Considering selling PC

[Ryzo89]

Well as some of you probably remember, i built a PC from scratch for the first time a month or two ago. Now, however, i'm considering selling what i've built, as a whole PC (although i have taken some things out, such as extra RAM). How much would you pay for this:

Casecom 6788 Black Mid Tower Case
Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
160GB WD HDD
2GB good quality RAM
ASUS P43 P5QL
INTEL Q6600 CORE 2 QUAD 4X 2.40
Nvidia GeForce 210
LG DVD-RW
500W OCZ Power Supply

Basically just looking for a rough guide as to how much someone would pay for it to see if i could actually make profit on it, i can get the exact descriptions of the RAM and DVD-RW when i get home if needed.

Cheers

[jim]

I would say not, unless you can find a mug (potentially a mate) who you wish to scam. I've known people do something similar in the past.

People will just add up the components, and will expect to buy the complete PC for less than you paid for the individual parts. At the end of the day, you could easily get a very similar machine from HP/Dell who can doubtlessly undercut you.

[b0redom]

Even Dell are shipping PCs with 4GB of RAM. It's pretty unbalanced too (poor GPU and RAM), more powerful CPU. The Q6600 is getting a bit long in the tooth too.

[Saracen]

I agree with snooty, you're most unlikely to make a profit selling it on here, because most people here know what the components cost, or certainly know where to find out, and a pretty good percentage are quite capable of building it themselves.

And there's another thing. If I buy the bits and build my own PC, if I have a problem with a component failure, I may well have a warranty claim and certainly have a potential Sale of Goods Act claim against the supplier. But if I buy a PC from you, as a private seller and it goes wrong, I probably won't have a warranty claim (as they are usually non-transferable) and I certainly don't have any Sale of Goods Act protections against failing bits, whether in three years from purchase or three days.

If it was as easy as buying the bits, building it and flogging it, a lot of us would be doing it. But it isn't as easy as that.

You might make a profit selling it to people that don't know any better, or where to get the bits or how to assemble them. You might be able to make a profit by building to a customer's specific requirements, that is, customised build using high quality components for a specific need, like a gaming PC, or a photo/video/music editing PC, etc.

But just buying the bits for a generic PC and making a profit? Not on here, not in my opinion. I wish you good luck with it ... but don't hold your breath.

[Saracen]

..... The Q6600 is getting a bit long in the tooth too.

Perhaps .... but still a damn fine processor .... and frankly, if I were buying right now, I'd still be tempted rather than paying a premium for i-series or DDR3 (though the latter is dropping fast), and more importantly, mobos for them. In any event, a Q6600 is quite capable of doing anything I need, now or in the foreseeable future, even if it isn't as fashionable as it used to be. The Q6600 is certainly perfectly capable of doing anything the vast majority of the buying public are going to demand from a PC.

[b0redom]

While that is true, if he's looking to sell something, it would need to be top end for enthusiasts (who would probably want an i7 box) or bottom end for the more mainstream. I still maintain that it's too unbalanced for either market.

Yes the CPU is more than capable for most stuff, but it's too 'old' for most enthusiasts wanting a new PC who wouldn't be prepared to build it themselves, and at the other end, where your graphics card and low amount of memory, you're going to be competing against PC World/Dell where costs and CPUs are much lower down the food chain.

[Syllopsium]

As the others said, it's unbalanced. The motherboard is far too high end for the remainder of the components. The Q6600 is a nice CPU but doesn't need a P43 chipset.

2GB is a bit stingy for Windows 7 x64. Yes, it's more memory efficient than Vista x64 but I still wouldn't run Oblivion on a 2GB Windows 7 x64 box.

The Geforce 210 isn't exactly fast and shouldn't be coupled with the other components. 160GB isn't that much hard disk space these days, either.

Without wishing to be mean, I would run a mile before trying to make a profit selling anything computer component related. It's a game for people with deep pockets that can buy in bulk, swallow price fluctuations and pay enough to research the construction of systems that are stable at 100% load during a hot summer in a hot room whilst offering an ongoing warranty.

The only way to make money is to add significant extra value - that's tricky with basic system assembly.

