PC Parts you should NOT buy secondhand

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[krazycharlie]

The PSU is the main component that comes to mind when avoiding the second hand market. You never know what any given used PSU has been put through, so it's better to have peace of mind and get something brand new.

[Sheila_Chu]

So i wasnt crazy when i was looking for storage secondhand and saw that they literally were the same price, or even *more* expensive than brand new, so i ended up buying brand new. Also interesting how its the same for Canadians too, as it is here in Norway, probably even other parts of the world as well

[bosstowndynamics]

I don't know about Canada, but in Australia it's very common that people selling used aggressively over value their hardware. You get stuff like 5 year old laptops where the person spent 2k new and won't let it go for less than 1500, in some cases it's so bad that it's cheaper on a performance per dollar basis to buy new

[nslayer]

3 things not to buy used
1. Storage
2. Power Supply
3. Motherboard

[DavidUnderhill]

Number 1 item you should avoid is anything that Linus has touched as it may have been dropped

[Arsonist]

My used ebay GTX1060 6GB lasted two years just fine, and thanks to the crazy GPU market I sold it for more than I paid for it 😂

[chiefbeef]

A mate of mine when he first got into PC gaming essentially bought a complete PC second hand, then slapped in whatever the latest GPU was at the time and the best CPU the motherboard could take, turned it on and it instantly fried. Like the PSU failed literally immediately and cooked everything in there, dude lost a good £700+ of new components because he didn't want to invest a little more to just get it all new. Defo a lesson in not risking it with PSUs, even scared me into buying a new one since mine was quite old.

[bradclapp]

Doesn't matter if it's new or secondhand storage

HAVE A BACKUP OF IMPORTANT DATA. All storage can and will fail sooner or later.

[micksam]

I've done a lot of second hand storage purchases, but it's all enterprise SAS drives, generally being tossed in bulk on eBay by companies upgrading large arrays.

[m-w-y]

I actually get second hand storage from shops that return any faulty products and replace them with new ones right away regardless if they are secondhand or box packed.
the reason being, nobody keeps secondhand storage for sale unless if its full health and they can sell it for about 10$ less the box packed price.

[TheGameBench]

To be fair... SSDs are much easier to gauge their condition. Hard drives are a crap shoot, even looking at power on hours. That being said, I find that you don't really save much buying a used SSD. For HDD's... do it, but don't use it to store data you care about.

[onemorepsi]

It'll be interesting to see the results of the mining video. A GPU that's been properly undervolted can potentially run cooler when its mining compared to a gaming session. But I've also seen a lot of people on mining pool discords that did zero research (and therefore zero tuning on the card) so might be a crap shoot.

[orangeapples]

For used storage drives try local computer shops. I wanted a 1TB 2.5” HDD and one near me sold it to me for $10. They’ve probably done tens or hundreds of SSD upgrades for people that they have no idea what else to do with these drives. I guess they are not worth the cost to recycle or they only recycle the really bad ones.

[gaatjeniksaan]

I've bought 3 graphics cards from 3 different people all claiming there are no problems with them at all, selling them because they upgraded their pc's. Picked them up in person, all died within 2 months

[OfficialScottR]

Surely power supplies are a definite thing to avoid getting used

[welshcorgi]

In UK. I bought all my components from Cex, paid a little extra than off ebay but had a 2yr warranty for the extra peace of mind

[MajatekYT]

I appreciate that the video ended right after Luke saying yep. Not before. Not halfway through. He agreed with Linus and we get to hear him verify Linus and his educated opinion.

[KurniawanRamadhan]

Isn't the most worrying secondhand pc part is the power supply not the storage? I've found many who got into trouble buying sketchy secondhand power supply

[brickmack]

Really I'd expect commercial applications to be more tolerant of used storage, since there tend to be large numbers of machines needing local storage either just as a boot drive, or for temp stuff (eg a rendering server that might need a few terabytes for assets/caching/output, but it gets wiped as soon as a task is done), and the important data will all be centrally stored and backed up multiple times over. If a workstation craps itself, oh well, takes like 5 minutes to swap the drive for a fresh one off the pile and you'll have at worst lost a few hours of work

[Aaron_Jensen]

I got a used 1080 Ti FTW3 as an upgrade for my brother's PC when prices crashed. Worked great for almost 2 months before dying. Sometimes you get lucky others you get burned.