Build of the Week: Jan 26, 2025
- Tomiax
- Jan 26
- 10 min read
Introduction
Hello everyone! We are designing another system this week and looking at where the components can be purchased at the lowest current retail prices. So, what's going to make this week a little different? Easy: We are going to then try to find the same/comparable/better parts on local market places and on eBay! What advantages do we expect to find by looking on eBay for second-hand PC parts? Well, we expect the prices to be a lot lower. However, we are comparing the cost of used parts to new parts doing this.
Keep in mind that the prices listed for components are based on availability found at the time of writing the post. Prices may vary, and are based on Canadian Currency in a Canadian market. The admin of this website might earn a commission whenever links that lead to Amazon are used to make purchases, but these links do not affect the final price to the consumer. Furthermore, we will still always link to the lowest price we found. Remember to add taxes and shipping to these prices when budgeting, and consider cost-saving strategies like waiting for sale prices or finding used parts.
Pros and Cons of Buying Parts on eBay
This segment is long. Those who have experience buying used things off of eBay may want to skip ahead to the build of the week part. For those who aren't sure about it, or who want to add to the discussion, I'll share some of my thoughts on it. Please feel free to comment any other ideas or red flags you can think of.
Here is one of the risks associated with purchasing used parts: What if the used part does not work as intended and is now out of warranty? This particular risk is compounded by a couple of factors involved in purchasing from eBay. First, there is no opportunity to see and test a part before committing to the purchase. So, if a part is defective or damaged by abuse from the previous user, you won't know for sure until it is at your door. The second compounding factor is also related to being unable to see and test the product before buying it, and that is you have nothing but the seller's say so that the product, which they really will ship to you (for realsies they swear), will actually arrive at your door. You risk everything from the product being different than advertised to the product not actually existing at all. This sounds terrible. So, what are some of the factors that might make eBay shopping more attractive? We already mentioned that prices will be lower, and the purpose of this post will be to test by how much the price is going to drop. If there turns out to be enough of a cost difference, then we could hypothetically build the same system 2 or 3 times over for the same cost as buying all new parts at retail prices. This could potentially save a budget from being completely blown on a high-end system (assuming that the parts we get all work as intended). The fact that we might save money on the build can also mitigate the risks if we do get scammed on a part. If the difference is big enough, we might be able to afford buying the part again and still be well under the cost of the system built by new parts. How much we can save by building an eBay system is not known by the author at this exact time, but this is what we want to find out! Also, are there some strategies we could use to further mitigate the risks.
To mitigate the risks of getting scammed, we will first want to use our immediate intuition on everything we look at. This is certainly not a catch-all, but it is a starting point and relatively quick way to rule out anything obvious. It works like this: If you read the ad and it doesn't leave you feeling right, click away. To advance this point a little, pay attention to things like grammar and quoted details. A seller that doesn't list the specs of the item either doesn't know them, or they decided not to write into their ad. In the first case, the best-case scenario is a seller who doesn't even know what they're selling. They didn't research it when they bought, they didn't research it when selling it. If they didn't take the time to look up what they are selling, or if they didn't bother to write down the specs in their advert, then this is an indication that they aren't putting a lot of time and thought into the item they are selling, which could in turn mean that they are spamming markets. They only care about showing the advert to as many people as possible, which could mean they are fishing for suckers. So, be more tentative about postings that don't list specs. However, be even more wary still of listings that have incorrect specs. Whatever you are buying, be aware of their specs and compare them to what is being listed. Incorrect information is an even worse sign of a seller who is using copy and paste to spam listings. It could also indicate a seller who titled the post as one thing to get attention, but actually has another in hand that they are selling. Both of these are sleazy tactics, and it's best to try and weed them out of your shopping options. Of course, spelling and grammar matter also. No one has perfect spelling and grammar, especially when just writing out an ad that we might not take extra time to proof-read. However, we've all received those phone calls claiming to be from some tax collections agency that sounds like text-to-speech where it sounds like the text has really weird wording and bad punctuation. My point is, we can intuitively pick up on what kinds of typos or poor grammar a human is going to produce vs what's going to show up in something written by sloppily bashing words and phrases together.
Second, we want to see seller ratings. The more ratings there are, the more likely it is that the average of those ratings is an accurate reflection of the seller's reliability. It's easy to fake 6 to 7 reviews. It's a lot more labour intensive to fake 100+. Every naturally accrued rating average will include some higher ratings and some lower ratings. Sometimes things will go wrong despite the seller's most earnest efforts, and sometimes buyers will just be nasty, spiteful a**holes who are physically incapable of ever being happy about anything. What you want to look at is the average, and how many low ratings there are compared to the higher ratings. If the ratio of high to low is not super-great (and/or the average is mid), then it might be worth reading a few of the lower ratings and a few of the higher ratings. If the lower ratings seem to be detailed, and especially if certain details are repeated, then this can be a red flag. Another red flag would be if the higher ratings all seem really basic and particularly easy to write. Think about what you would write if you were earnestly blown away and super happy with a transaction, and compare that to "great buy - 5 stars". "Great buy - 5 stars" seems fake, doesn't it? If, however, you find the inverse of these two points where the higher ratings had some really good points and the lower ratings are basic or spend a lot of time complaining about minor things (like my order arrived a day later than anticipated), then that seller could just be victim to misfortune.
