The Amazing ALL-EBAY Gaming PC
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,538 words · ~12 min read
0:00
whenever we put together a list of recommended parts for building your own
0:04
pc there's one complaint that oh shows
0:09
you dumb canadian
0:13
yeah that you know that was pretty mean but
0:17
the random stranger i've never met and never will has a point
0:22
maybe it's just as viable and maybe it's
0:27
way cheaper to build a pc on ebay
0:31
maybe within the same budget you could build a much more kick-ass rig than you
0:36
could by going through newegg or amazon maybe
0:40
none of this is a maybe because maybe we
0:43
already did it and maybe i'm gonna tell you guys all
0:48
about it
0:57
g skills trident z royal series ddr4 RAM
1:00
features a polished aluminum heat spreader and gold ore silver and this
1:04
gorgeous crystalline light bar that radiates RGB in every direction check it
1:09
out at the link below so we began our journey with a spec list
1:14
for like a decent gaming pc on pc part
1:18
picker that ended up at just over a thousand dollars for all new parts at
1:23
retail prices now we didn't choose this price point for any particular reason
1:28
other than that it's just kind of what we ended up with for a good
1:32
bang for the buck gaming pc so with any luck ebay is either going to
1:38
increase our bang or decrease the buck
1:42
now of course regardless of price the main disadvantage of ordering off ebay
1:48
is that you're going to be stuck getting all of your parts piecemeal which for us
1:54
meant that we actually had to wait about a month in between ordering all this
1:59
stuff and making this video here for you
2:02
people which is going to be an eternity if you're just looking to
2:06
fire up some apex legends with your buddies now to mitigate that somewhat we did
2:12
actually limit ourselves to buy it now
2:15
items rather than furiously refreshing auction pages so you can assume that
2:20
with some more patients you could actually do a little bit better than us
2:24
but then how well did we do
2:27
it's time for a haul video
2:31
let's start off with our case then okay this honestly didn't matter much we were
2:36
going for cheap and functional and it ended up
2:39
being a rosewill nautilus that won the
2:43
day it was packed
2:46
well enough and it's arguably a reasonably
2:51
attractive case too if you're into the whole kind of glossy
2:55
uh plastic look now you might be thinking to yourself
3:00
when you first open up the case doesn't the nautilus come with two
3:05
fans in the box and yes it does
3:09
they just happened to be loose in the box for us for some reason
3:14
actually if we're being honest the shipping was overall quite
3:19
horrible for this thing and worse the
3:22
nautilus is supposed to have a windowed side panel and as you guys already saw
3:28
it does it just was installed on the wrong side so
3:32
clearly they were packing it up in a freaking hurry
3:37
i mean this is what you get sometimes when you go with ebay and the thing is
3:41
that with cheap cases we actually found that the pricing for used ones on ebay
3:46
wasn't really any better than just buying an entry-level case at retail
3:52
unless of course you count the extra value
3:57
ah yes not one not two
4:01
but three extra SATA cables were included in the
4:06
box
4:09
so then once we get all of our wires managed and kind of where they're
4:12
supposed to be right gotta take that off that's a
4:17
it's a window there we can move on
4:21
zero gravity that seems to be what whoever packed this was
4:25
hoping for because that's the only way it was going to survive
4:31
next up next up is our power supply an 80 plus
4:37
rating for the power supply of any modern computer is pretty much
4:40
non-negotiable and we're gonna want about 500 watts of continuous power for
4:45
our build to live and to give us some room to expand now
4:49
despite its shortcomings like its lack of modular cabling and if we're being
4:54
honest middling overall performance evga's 500b fit the bill for us nicely
5:01
now this one right here is an open box model so
5:05
it hasn't been used very much if at all actually doesn't have a speck of dust on
5:10
it so this looks like a pretty good score for 25 us dollars
5:16
now for the platform that's going to go into our
5:20
kind of rat's nest over here we wanted something that was going to have at
5:24
least eight threads with enough per thread performance that games won't end
5:29
up slowed down by our CPU so ryzen is
5:32
kind of a no-brainer at this price point and there were some very decent deals to
