so you guys seem to love scrapyard Wars and don't worry we'll revisit that
concept soon enough but for now we've got a fun way to address some critical
feedback from our viewers about the choice to use secondhand components for
our builds now you can see the original series and the machines that Linus and I
constructed in the links here and here but while the showdown between Linus's
kind of allrounder q6600 platform and my
r9290 with a tin can around it was interesting it left out the option that
many of you pointed out which was new stuff now in our minds we bought used to
gain an advantage in price per performance over new in box but without
actually testing it how do we know how much of an advantage we actually gained
let's find out stay subscribed to lus Tech tips for more Adventures like
this of course there's h80i GT and h100i
GTX allinone liquid coolers improve both the appearance and cooling of your PC
click now to learn more so how do we compare our used machines to something
new well we could give ourselves a fixed budget to put together a new $300
machine for comparison but I'm pretty sure a lot of you would cry foul because
$300 isn't really enough for new parts and if we did this spec ourselves then
we could potentially rig it so we decided on a $400 US budget which
allowed lonus and I to combine our machines with the best parts of each and
challenge The Forum to spec out a rig with brand new pieces to to try and put
it in its place they had to factor in stuff like shipping and taxes into their
price but were allowed to shop from anywhere in the US or Canada this gave
them actually a number of advantages they were able to use a $400 budget
instead of 380 which ours totaled and that was in US funds instead of Canadian
which makes it a lot more valuable currently and lastly they were able to
shop from any Us stores which gave them a generally lower markup than Canadian
stores just in case then we took to Twitter to pull more people in and had
people vote on the users submitted builds it was a fairly close battle
between members Lord gabin and Sauron but in the end Lord gabin won with over
45 votes lonus and I actually didn't think that Lord gav's build was the
strongest submission and ended up picking our own editor Choice Community
build to compete with and we went with st Mapes that leaves us with the lus of
L Thrift machine 4,000 one corner
rocking a Core 2 quad q6600 eight gigs of ddr2 RAM a 500 wat
power supply and an r9290 with a tj4 an
artic cooling CPU Cooler with a stock cooler strapped to it in the other
Corner we've got Lord gab Shrine with an A6 6400k four GS of RAM a 400 W power
supply and a st92 80 and in the third
Corner we got all these kinds of triangles going on we got Str strr M
Prometheus featuring an X4 860 6 gigs of
RAM a 480 wat powerly and another
r9280 I actually don't have an r9280 so
we upgraded both the Prometheus and the shrine to an r9280x and just decided to
make it a little bit more fair we just didn't an overlock it there's three main
performance determining Parts here we have the CPU the GPU and the RAM all
these machines have their CPUs overclocked to varying degrees but only
the GPU of the thrift machine 4000 is actually overclocked
for CPU the thrift machine 4000 and Prometheus are sitting on quad cores but
the q6600 is running a little slower at 3.2 GHz compared to the 4 GHz of the X4
860k also don't forget they run a completely different architectures the
big outlier here is Lord gabin Shrine with a dual core A6 6400k running a lot
faster at 4.4 GHz but remember two cores
instead of four for GPU things are much more similar both being submitted with
an r9280 and resulting with an r9280x running at the same speed while the
thrift machine 4000 is sporting an r9290 running at about 1,000 MHz RAM gets
interesting again though check out this video to see what Linus's talks about
the differences between DDR3 and ddr4 but will going all the way down to ddr2
cause our Thrift machine 4000 any issues or will its greater capacity and proper
dual Channel operation compared to the prometheus's 6 gigs and the shrine's 4
gigs be worth it in the end time to find out now as we go through
the results here some of you will undoubtedly point out on the Forum that
this isn't the whole equation and in conclusion while our Thrift machine 4000
may be doing quite well in the performance results there are many
potential issues when buying used hygiene for example lonus had to spend a
fair amount of time getting his machine to an acceptable level of cleanliness
and missing accessories again lus had to hunt through boxes for more than a
couple of missing things while building his PC something that may not be an
issue for the techies out there but folks who don't have bins of spare parts
of hardware and whatnot this may be a showstopping issue for you while you
wait for parts and of course used parts can come bruised or even damaged for
example again Linus's case came with some scratched parts and missing a foot
maybe not a huge deal in the end but not great then you have even more issues
seller may ship you a DOA component or straight up scam you if you aren't
careful enough and or if you're just unlucky and even then some things come
with a 2 we warranty as they sometimes do with eBay but who knows if they'll
even be properly honored in the end and while the promises of a lifetime
warranty for BFG Tech customers who bought their cards new probably stung at
least if you buy from a reputable retailer your butt is probably covered
even if a manufacturer does go out of business it's hard to get that kind of
protection shopping secondhand and the pain train keeps on coming sort of Parts
longevity is actually not a clear win either way a lot of people people are
going to point at the use machines here and say well they'll die sooner they'll
have some problem with them and they're right to some degree but don't forget
many of the new machines speed out here on the Forum were using terrible power
supplies that we would generously describe as super sketchy and while both
the used machines we're using well-built continuous power an tech power supplies
so in final conclusion the best strategy may be to buy some things new and some
things used and it's just going to come down to your risk tolerance we would
recommend getting your case new so that it's in pristine condition and comes
with all of its accessories and whatnot and your storage new since losing data
sucks so freaking much and it's
comfortable knowing that as long as you didn't drop your hard drive it probably
hasn't been dropped CPU and RAM can probably be bought used as they're very
rarely fail and RAM often has no questions asked lifetime warranty but
other things can Lar rely on how good of a deal you can get things like
motherboard or video card will depend heavily on their current condition and
warranty coverage status as well let me know what you guys think is a good
strategy and speaking of good strategies I will be attending pxs East and
surprise surprise our friends from Intel will be as well actually that's not much
of a surprise but anyways they usually have some pretty sweet Community
giveaways to go along with their presents and PX East is no different
this year they'll be hosting a #y Intel Build contest with which is focused on
sharing your favorite Intel based PC build whether it's one you've done
yourself or one you see on the showl at PAX East you can enter whether you're
attending the show or not it doesn't really matter just submit a picture of
your favorite Intel-based build on Vine Twitter or Instagram with the hashy
Intel build and you're entered a into a chance to win one of three Intel Core i7
processors you can enter as many times as you want and you can showcase as many
different systems as you want just make sure that use the hashtag with each
entry the contest has already started and it closes on March 13th so get your
entries in now all right guys don't forget to comment on the Forum or I
guess in the comments down below what kind of build you guys liked more and if
you guys think buying new or used for different parts is a good idea also a
shout out to the kind of Build contest thing in the builds new builds and
planning section of the Forum I it's it's a pinned at the top and they
constantly have different contests going on for different people specking out different systems running this was
really fun but they run that all the time and that's a really cool community
so be sure to check that out also while you're on the Forum if you click the
support us Link in the top right hand corner it can bring you to a really cool
page where you can see all of our sponsors and stuff and maybe even change
your Amazon links so that we get a small Kickback whenever you buy things that
helps out a ton in the in the description below the video you'll be
able to see a shirt link where you'll buy things not based on Star Wars and uh
yeah anyways don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already like the video
dislike the video depending on if you're a star treky or Star Wars kind of person
this is a shirt that you can buy from lus Tech tips that Linus just took off
he's half naked off screen right now anyways guys thanks for watching I'll
see you next time