A third thing is to look for is evidence that the product actually exists and that it works the way the user reports. Hopefully they have actual photos and not just stock images (a bit of slight on myself because my website is full of stock images, lol). If they have actual photos, scrutinize those pictures for anything that appears damaged. A seller who is both clever and deceitful could deliberately angle photos to hide damages. So, prioritize sellers who show the whole product over multiple different angles. The seller gets bonus points if they can show a video or screenshots of the item working well in their system just prior to upgrades. Another place a seller can pick up bonus points is if they offer original boxes, and/or can demonstrate knowledge about the remaining warranty from the manufacturer on the item. Another tell-tale sign of product legitimacy is pricing. If a listing has stock photos paired with unrealistically low prices compared to other sellers, then odds are good that they're not selling the product they say they are.
The fourth thing to keep in mind is seller communication. Really, a lot of what's been said before is part of building into this point, but we can go well beyond just the listing itself. Is the seller well rated when it comes to replying to buyer questions and concerns? If you message the seller with a follow-up question while deciding, do they offer a sensible answer that addresses the question? A real person selling an item should be able to demonstrate their knowledge level with the item. Now, how much they know is going to vary from person to person, legitimate or not, but you don't want to buy from someone who doesn't understand the product at all, doesn't respond to buyers at all, or who responds with pre-fabricated nonsense that doesn't actually address your question. Also, if the seller is too aggressive or pushy, trying to pressure you into making a hasty decision, that is a massive red flag. A seller who doesn't want to give you time to think about a purchase as a buyer is usually one who has something they don't want you catching onto. These all indicate the potential for being scammed or sold something unexpected.
The last thing I'll bring up is very much a last resort, and that is chasing down eBay to claim restitution in the event that you do get scammed. eBay has buyer protection policies in place, and it's worth reading them before committing to making any purchases on their platform. When unboxing items, be ready to inspect, and keep a record of your inspection of, the item on arrival. If you do get scammed in some way or another (wrong product, damaged product, failing product), then your odds of getting restitution with eBay's support scales with the quality of evidence you can provide that the seller sent you something different than advertised. This is a last resort, and not something you want to abuse lest it wreck your trustworthiness on the platform.
The Build
Since the purpose of this post is to compare retail prices to used prices found on eBay, we aren't going to be putting too much thought into trying to build a great balanced or purpose bound system. Instead, we're just going to pick whatever components are compatible and tickle our fancy at the moment.
Central Processing Unit
$549.00 @ Amazon
Boosts to 5.6 GHz on performance cores
Performance will vary based on cooling (why we are going with a big ol' 360mm radiator)
8 of the 12 cores are "performance" optimized, the other 4 are optimized for "efficiency".
24 threads
Supports 192 Gb of RAM
CPU Cooler
$98.82 @ Amazon
AiO Water Cooler with 360mm radiator
Has a fairly aesthetic LED display
Good price, decent brand name, large radiator
Motherboard
$178.98 @ Amazon
Supports 192 Gb of DDR5 RAM
Newest RAM version means more potential to upgrade later.
Has 2.5 Gb/s ethernet
Supports overclocking for both CPU and RAM
Random Access Memory
$124.99 @ Amazon
Stats are in the description.
The need for 32 GB of RAM in games instead of the older standard of 16 GB is steadily arriving.
Could go with a faster DDR5-6400 speed RAM and notice the difference with our CPU, but the difference isn't that big.
Has pretty LED lights and stylish head sink!
Storage
$154.99 @ Amazon
Sequential Reads up to 7400 MB/s
Sequential Writes up to 6400 MB/s
Graphics Card
$419.00 @ Canada Computers
12 GB of dedicated video memory (VRAM)
Boosts up to 1867 MHz
Not the newest GPU we can get, but that's on purpose:
An older GPU model might have more used options available online
We should have applied the same logic to the other parts. Oh well...
Case
$119.05 @ vuugo
Comes with 4 140mm case fans pre-installed:
3 front mounted as intake with LED displays
1 rear mounted as exhaust (no LED)
Power Supply
$149.05 @ vuugo
Fully modular makes cable management much easier as we only plug in the cables we need.
80+ Gold standard from a reliable brand guarantees competitive energy efficiency.
Cost Comparison
Now we get to the whole point of this week's post where we compare the cost of buying all the parts new at retail prices and trying to find them on eBay. I'll also be looking at local marketplaces. These local marketplaces can really vary a lot depending on where you are, and I will find my area to be very limited. You might find a lot of options local to where you live. While shopping for these parts used, we settled for anything with similar performance if we could find it. What were the results? Not great. For the most part, we just had trouble finding equivalent parts both locally and on eBay. Some parts also worked out to be even more expensive on the used market. However, we omitted situations where the available used part was more expensive than a new one. First, if the used part costs more, then why buy it? The whole point of shopping used hardware is to see if we can save on budget costs. We also added in any shipping costs that we saw on eBay to the price before putting it into the calculation. Most retailers will ship for free, or offer free shipping over a certain order value. That said, we did save about $246.92 off of the retail price by shopping the used parts on eBay first.
Retail | Local | eBay | |||
$549.00 | N/A | $475.00 | $74.00 | ||
$98.82 | N/A | $70.00 | $28.82 | ||
$178.98 | N/A | N/A | |||
$124.99 | N/A | N/A | |||
$154.99 | N/A | N/A | |||
$419.00 | N/A | $355.00 | $64.00 | ||
$119.05 | $50.00 | $69.05 | $100.00 | $19.05 | |
$149.05 | $100.00 | $49.05 | $88.00 | $61.05 | |
$ 1,793.88 | $ 118.10 | $ 246.92 |
What would I change about my strategy trying to find parts on eBay compared to what I did today? Instead of starting with a build then trying to find parts to match or emulate that build, I might actually start by just shopping what is available on eBay. Then I could go back and check that the value is there before committing to the purchase. That approach would have saved me a lot of frustration trying to find parts that just didn't exist on the used market. That said, it was still a fun experiment. Have you built a system out of eBay purchased parts before? What kind of luck did you have with the deals you found?
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