a licensed copy of Windows that they get donated from Microsoft. Anything they can't get working gets put in a shipping container. When it is full it gets hauled off to an electronics recycling plant in Chicago.

 

[punkncat]

I just wished to follow on that I have ended up with all of the 7th gen stuff sold, some 6th gen, and also a 1st gen i5 mobo/CPU/RAM combo. I have left the A88X (IIRC) legacy AMD build, and I opted to keep the one with the wonky front panel issues. I ended up cobbling together the last system in a case that was not only the lowest price ATX case I could find, but which gathered more interest than all but one system I traded/sold. I was amazed that it would be so popular.

All in all, if I consider everything but the one I kept I came out good on this situation, but it was close. If I consider the system I kept then I am probably in the hole sub $100. I have a legacy system, some RAM, a butt-ton of fans...so I think it was all pretty much a wash. It was a great learning experience so there is that. Unless I can happen across another lot like that I cannot see this aspect of it being a sustainable business model. It was a lot of fun, so there is that.

 

[Eximo]

Pretty sure I lost money the last time I sold hardware. Especially, if I paid myself for the time it took.

 

[stonecarver]

It really must come down to a lot on location. I spent a short time back east. Tennessee , Illinois, and Arkansas visiting family and and while there I did some local surfing craigslist and offerup and nothing seemed to sell or move.

Out here in California if you see it posted you better jump as I have seen even the most crappiest old parts sell.

And here is the only place I know that stuff sells, broken, dirty, missing parts. It all gets bought.

And were also guiding people right here on Tom's if it's not new and current it's no good.

You have Mr Joe or Maryjane show up asking a question where they have older parts and end up with a new build list to ditch there old parts. Some are justified nudges to get people to ditch there older aged PC's but some just need a small fix but still sent away , you need a new system.

Times that by 100's of million people who read this forum and the general outlook is old parts =bad.

So yes older parts are getting harder to be sold and used for a cheap gaming rig.

There is one thing I have seen people do on offerup is post there parts in California but are back east with shipping through offerup.

 

[Eximo]

For me it was the shipping. I got very few offers without shipping included. People are looking for deals, and new parts often have free shipping, so the price difference has to be really there for it to make sense.

Not to mention that right now there are piles of quad cores from 14nm+++++ era. They are all basically the same and Ryzen wasn't as competitive, except in core count. When Intel and AMD started increasing core counts and cache, the CPUs just got that much faster. So while I can get a cheap i7 quad core, I can also get a cheap i3 that does the same job and then some on a per core basis.

$450 for an i5-8400 with RX580. $500 for a similar machine with a GTX1070.

Or all new parts that are faster for $550

Shoutout to the 13100F right now, quite the price. 6650XT is slightly suspiciously priced, but a regular RX6600 is an option, or even a 3060 6GB with a cheaper PSU (Sad there aren't many small PSUs anymore)

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i3-13100F 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Processor ($87.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock B760M-H/M.2 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($89.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Patriot Viper Venom 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR5-5200 CL36 Memory ($61.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: TEAMGROUP MP33 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($57.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: XFX Speedster SWFT 210 Core Radeon RX 6650 XT 8 GB Video Card ($159.00 @ Amazon)
Case: Cooler Master MasterBox Q300L MicroATX Mini Tower Case ($39.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 600 W 80+ Gold Certified ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $556.94
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-06-20 15:44 EDT-0400

 

[punkncat]

That last system ended up being the B350 (250?) K4 Gaming with a 7600, 32MB of RAM (8x4), an R7 graphics solution, an old Gen 3 M.2 that I stepped down from my own work rig (replaced that with a Gen 4 and capable CPU), a 2.5" Samsung SSD, el cheapo 600W Thermaltake Smart, and the Moroval case with LED. This thing got WAY more comms than all but one of the items I sold. Ended up getting $220 out of what my cost was probably ~$130-ish. I didn't actually count part of the hardware since it had been around for a bit.

Anyway, it ended up being a good solution for the buyer and actually got me closer to being in the black. I would have to go back and audit but even with keeping one of the rigs (as mentioned above) because I went too deep into it, I feel like I pretty much zero'ed out.

As to my own time, that really is another story. I enjoy doing stuff like this and it also kept my mind busy on something other than the ongoing family issue, so to me it was a great distraction.

I am wrestling with myself as to whether I want to try one more system since I have some RAM, a 10105 i3, and a few other sundry parts around that I wouldn't have issue parting with. I may sit on that and consider for a bit.