BEST Value PC Challenge - Scrapyard Wars Season 3 - Episode 1
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,292 words · ~16 min read
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so as you can see we got our million dollar plaque billion million subscriber plaque and then we
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got our multiple hundred thousand well some things but i don't think it's
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really gold but my actual my favorite lot of money it does and then the silver
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ones too like if that's all solid that's quite a bit of money and then so welcome
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to scrapyard wars you guys might be wondering
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what's up with all the mad stacks well this crapyard wars is going to be a
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little bit different we are going to build a computer we are going to build a
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good value computer but there is no set
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budget the challenge today with our special guest austin evans is to build
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the best bang for the buck computer we'll be using five different benchmarks
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tomb raider far cry 4 cinebench pc mark and 3dmark firestrike to determine who
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has gotten the most possible value for
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their money
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all right friends boom care package from brand d brand
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skinned oh yes sirs
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so we got an s6 edge plus
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we got a note 5 and we got yes my friends
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macbook airs pearl
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it's what i always wanted
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okay so these are the tools
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that we'll be using to do all of our scrap yard
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warring thanks to dbrand let's see uh i think my macbook air is supposed to be
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like a special one so orange
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yes i believe that one that one is it so you guys can flip over the other two
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because i am totally going for this is a new orange finish from them that looks
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absolutely sickle though i gotta say i like the wood grain that orange is
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pretty pretty nice i would match my wood grain if i got wood grain on the laptop
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no wood sure i'd always want one
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okay so i don't know about you guys but i got my dbrand phone
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i got my chest strap done up oh you got the real stuff right here
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yeah you got the real stuff right right yeah me too bro so
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let's go no holds barred scrapyard wars no holds barred case bros
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wait actually i need my laptop where did my laptop go
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here it is okay uh i really have to pee let's go dude uh
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how do we get out of here
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okay all right so basically my plan right now is
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there we go okay totally thought the door was locked all
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right so the plan right now is to just get out of here so
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i think it looks way more legit if we're like not here so where are we going it's
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a great question uh let's not be here let's just drive a little ways and
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figure this out so okay potential problem number one
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i actually haven't even done any pre-thought i've been so busy that i
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haven't had any time to figure out how i'm gonna tackle this challenge
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potential problem number two there's three of us this time there's
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going to be craigslist crap that's listed two weeks ago that they get no
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calls about and they're gonna have three people calling them today
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so it is going to be a race against the clock to win scrapyard wars three
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which obviously means it's a great idea that i'm sitting here on a couch i
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should really get going so i'm gonna try to save some money by
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avoiding a case i'm gonna try to build everything onto like a cardboard box or
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something it's all about price to performance so
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if i spend like even half the budget i almost feel like
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we're gonna go over because i don't know i'm thinking like seven
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hundred dollars something like that you know of a cool spot around here like i
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know my hotels over here what's the cool spot like we could hang out um we're in
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langley so nowhere oh that is some wicked gas
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we're not in the car yet though so it's okay
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oh man oh wow that's like that is some
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outdoor grade gas one of my biggest concerns is that i think we're gonna be
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fighting for parts uh i think we're gonna be fighting for parts because i
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don't think there's actually that many for sale right now i'm wondering if it has something to do with the canadian
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dollar being in the tank at the moment oh my goodness is
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that mine they're just sitting on the ground it's my tip
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so one of our dastardly plans is to send
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responses from craigslist ad posters to
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those guys that they never actually messaged so we'll try and we'll try and
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get them off the trail get them confused
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so we're all gonna be on craigslist
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we're all gonna be trying to find
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the same deals or maybe not because the way that i see it there's
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actually a few different ways to tackle this we can try and get the cheapest
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possible computer that is at least capable of running the benchmarks
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and hope the other guys spend way more
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or we can go for like the traditional bang
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for the buck pc somewhere in the seven to eleven hundred dollar range and win
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the benchmarks and hope the other guys aren't able to get great value for the
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dollar i frankly don't know what the answer is
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right now yeah what if we try to do like a hundred dollar gaming pc build i don't
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know if it's necessarily going to be awesome but it's price for performance
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right so if this is as tenth as good as if they spend a thousand dollars then we
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actually win so this could work it's only ten dollars
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and it's even here this could work
