Gadgetory

whenever we put together a list of recommended parts for building your own PC there's one complaint that oh yeah that you know that was pretty mean but the random stranger I've never met and never will has a point maybe it's just as viable and maybe it's way cheaper to build a PC on eBay maybe within the same budget you could build a much more kick-ass rig than you could by going through New Ager Amazon maybe none of this is a maybe because maybe we already did it and maybe I'm gonna tell you guys all about it G skillz tried n'zeer oil series ddr4 Ram features a polished aluminum heat spreader in gold or silver and this gorgeous crystalline light bar that radiates RGB in every direction check it out at the link below so we began our journey with a spec list for like a decent gaming PC on PC part picker that ended up at just over $1000 for all new parts at retail prices now we didn't choose this price point for any particular reason other than that it's just kind of what we ended up with for a good bang for the buck gaming PC so with any luck eBay is either going to increase our bang or decrease the buck now of course regardless of price the main disadvantage of ordering off eBay is that you're going to be stuck getting all of your parts piecemeal which for us meant that we actually had to wait about a month in between ordering all this stuff and making this video here for you people which is going to be an eternity if you're just looking to fire up some apex legends with your buddies now to mitigate that somewhat we did actually limit ourselves to buy it now items rather than furiously refreshing auction pages so you can assume that with some more patience you could actually do a little bit better than us but then how well did we do it's time for a whole video let's start off with our case then okay this honestly didn't matter much we were going for cheap and functional and it ended up being a rose will Nautilus that won the day it was packed well enough and it's arguably a reasonably attractive case too if you're into the whole kind of glossy plastic look now you might be thinking to yourself when you first open up the case doesn't the Nautilus come with two fans in the box and yes it does they just happened to be loose in the box for us for some reason actually if we're being honest the shipping was overall quite horrible for this thing and worse the Nautilus is supposed to have a windowed side panel and as you guys already saw it does it just was installed on the wrong side so clearly they were packing it up in a freaking hurry I mean this is what you get sometimes when you go with eBay and the thing is that with cheap cases we actually found that the pricing for used ones on eBay wasn't really any better than just buying an entry-level case at retail unless of course you count the extra value high yes not one not two but three extra SATA cables were included in the box so then once we get all of our wires managed and kind of where they're supposed to be right gonna take that off that's all it's a window that we can move on zero gravity that seems to be what whoever packed this was hoping for because that's the only way it was gonna survive next up it next up is our power supply at 80 plus rating for the power supply of any modern computers pretty much non-negotiable and we're gonna want about 500 watts of continuous power for our build to live and to give us some room to expand now despite its shortcomings like its lack of modular cabling and if we're being honest middling overall performance EVGA is 500 be fit the bill for us nicely now this one right here is an open box model so it hasn't been used very much if at all actually doesn't have a speck of dust on it so this looks like a pretty good score for 25 US dollars now for the platform that's going to go into our kind of rats nest over here we wanted something that was gonna have at least eight threads with enough per thread performance that games won't end up slowed down by our CPU so Rison is kind of a no-brainer at this price point and there were some very decent deals to be had on the gen 1 risin 5 1600 X now we had considered an engineering sample core i7 8700 non K but it has a locked multiplier and no heatsink in the box if we're gonna have to buy a CPU cooler anyway we want to be able to overclock so we ended up by the way with a deep cool gam Max 400 which cost us about $24 now with just a 6 core CPU and a single graphics card we don't need the fanciest motherboard on the block so we went hunting for a B Series board with a decent vrm layout for dad overclocking now virtually all the options available on eBay with decent pricing were refurbs which means that they only come with IO shields if you're lucky although we did also get a Wi-Fi antenna so that's nice but thankfully that's actually not a big deal for us thanks to our or it bonus SATA cables anyway the choice really came down to between two boards from a sues the be 350 plus and the be 450 plus now the chipset difference doesn't really matter for us because we're running first gen Rison but we decided to spend the extra five dollars on the newer beef 450 board if only because it's likely to get firmware updates for longer next up is RAM now 16 gigs was our target for comfortable gaming and multitasking including running the notorious memory hog chrome web browser but the thing that we kind of ran into here is that memory deals on eBay were few and far between so we ended up going with this like the definition of bog-standard no-name ddr4 2400 and this stuff is weird like there's no visible branding even on the chips themselves where you'd normally see you know some kind of name you recognize like Samsung or SK Hynix and when we fired up these modules to test them we couldn't even find a vendor ID string spooky I mean at least it was cheap this is funny to warranty void if removed what warranty from who nobody knows anyways speaking of cheap our storage options now we wanted an SSD that was large enough to handle our operating system and our key applications so