Price guide on used desktops

irongeek2012 said:
http://www.gadgetvalue.com/
Click to expand...

Nice link, states my old Emachines ET 1331G-03w is worth over $300 in today's market. Not sure its right. Perhaps if I included the 5770 1GB and decent PSU.


@ holyfather,

The first system was good, just make sure they detail all the specs on the advertisement for the PC. That way you can do some research to see if/how you could upgrade it later.

Since you said you've built them before, but are uncomfortable with building one, I'm sure you would be fine with upgrading one later on. Keep at it, you can find some great deals on Ebay.
 
That site showed higher value that what I put into on both my PCs. Also it does not take into consideration the quality components but it assumes to.
 
Hey guys,

Me again...

Okay, I've bagged a PC for £180. Could you guys let me know if you think I've paid a fair price for it? Here is the spec:

Dell XPS 720
  • Quad core Q6600 2.4Ghz
  • 4GB RAM
  • 2x500GB hard drive set up in raid 0 for performance
  • NVDIA Geforce 8800GTX 768MB graphics
  • Optical drive DVD+RW
  • Comes with vista/recovery CD and power lead

Cheers guys!
 
Not too bad but I wouldn't have paid £180 for a Q6600 and an 8800 GTX.

Hardware gets old and loses value. That hardware is at least 5 years old now, maybe coming up to 6 years. A better price would have been around the £100 mark.

Just to clear things up, we have Stone computers at school. They're OK but obviously intended as cheap 'bulk buys' for educational institutions I think.
 
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I can definitely say this is my first and last bidding experience on eBay - there are far too many people that aren't really serious on there and don't fully intend to follow through with the purchase making the final bid sky-rocket!

Also, a lot of shafters on there too!

'Buy it now' may be a wiser choice...
 
I wouldn't worry too much about how much you paid. I've put stuff up on eBay and it's sold for way more than it's worth. Sold an i5 760 with an ASUS P7P55D-E and 8GB of DDR3 for close to £200 once haha. :P

You could have paid far, far more.
 
Everything I've purchased on Ebay has always been buy it now options with free shipping. I generally only purchase from those who have 1,000 plus high star rating. I did purchase GTA IV from some kid in NYC for $5, free shipping, when I lost my other copy.

I normally know what I'm after ahead of time and may look around on ebay for months on end before finally making the purchase once I find a seller and price that meets or exceeds my high standards of satisfaction. I've been shopping around for four months for the stock pioneer sub for my 05 Cobalt. Not found any in a good enough condition yet, since mine was stolen. :(

From what I've heard in the past, the Q6600 CPU's were good, and decent when overclocking. A newer GPU would help you out if your looking to play modern games though. doesn't have to be high-end either.
 
Hey Currency,

I think that's the best way forward - don't buy anything until you are sure of the value and don't get involved in the bidding war game.

I think someone I was competing with in this case was truly trying to play the system as I studied the bidding history. Seems his cunning plan was to enter a bid of £1000 to outbid me and get an idea of my maximum bid and then, once he established that, withdrew the bid (eBay gives you one chance to do this) and in the final few seconds tried to some method to 'snipe' a winning bid at a slightly more realistic amount.

I looked at his bidding history and this character had been doing this for a while - he had 161 withdrawn bids in the last 3 months! Turns out I won by 50 pence though.

I intend to turn the PC into a project and upgrade various components in due course (I won't be using eBay and buying them used). Turning out an expensive project though!
 
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