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maybe okay so i just got a 220 offer on a r9
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290. box of video cards oh we're we're
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calling this guy we're calling this guy that looks like an 8600 gts like if we
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can just taking up space on a shelf if we can get that for like two bucks or
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five bucks or something we might be in pretty good shape it's an option
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so i'm calling the guy with the r9 280 for 130 bucks i'm going to offer him 120
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if he doesn't take it i'm still going to do it can you do 120 bucks awesome uh when do
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you want me to come pick it up yeah yeah but port moody's like a city like i need
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to know where okay so i got a
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r9 280 for 120 bucks i really wanted to get that 290 but i don't think the price
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per performance is worth it when the 290 would be
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over a hundred dollars or no basically exactly a hundred dollars more i don't
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know there's there's some funny math there because you have to calculate in
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the whole rest of the system as well but i think a 280 is going to be good
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and i think i need to move on to other things so i'll go with that if i'm
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learning anything from this is that people like to really overprice their
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old pc hardware like people likes are like oh my my six-year-old gaming pc is
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worth 800 it was worth 1200 five years ago like no dude it's worth like 300 get
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over yourself canadian used market in general is just
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because uh the turnover is so low yeah
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dude yeah i mean i'm just seeing tons of junk here and every once i see something
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cool like yeah okay so this is a g4 7900 for
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50 i mean it's got s video on it it's not
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going to be worth 50 i don't care what you say wow a lot of this stuff is
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pretty brutal is that a 9 600 for 10 bucks though
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that's not bad let's save that in the numbers sheet
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the best thing to do this is going to be a disadvantage for austin in this whole
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competition because he hasn't done this before but the best thing to do is right
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in the first couple hours put out as many feelers as possible yeah you're
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right this does take a long time i also totally want to find like a pawn
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shop or something car oh dude that's a good idea
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that's a great idea yeah like the car just like runs out there's a q 9650 CPU
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i'm still potentially interested in that if i can get it for the right price i
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think we're gonna need a quad core to win uh that cinebench is gonna make a big
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difference i wonder how austin's doing at this point like new city like he
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doesn't even know where any of these sub regions are like he's gonna be like oh
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yale town that's probably pretty close okay i think we might have found
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something here a pair of 7950 graphics cards for 150 and that's both of them so
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basically one of them actually they were both used for bitcoin mining but i don't
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really care as long as it works for long enough where i can actually like benchmark that could work 150
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where is this 13th avenue is that burnaby
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was that anywhere near burnaby newest
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do you have any idea where that is scrapyard wars will be right back after
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these messages this episode of scrapyard wars is
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brought to you by dbrand makers of the precision cut vinyl skins that you'll
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see on the phones and notebooks of our contestants they offer a wide variety of
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styles and colors and support for the coolest devices including the playstation 4 galaxy note 5 and iphone
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6s protect the body of your devices and make them look great at dbrand.com
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scrapyard wars i'm trying to work on system so what i'm trying to find now i
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have a graphics card i'm probably not going to look for a case power supply
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i'm probably going to have to get on its own and so what i'm looking for right now is
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motherboard processor memory essentially
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and a hard drive i guess but i might try to sneak an SSD in there if i can i just
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don't know if it'll be worth it because most of our benchmarks are CPU or GPU
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60 for an SSD that could be that could be all right maybe i think
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you might be able to get a new SSD or around that they probably wouldn't be
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that it's probably not that much cheaper but we also maybe try to get that guy down a little bit so this guy wants 60
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bucks for a 120 gig SSD that is so
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not happening 60 dollars for price
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you can buy brand new 240 gigs for
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98 dollars so
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i'll see if i can get him to be a little bit more realistic
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now you should know luke almost lost his money
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yeah i was just wondering if you were interested in selling parts of it at all
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yeah yeah that's a pretty good point um i was only interested in the
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motherboard processor
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RAM and potentially power supply i call them up i'm like are you interested in
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selling just the parts and he's like oh yeah totally that was my first idea when
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i was gonna put on craigslist was i was just gonna part it out and he ends the
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phone call like well i'm okay with selling the parts if you buy all of them
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so so far i've got a graphics card that i'm picking up at three something that
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was a r9 280 for 120 bucks i don't know
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if that's like necessarily the best deal i could get
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but i wanted to move on to system because i did notice that a lot of my
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target processors they're kind of scarce right now i can't find very many of them
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so i had a whole bunch of graphics card options and was like okay i just want to
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get that out of the way i should have maybe done that later
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but whatever i'm really trying to find my platform right now and having a