5:36
be had on the gen 1 ryzen 5 1600x
5:41
now we had considered an engineering sample core i7 8700 non-k
5:47
but it has a locked multiplier
5:50
and no heat sink in the box if we're
5:53
going to have to buy a CPU cooler anyway we want to be able to overclock so we
5:58
ended up by the way let's just gonna get this up there we go with a deep cool
6:03
gammaxx 400 which cost us about 24
6:09
now with just a six core CPU and a single graphics card we don't need the
6:14
fanciest motherboard on the block so we went hunting for a b series board with a
6:20
decent vrm layout for that overclocking
6:23
now virtually all the options available on ebay with decent pricing were refurbs
6:28
which means that they only come with io shields
6:32
if you're lucky although we did also get a wi-fi antenna so that's nice but
6:37
thankfully that's actually not a big deal for us thanks to our
6:41
for it bonus SATA cables
6:48
anyway the choice really came down to between
6:51
two boards from ASUS the b350 plus and
6:55
the b450 plus now the chipset difference doesn't
6:59
really matter for us because we're running first gen ryzen but we decided
7:04
to spend the extra five dollars on the newer b450 board if only because it's
7:09
likely to get firmware updates for longer
7:12
next up is RAM now 16 gigs was our target for
7:17
comfortable gaming and multitasking including running the notorious memory
7:22
hog chrome web browser
7:26
but the thing that we kind of ran into here
7:29
is that memory deals on ebay were few
7:33
and far between so we ended up going with this
7:38
like the definition of bog standard no
7:41
name ddr4 2400 and this stuff is weird
7:45
like there's no visible branding even on the chips themselves where you'd
7:50
normally see you know some kind of name you recognize like samsung or sk hynix
7:56
and when we fired up these modules to test them we couldn't even find a vendor
8:01
id string spooky i mean at least it was cheap this is
8:06
funny too warranty void if removed what warranty
8:10
from who nobody knows
8:15
anyway speaking of cheap our storage options now we wanted an SSD that was
8:19
large enough to handle our operating system and our key applications so a
8:22
crucial mx 500 250 gig fit the bill just
8:26
nicely not only is it yes dirt cheap but
8:30
it also has a dram cash which is important for its long-term performance
8:35
the one thing it can't do is handle a big steam library so we also grabbed
8:40
this two terabyte western digital 7200 RPM enterprise drive which was a steal
8:47
at 49 so both of these are either new or open
8:52
box because buying heavily used storage is
8:56
just not the brand of fun that we're gonna get into today
9:01
finally we come to the single most important piece of any gaming rig our
9:06
graphics card so our goal was to pick up something that's capable of running
9:11
1440p at 60fps or 1080p at much higher frame
9:17
rates like you know 120 or 144 hertz and
9:22
so we quickly narrowed down our search to either the GeForce gtx 980 ti or gtx
9:28
1070 ti which are surprisingly quite
9:32
similarly priced at around 300 us dollars right now which is a bit strange
9:36
when you consider that the 980 ti is actually closer to a regular 1070 rather
9:42
than a 1070 ti so obviously we ended up
9:46
then with the 1070 ti at least though to the 980 ti's credit it's not as bad of
9:51
value as some of the older titans that we were considering early on so right
9:55
now this looks like about the sweet spot in the used market so i guess a lot of
10:00
the folks who bought 1070 ti's are upgrading or else we got
10:05
a mining card which is possible it's clean but it looks
10:10
cleaned as opposed to clean
10:19
so after a not insignificant amount of cable management thank you Anthony
10:24
we've got our build and all of its second-hand glory all in we spent about
10:31
776 dollars before shipping which if we
10:35
were in the continental us would have been about 50 bucks which is just about
10:40
250 dollars saved versus our retail
10:43
build now there are a couple of small issues like that wireless antenna i was
10:48
so pleased about being included doesn't plug into our motherboard and
10:53
that io shield that we were so happy to have
10:57
is also not correct for our motherboard but hey
11:01
gamey is gaming so why don't we take it for a spin
11:04
all right oh we need to turn vsync off oof
11:08
okay hold on just need to turn off that uh motion blur ew motion blur ew ew
11:15
all right resume the game dang
11:18
Anthony this is one cheap
11:21
