Gadgetory

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 second-hand 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 all-rounder q 6600 platform and my r9 290 with a tin can around it was interesting it left out the option that many of you of you pointed out which was new stuff now in our minds we bought used to gain an advantage in price for performance over new inbox but without actually testing it how do we know how much of an advantage we actually gained let's find out stay subscribed to Linus tech tips for more adventures like this Corsairs h ATI GT and h100 IG TX all in one liquid coolers improve both the appearance and cooling of your PC click now to learn more so how do we compare our use machines to something new well we can 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 back ourselves then we could potentially rig it so we decided on a $400 us budget which allowed Linus and I'd to combine our machines with the best parts of each and challenge the form to spec out a rig with brand new pieces to try and put it in its place they had to factory and stuff like shipping and taxes in to their price but we're 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 dollar budget instead of 380 which ours totaled and that was in u.s. funds instead of Canadian which makes it a lot more valuable currently and lastly they're 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 gaben and Sauron but in the end lord gaben won with over 45 votes - and I actually didn't think that Lord gaben's build was the strongest submission and ended up picking our own editor's choice community build to compete with and we went with STR Mapes that leaves us with the Waterloo cook wishing four thousand in one quarter rocking a Core 2 quad q6600 hey Kix of ddr2 ram a 500 watt power point and in r9 290 with a 2-0 for we are controlling CPU cooler with a spark cooler strapped to it in the other corner we've got lord gaben shrine with an 86 6100 k 4 gigs of ram a 400 watt power supply and it's door 1980 and in the third quarter it's kind of triangles going on last the arm is prometheus reaching an X for 866 gigs of ram before turning one tars one another oh I actually don't have an r9 280 so we upgraded both the Prometheus and the shrine to an r9 280x and just decided to make it a little bit more fair we just didn't overclock it there's three main performance determining parts here we have the CPU the GPU and the RAM all these machines have their CPU is overclocked to varying degrees but only the GPU of the three of machine 4000 is actually overclocked for CPU the third machine 4000 and prometheus are sitting on quad cores but the Q 6600 is running a little slower at 3.2 gigahertz compared to the 4 gigahertz of the x-48 60 K also don't forget they run a completely different architectures the big outlier here is lord gaben shrine with a dual-core a6 6400 K running a lot faster at 4.4 gigahertz but remember two cores instead of four for GPU things are much more similar both being submitted with an AR ni 280 and resulting with an r9 280x running at the same speed while the thrift machine 4000 is sporting an r9 290 running at about a thousand megahertz ram gets interesting again though check out this video to see what Linus's talks about the differences between ddr3 and ddr4 but while 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 is 6 gigs and the shrines for gigs be worth it in the end time to find it 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 Linus had to spend a fair amount of time getting his machine to an acceptable level of cleanliness and missing accessories again Linus had to hunt through boxes for more than a couple of missing things while building his BC something that may not be an issue for the seasoned techies out there but folks who don't have been spare parts of hardware and whatnot this may be a show-stopping issue for you while you wait for parts and of course use parts can come bruised or an 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 solar may ship you a do a component or straight-up scam you if you aren't careful enough and or if you're just unlucky and even then some things may come with a two-week 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 are going to point at the used machines here and say well they'll die sooner they'll have some problem with them and their right to some degree but don't forget many of the new machine spec tody on the forum we're using terrible power supplies that we would generously described as super sketchy and while both the use machines we're using well-built continuous power and 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 a no-questions-asked lifetime warranty but other things can largely 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 PAX 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 presence and PAX East is no different this year they'll be hosting a hashtag my Intel build contest 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 show for 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 hashtag my Intel build and you're entered 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 is already started and it closes on March 13th so get your entries in now alright 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 use 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 it's it's a pinned at the top and they constantly have different contests going on for different people spec you know 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 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 Trek II or Star Wars kind of person this is a shirt that you can buy from Linus 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