PLEASE Stop Buying These RIP OFF Gaming PCs

Why build a new machine when you can save some money and buy used, repurposed parts slapped into a case with RGB and a tempered glass side panel from Ebay? Well, big surprise, they're not as good as you might be led to believe.

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

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MUSIC CREDIT
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Intro: Laszlo - Supernova

Outro: Approaching Nirvana - Sugar High

CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:44 What's in the box
4:30 CPU Nomenclature
5:28 GPU Nomenclature
8:30 Hardware Support
9:30 The Price
11:50 Bad Marketing
13:15 Conclusion
15:32 Outro

[LinusTechTips]

Corrections:
8:19 - The 665MHz listing is technically correct but we should have doubled it as per the Double in DDR.
9:39 - The GTX 970 shown is listed as "For parts or not working" (We sent the wrong link to our editor, oops), but there are plenty of 970s on eBay that are listed as "Used" condition that are the same price, if not cheaper.

[rfitzgerald]

The sad thing is when someone without the knowledge purchases it for their child or grandchild, they're so happy to get little Timmy the gaming rig he's always wanted, but when he finds out it can't play half the games he wants it's often too late to return it - even worse for a family on a low income who have really struggled to afford it in the first place and essentially been conned

[killer]

Plot twist: all 215 sold PCs are just different Youtubers buying them to showcase why people shouldn't buy them in the first place.

[EvolvingLark]

My brother was a victim of that. The PC wasn't presented as a gaming PC, but an office PC which is exactly what he wanted. They were upfront about the specs and that it wasn't brand new. Only, they didn't say how old it was. It stopped working in like a week. They got a replacement, but it wasn't any better.

[InfamousTog]

my friend bought one of these systems on Amazon. It was advertised like this: "Modern Quad-Core i5, 32GB RAM, NEW GeForce Graphics, FAST SSD, USB 3". It was an i5-750 with DDR3 RAM and a GT-520 GPU. It also did not come with an SSD, it came with a hybrid HDD/SSD, and the "USB 3" ports were just USB 2 ports painted blue

[squidworkss]

I tried to help my sister buy a gaming laptop suitable for her needs- sims 2, minecraft and text docs. Suggested something mid range. She went and dropped loads of money on a high end laptop despite having no clue what any of the specs meant- some people just dont care if they get ripped off or spend more than they need

[countfrackula]

13:00 As an IT professional myself, I find Intel's model numbers utterly indecipherable. I just look up every single Intel CPU up on Passmark to get an idea of where it stands.

[kevinwells]

And this is why my friend had to ask me to help him find a good gaming laptop when he was looking for one. He's even a tech savvy guy (he's a data analyst and knows some programming), but if you don't keep up with all of the model numbers, generations, and specs it's an indecipherable mess of random numbers and letters, and it's even worse when it comes to laptops because often the mobile version of a CPU or GPU isn't at all the same as the desktop version (I don't know why they insist on calling them the same thing in the first place)

[jenrosejenrose]

I spent the first couple weeks of starting to plan a new system thinking "I'm on an i7, I better go up to an i9" and ended up with an I5 and this thing is lightning fast... my i7 was 6th gen. The i5 is 13th gen.

[januszkurahenowski]

I was duped once into this sort of a PC many years ago since it has a huge title of "INTEL I7 16GB RAM". It was pretty cheap and the cpu caliber and ram seemed very good. But on closer inspection it was only 1st gen i7, ram was from some weird niche manufacturer and it had a proprietary motherboard, case and psu from dell which were impossible to upgrade. Feel like a lot of people tell for those deals through years

[bradclapp]

Please do the same thing for Servers. All the time on Reddit I see people who want to get into home labbing looking at decade old or older severs due to them having higher core counts and lots of memory but then gulp down power and are close to EOL for even home lab use.

[potatosordfighter]

One thing about these glamfurbishers that probably helps to keep them in business alongside OEMs and SIs is the fact that they seem to have SIGNIFICANTLY higher QC. The system you got was tidy and extremely well managed for what it was.

[ForTheOmnissiah]

getting a 970 instead of a 660 is actually an insane upgrade.

[joshuatatro]

The other bit is how heavily eBay allows these "shops" to push these things via sponsored listings that appear higher up in search results, not to mention that they will prioritize sellers that have simply sold a lot (even if what they're selling is hot garbage).

I actually used to have fun building decent PCs with a mix of new and used parts, using nothing more than a 2-3 years old in the mix for CPU/GPU/mobo, and always using a new PSU, SSD/HDD combo, etc. But at some point those builds -- despite being far and away superior in both performance and longevity -- had no visibility compared to these garbage peddlers, so what's the point.

It also doesn't help that seemingly the same people buying these and other "entry level Core i5 gaming PCs" from slightly more legit vendors are also delusional when they go to unload them on the used marketplaces. The amount of people being like "I paid $1700 for this" and thinking that justifies asking over $1K for their machine is crazy.

[YouSeeMeTrolling]

Thank you for making content like this - a lot of gamers out there who aren't as in the know about PC hardware like we are (potentially moving from console), and eBay is absolutely filled with recommendations like this. It's very important that you do your Kitboga-esque duty and try your best to stop others from falling victim to the amount of scammers out there selling off their old hardware. Keep it up!

[KRAVER_]

I have been fixing PC since 1997 and this happens a lot. prob about 80+% of the PC I fix that customers call gaming PC are barely a gaming PC.
and a lot of these people say they just got it online within a year. and pay way more than it is worth usually double priced. this is sad.
I try to educate people or answer questions they have to not get ripped off, but it still happens over and over and over.
more creators should (NEED TO) post videos like this to spread awareness to not get ripped off.

[andreacimenti]

some years ago a friend of mine bought a pc, and after he did he asked me what did i think about the specs, it had a celeron gold with integrated graphics and 8 gb of ddr3, the worst part is that he paid 900euro for it

[ripleyk]

Currently, if you're upgrading like I recently was so you have parts to carry over (psu, drive, ram, and case), you can buy a ryzen 5 5500, b550m k, and rx 6650xt for about $400 new for a much stronger budget build. I opted for the 5600x for a little more, but you'll see loads more performance

[tonyjohansson]

I built a system like this for my younger brother for $200. That was 7 years ago. System specs were i7 2600, HP motherboard, 16GB DDR3, R9 280X, 500GB HDD, New 500W Corsair PSU, New Cooler Master Case with plastic sidepanel. He gamed on that computer until last year when we built him a new PC with new parts.

[Irihman]

Really looking forward to the labs' database so It becomes really easy to compair older hardware to newer stuff so it becomes waay easier to combat E-waste