The best I've ever managed is to sell a Pentium 3 1GHz for a quarter of its purchase price, about seven years after purchase. Personally I called that a result.. (the 100FSB model is rare).

PK

[shaithis]

£200-250 I would have guessed at being fair.

[Saracen]

As the others said, it's unbalanced. The motherboard is far too high end for the remainder of the components. The Q6600 is a nice CPU but doesn't need a P43 chipset.

2GB is a bit stingy for Windows 7 x64. Yes, it's more memory efficient than Vista x64 but I still wouldn't run Oblivion on a 2GB Windows 7 x64 box.

The Geforce 210 isn't exactly fast and shouldn't be coupled with the other components. 160GB isn't that much hard disk space these days, either.
....

While I largely agree, I'd add that memory is pretty easy to add, even for a novice, and the graphics card may be light for anyone with gaming in mind, but not everyone cares about that and if that isn't an objective, then it's fair enough.

I do agree about hard disk, though. Given the cost difference between 160GB and, say, 640GB the 160Gb looks to be mistake. So much so that it makes me wonder if the 160 was bought for that machine, or if it happens to be an older one and a larger drive has been "retained". Whether it has or not I've no idea, but it would be what I'd suspect if I saw a spec like that in a local paper, because it seems so under-spec'd compared to mobo and CPU.

Where it is possible to make money is offering a "service", talking to people about that they want, recommending quality hardware, then buying and building, and charging for doing so. Of course, if you aren't careful, you end up as a "business", and if the taxman finds out, then first, he'll want you to complete a tax return (which is a pain), and secondly, he'll want his cut of any profits.

Then, of course, you can end up liable for any hardware failures. You can get round that by getting the customer to buy the builds, and you charge fee for building, which includes buying advice.

Then, of course, the customer expects support, and that can take a lot of time, so you need to make clear in advance that while you will fix and problems resulting directly from your work, that does not include untwisting Windows knickers when it throws a fit, or disinfecting the viruses the customer manages to acquire by being a numpty, and that if you end up doing that, he'll be paying for your time.

And don't forget to think about liability insurance. If you build a PC (as a business) and it electrocutes someone or catches fire, you don't want to be paying their hospital bills or to rebuild their house.

And finally, while you can get the above type of work, the really tricky bit is finding the customers. The world won't beat a path to your door, and getting enough work for it to be worth it is not easy.

All told .... building for profit is pretty much a non-starter these days. 15 years ago, maybe, but not these days.

[mycarsavw]

You paid £175 for the bulk of the bits.

Casecom 6788 Black Mid Tower Case - ~£25 new
Nvidia GeForce 210 - ~£30 new
LG DVD-RW - ~£20 new

You'll be lucky to get £200.

Depending on the revision of the Q6600 (G0 / B3), I may be interested.

[scaryjim]

... Given the cost difference between 160GB and, say, 640GB the 160Gb looks to be mistake. So much so that it makes me wonder if the 160 was bought for that machine, or if it happens to be an older one and a larger drive has been "retained". ...

I'd agree that it basically looks like a decent quad core gaming rig that's been harvested for reuable parts - DDR2 RAM, higher end GFX, perhaps HDD - and had the cheapest possible replacements stuck in. A quick look at my spec will show you that I have a Q6600 gaming rig with a 160GB hard drive - but that was built over 2 years ago and the price differential then was a lot bigger.

I have to say, however, that unless you're into serious (legal) Video downloading / ripping, 160GB is actually quite a lot of space. I've had to work hard to fill 160GB at work, and I have a big store of software ISOs (30GB on their own) - I could easily archive those to external storage and more than double my free disk space! But nowadays the only rig I'd put a 160GB HD in would be the cheapest of cheapy builds.

As everyone else has said, the only way you make money from building computers is either by being able to shift (and therefore order) bulk, or doing custom specialist builds for non-techs. I've managed both of these in the past, but not consistently enough to actually make a living out of...

[Saracen]

I take the point, scary, but you can eat up a lot of space with OS, a few major progs (Office, Photoshop, and so on), and then a truckload more with a few games. And if you're into digital photography, you can build up a fair bit of usage that way too.