130 FPS at 2560 by 1440 and doom
11:27
look at that responsiveness i mean you'd never know
11:32
sort of looking at the frame rates we're running at here that this is like a you
11:36
know ghetto jank ebay pc i mean it doesn't make your skills any
11:40
better but like not bad at all
11:45
oops hit him in the ankles oh no oh no
11:49
CPU temps for sitting nice in the just 40 plus range
11:54
although bear in mind of course AMD does record CPU temperatures slightly
11:57
differently from Intel when we do shadow of the tomb raider something a little newer everything working exactly as we'd
12:03
expect why don't we crank this puppy too
12:06
exclusive full screen turn that v-sync off
12:11
highest no motion blur so here we're stuck with the built-in
12:15
benchmark but that'll still give us a pretty good idea of how this guy's gonna
12:19
run were you using hot glue for this build
12:22
a few tweezers Anthony well someone got hot glue on the tape oh
12:26
you know what i think that was me not bad so remembering that we were
12:30
targeting 1440p 60fps
12:35
that is looking pretty darn
12:38
nice so yeah we're a little on the low side but remember we absolutely cranked
12:43
this game and this is one of the top triple a titles from 2018 so
12:49
oh good he gave me a gun oh that's so nice
12:52
i'm a nice person and inspect weapon really that's a
12:56
button to stare at your weapon so we're in apex legends now
13:01
i'm aware that the hd textures are not done downloading but for some reason
13:05
they've stopped coming down and i don't really know
13:09
what the issue is with that so we're just gonna go ahead and assume
13:14
that it'll be some performance amount that's a little lower than this the good
13:18
news is that's honestly pretty fine
13:21
because we're looking at like
13:24
70 80 plus frames per second
13:28
not bad at all i'm officially better than half of the
13:32
people who joined this match do i have any bullet guns button gun bullets
13:37
yeah he's he's done oof all right and we're dead
13:41
so that was it for um my apex legends
13:45
career could have gone pro if only i had any
13:48
skills and uh practiced so
13:52
at the end of the day some of the items were either the same price or more
13:56
expensive on ebay compared to retail but
14:00
if you're strapped for cash and you need a cheap way to get some gaming grade
14:03
hardware at least some of them were a better deal as long as you don't care
14:08
too much about warranties now the risk of getting something that's
14:12
just dead on arrival is not as much as you might think thanks to ebay's from
14:17
our experience anyway excellent buyer protection so
14:20
what it really comes down to then is your willingness to deal with a
14:24
premature failure that doesn't come with any kind of manufacturer warranty
14:28
support as for me well
14:32
as a tinkerer the way that i've always looked at it is that if i save
14:36
nearly the cost of my single most expensive component on a build then i
14:42
can literally afford to replace any piece of it that fails and worst
14:47
case scenario i'll be back where i started then
14:50
if it doesn't fail well then i get to keep that money in my pocket
14:55
and that's a pretty appealing reward for a little bit of extra effort and
15:00
patience no matter what you need a website for
15:04
squarespace is the place to go you can use their all-in-one platform to make a
15:08
beautiful functional website in an extraordinary short amount of time
15:12
they've got award-winning templates that you can use as starting points for a
15:16
huge range of projects and if you need any help squarespace is there to help
15:21
you they've got webinars a full series of help guides and you can even contact
15:26
their customer support 24 7 via live
15:29
chat and email and they've got tons of great tools if you already have a third
15:33
party domain you can just transfer it over to squarespace they've got
15:36
e-commerce features built into every one of their sites to help you sell merch or
15:40
services online you can publish an apple news format you can use their logo
15:44
designer it's awesome head over to squarespace.com forward slash LTT we'll
15:48
have that linked below and you can get 10 percent off your first purchase
15:53
so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if
15:57
it was awesome hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to
16:01
buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is
16:05
our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum
16:08
which you should totally join