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little bit of trouble with it ah dude i think this might be it 150 for 279 50s
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that's gonna kill it all right this is this is we totally need to go this way
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so now let's try to find some other parts and start calling that's totally the way to go dude that's that's it
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that's that those are our cards right there so for a lot of the components i'm
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just going to be kind of browsing what's out there and buying whatever but for
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the graphics card i think i have to shop a little bit smarter so i'm going to be
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using anantech's bench repository in order to compare graphics
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cards across generations and then from
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looking at it briefly i'm feeling pretty good about the approach of going with a
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tahiti based card so either a
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280 or 280x or a 7950 or 7970 i think
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that's where we're gonna get the best bang for our buck so i'm gonna lowball
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this 280x and kind of go from there
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okay so this is how i write a craigslist email how's it going saw your listing
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for the pair of 7950s i plan on building a gaming pc and was wondering if you've
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made sure they can game i don't plan on mining but want to make sure both cards are fully working thanks because i've
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got to be polite i'm in canada so fire that off
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and hopefully we hear back okay i'm just being like a little [ __ ]
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hi i'm um contacting you about the 280x for sale are you firm on the price
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i don't think i can spend that much
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whenever someone contacts you like that whenever they open with that they're a
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loser well not like a loser but like getting a better price makes you a
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winner yo but uh being a little [ __ ] hey here's a
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good deal on an SSD let's see if this guy has a phone number
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40 bucks call all right i'm gonna offer i'm gonna offer 30 for a 120 gig if i
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can get it i'm feeling really good about my storage
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drive who uses a home phone number i
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can't even text that so i'm gonna i'm gonna just oh man i'm gonna play every
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game in the book SSD on craigslist um i can come get it
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today if you can do 30 do you have anything else for sale i'm trying to
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build a budget gaming pc for a friend of mine who's moving away who could say no
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to someone trying to buy a present
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maybe next time it'll be like my six sister or something she broke her ARM
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and she can't go out much so we're getting her gaming computer
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look you might be judging me here but i
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have a competition to win so
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yeah i did say no holds barred this is the
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guy with the lots of older computer stuff
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um come he says come take a look should we just should we just go check it out okay
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i've come across an interesting discovery there's a 7950 gx2 that's a
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dual GPU card the guy's asking 25 bucks
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if i can get that for like 10 or something
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i could be in really good shape
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no that's a directx 9 part
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okay i knew i knew when we were choosing the
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benchmarks that we should have gone with something older than far cry 4
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but it looks like you have to run it on dx10 or dx11
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hardware so right now i've switched from buying
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that that r9 280 to an r9 200 or 290 i
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haven't told the 280 guy yet because the 290 guy seems a little bit flaky so
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i think i'm gonna wait until i get a actual confirm from him so the next
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problem we have is just having to power these two 7950s so i started looking
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around there are not a lot of power supplies we might be able to find something used but just out of curiosity
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i looked on ncix it's gonna be like 97 to get like a Corsair
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we might end up having to buy some new stuff because they're the options on craigslist are not as
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solid as i was hoping um and plus there a lot of these people think that stuff
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is worth way more than it actually is so we're super stressed on time right now
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um so much so that we're having delicious sushi because um you know we
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got this okay so i found something decent here so this guy has an older
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computer but he's willing to part it out so you get a cooler master case with a
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db rider for 20 bucks and there's a power supply a 500 watt power supply for
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30 bucks that can work but i don't think that 7950s enough to power them
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what if we get two really cheap power supplies
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oh and like tape one of the top or something yeah dude that would be so
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cool so like we basically just like have like one 500 watt power supply in the system
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like we like tape another one to the top just to power the other graphics card
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i almost want to do that purely because of how ridiculous it would be it might not even save us any money but that
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would be awesome uh now we're gonna go try to hit up some local computer stores
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maybe try to find like some used cases uh we still need like a motherboard and
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memory um okay so i did not realize it's gonna be an apple specialist
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i mean we're here we might as well try
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yo you have the macbook right nice
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okay um so slight change of plans we just left the macbook at the restaurant
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no big deal but uh that was my bad so let's uh try to get
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back to there before uh this macbook is stolen
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i can't believe i just walked off that's
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neither of us saw that right next time on scrapyard wars luke's mom
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finally gets her revenge on Linus austin's surprise visit from a friendly
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grizzly bear turns harry Linus reveals the deep dark secret
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behind his obsession with sandals