But I take the point - general office use, browsing, email etc doesn't need a vast hard disk. But then, it doesn't need a quad core either. Which comes back to the point others made earlier .... it looks unbalanced ... too high a spec in places for some types of users, and not enough in other places for other types.

And, of course, as you suggest, replacing an older 160 with a 640 might not be justified. I've got machines with less than that that are doing the job quite well. It's buying the 160 as opposed to the 640 (or similar), for a general machine, at today's prices, that seems a bit strange and suggested the 'harvesting' possibility.

[scaryjim]

... if you're into digital photography, you can build up a fair bit of usage that way too. ...

I always forget that digital photography geeks go pale at the though of using compressed file formats My digital camera's only 3MP, and at minimal compression it can still fit about 200 images on a 256MB SD card. But other people have different usage patterns, of course

tbh, it looks like the kind of build I see all the time on ebay, advertised as having a "9.6GHz" processor: it's targeted at people who've fallen for Intel's "the processor is the only thing that matters" hype - so everything else is skimped on massively to squeeze a fast quad core into what should be a £200 browsing box.

Anyway, to get slightly back on topic and answer the OPs question, you're likely to get more for it broken down into components than selling it as a built machine, and either way you're not going to make anything appropaching a profit.

If you swapped the Q6600 for something like a Celeron E1500 or E3300 you might be reasonably able to charge up to £250 for it is a surfing / office machine (it would look like a much better thought out, well balanced machine that way), then you could sell the Q6600 separately and get a bit more money back that way. But I'd be surprised if that was enough to turn you a profit. You're trying to sell second hand and make a profit against new retail components. That's not the way second hand (or retail) works...

[Saracen]

I always forget that digital photography geeks go pale at the though of using compressed file formats My digital camera's only 3MP, and at minimal compression it can still fit about 200 images on a 256MB SD card. But other people have different usage patterns, of course ....

And if you think digital photos can eat space, try doing an 800dpi scan in 36-bit using my A3 (and yes,I mean A3) scanner.

Mind you, that's not exactly a use the average Joe gets from his PC.

[petrefax]

All told .... building for profit is pretty much a non-starter these days. 15 years ago, maybe, but not these days.

gotta agree with that (and the rest of saracen's post too).

i used to custom build as a bit of a side-line a few years ago, back when an off-the-shelf machine would set you back £800 minimum

IMHO you're mostly aiming at the lower end of the market, in my experience there are few people after a top spec rig who wouldn't just build it themsleves. i did come acorss a few but they're rare.

a few things put paid to this in the end

firstly the ball-ache of having to deal with every little software issue a customer encountered. regardless of the fact that 99.999% of the time they'd caused the issue, their thinking was, "you built it, you own all problems with it for the rest of its life"

secondly the expectation that every PC automatically comes with a plethora of (very expensive) software pre-installed. to this day most people think MS Office comes as standard

lastly and more importantly there came a point where off-the-shelf prices dropped to a point where it was difficult to build any cheaper than a pre-built would cost (unless making a high-spec rig, see point above, not many of those required)

if you're looking to make money from tinkering with Pcs then upgrades, maintainence & fixing broken machines is more likely to be profitable

NB - this comes with its own downfalls too....like having to enter some frankly shocking households where you can hardly breathe for the smell, opening up a PC to find toadstools growing inside it & all the while their dog is climbing all over you & no matter how politely you ask it to stop, the only answer you get off its owner is "ah, he's just being friendly, looks like he likes you" while fido is rubbing his 'lipstick' on your jeans <shudder>

[Fortune117]

NB - this comes with its own downfalls too....like having to enter some frankly shocking households where you can hardly breathe for the smell, opening up a PC to find toadstools growing inside it & all the while their dog is climbing all over you & no matter how politely you ask it to stop, the only answer you get off its owner is "ah, he's just being friendly, looks like he likes you" while fido is rubbing his 'lipstick' on your jeans <shudder>

I think youve had some pretty traumatic times fixing PC's.

Its ok, we're here for you.