a crucial MX 500 250 gig fit the bill just nicely not only is it yes dirt cheap but it also has a dram cache which is important for its long-term performance the one thing it can't do is handle a big Steam library so we also grabbed this 2 terabyte Western Digital 7200 rpm Enterprise Drive which was a steal at $49 so both of these are either new or open box because buying heavily used storage is just not the brand of fun that we're gonna get into today finally we come to the single most important piece of any gaming rig our graphics card so our goal was to pick up something that's capable of running 1440p at 60fps or 1080p at much higher frame rates like you know 120 or 144 Hertz and so we quickly narrowed down our search to either the geforce gtx 980ti or gtx 1070 TI which are surprisingly quite similarly priced at around 300 u.s. dollars right now which is a bit strange when you consider that the 980ti is actually closer to a regular 1070 rather than a 10 seventy TI so obviously we ended up then with the 1070 TI at least though to the 980 TI is credit it's not as bad a value as some of the older Titans that we were considering early on so right now this looks like about the sweet spot in the used market so I guess a lot of the folks who bought 1070 T eyes are upgrading or else we got a mining card which is possible it's clean but it looks cleaned as opposed to clean so after a not insignificant amount of cable management Thank You Anthony we've got our buildin all of its secondhand glory all in we spent about seven hundred and seventy-six dollars before shipping which if we were in the continental US would have been about fifty bucks which is just about two hundred and fifty dollars saved versus our retail build now there are a couple of small issues like that wireless antenna I was so pleased about being included doesn't plug into our motherboard and that i/o shield that we were so happy to have is also not correct for our motherboard but hey Jamie is gaming so why don't we take it for a spin alright oh we need to turn vsync off and move okay I just need to turn off that motion blur you motion blur you all right we resume the game dang Anthony this is one cheap 130 FPS at 2560 by 1440 and doom look at that responsiveness I mean you'd never know sort of looking at the frame rates for running at here that this is like a you know ghetto jank eBay PC I mean it doesn't make your skills any better but like not bad at all oops him in the ankles oh no oh no CPU temps were sitting nice in there just 40 plus range although bear in mind of course Jambi does record CP temperature slightly differently from Intel when we do shadow the Tomb Raider something a little New York thing working exactly as we'd expect why don't we crank this puppy to exclusive full screen turn that vsync off highest no motion blur so here we're stuck with the built-in benchmark but that'll still give us a pretty good idea of how this guy's gonna run were you using hot glue for this build Anthony well someone got hot glue on the table oh you know what I think that's me not that so remembering that we were targeting 1440p 60fps that is looking at pretty darn nice so yeah we're a little on the low side but remember we absolutely cranked this game and this is one of the top triple-a titles from 2018 so oh good you give me a gun oh that's so nice nice person and inspect with it really that's a button to stare at your weapon so we're in Apex legends now I'm aware that the HD textures are not done downloading but for some reason they've stopped coming down and I don't really know what the issue is with that so we're just gonna go ahead and assume that it'll be some performance amount that's a little lower than this the good news is that's honestly pretty fine because we're looking at like 70 80 plus frames per second not bad at all I'm officially better than half of the people who joined this match don't have any bullet guns but gun bullets yeah he's done oh alright and we're dead so that was it for my apex legends career could have gone pro if only I had any skills and practiced so at the end of the day some of the items were either the same price or more expensive on eBay compared to retail but if you're strapped for cash and you need a cheap way to get some gaming grade hardware at least some of them were a better deal as long as you don't care too much about warranties now the risk of getting something that's just dead on arrival is not as much as you might think thanks to eBay's from our experience anyway excellent buyer protection so what it really comes down to then is your willingness to deal with a premature failure that doesn't come with any kind of manufacturer warranty support as for me well as a tinkerer the way that I've always looked at it is that if I save nearly the cost of my single most expensive component on a build then I can literally afford to replace any piece of it that fails and worst case scenario I'll be back where I started then if it doesn't fail well then I get to keep that money in my pocket and that's a pretty appealing reward for a little bit of extra effort and patience no matter what you need a website for Squarespace is the place to go you can use their all-in-one platform to make a beautiful functional website in an extraordinary short amount of time they've got award-winning templates that you can use as starting points for a huge range of projects and if you need any help Squarespace is there to help you they've got webinars a full series of help guides and you can even contact their customer support 24/7 via live chat and email and they've got tons of great tools if you already have a third-party domain you can just transfer it over to Squarespace they've got ecommerce features built into every one of their sites to help you sell merch or services online you can publish an apple news format you can use their logo designer it's awesome head over to Squarespace comm /l tt will have that linked below and you can get 10% off your first purchase so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join