dizmo

Some apps send way too many notifications. I go through apps often and have to adjust what they send messages for. Ever had to use LinkedIn? Probably the worst offender. Right now I'm annoyed by the notifications Google is pushing (news, promos), but I haven't looked into how to get rid of them yet. The Pixel is a decent device but I don't think I'd get another.

Ehh I dno this doesn't really take much time. There's only like 5 categories you really need to look through on eBay and you're covered. Definitely wouldn't have been covered by just working.

Depends how much you're fine spending. It's hard when it's for a single item, but there were a few 4080/Super computers I was looking at. They're usually around $1,200 (US). I think I could have gotten one for $1,000. The key right now I think would be to find one with either a lot of RAM, or multiple SSDs. I almost bought a computer that had 8.5TB of 990 PRO SSD storage. It was $800 US. I could have doubled my money. So they're out there. If you had a machine with 2 decent SSDs and 64GB of RAM you'd cover most of the cost I'd think.

Hello! The time has come! My last build was in an ITX case, the Streacom DA2, and while I love it's design, I don't love having a PC on my desk. It takes up space, it's loud when gaming, it's not ideal. I'm also not a huge fan of the massive restrictions using an ITX case brings. Since I'll be relocating somewhere with some more space, I've decided now is the perfect time to build a floor dwelling machine. I originally set out for this to be a "free to me" PC, however with current price increases and shortages, I've decided I'd be happy ending up spending $500 when all is said and done. Originally this was supposed to be bought and built over the course of 6 weeks, but it's taken me...ages to get this written. It did take longer too, as there were a few setbacks with finding the parts I needed. I did a similar build 4 years ago: @LinusTech @Slick might enjoy this, @spacepickle you said you wanted to see when this was up, and thanks to @Crunchy Dragon with the help for the OS transfer. The Ethos I've never enjoyed simply going to the store, picking out parts and buying them. I do it often for friends, but for myself, it's too easy. I like more of a challenge, and that's what building a PC like this gives me. Plus who doesn't like getting packages in the mail? The Desired Outcome My current build, a Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB of RAM and 500GB/1TB of storage and a GTX 1050. The build has gone through several different graphics cards, and I had an opportunity to sell the 3070 Ti for $150 more than I paid for it, so I jumped on it, as I had the idea of building something new growing in my mind. The 1050 is actually shockingly capable of playing older titles! I wanted to go to a DDR5 platform in a larger case, with a video card that could handle most anything I threw at it, while ultimately spending as little as possible. Where I Buy From Almost exclusively eBay. While in the past I have found excellent deals locally, with eBay you have almost foolproof buyer protection. I've had several complete PCs I've purchased show up with massive amounts of damage. Simply file a claim with eBay; the seller can either take it back, offer a partial refund, or offer a full refund. They refuse, or ghost you? Full refund. It does, however, take a couple of weeks. The Acquired Loot! Below I'll show the items I pulled parts from to complete my build. I'll show the cost, what I kept, and what I sold, with an ending result for each category. Case: I bought this computer for the RAM and the case (also the cooler, but more on that later). Sold the 14900k and motherboard for $650, the PSU for $100, RTX 2080Ti for $360, and the cooler for $125. Kept the 64GB of RAM and the case. Cost: $1,350 Profit from items sold: $1,235 Result: -$115 Power Supply: Managed to score this lot for a pretty good price. 4 Razer Katana Chroma PSUs. Kept one for the build, sold the others for $120 each. Then we arrive at a problem. I bought an adapter for the GPU (thanks 16 pin) off of Amazon, and about once a day it would restart. GPU would spin full speed, black screen, but computer would still be playing video. I looked through the PSUs I had on hand and one of them turned out to include the 16 pin cable, so I installed that, and it solved the problem. I sold the Razer PSU for about what I paid for the replacement so the cost there is a wash (if not a little bit more profit on my end). Cost: $250 Added adapter cost: $25 Profit from items sold: $360 Result: +$85 Cooler: Usually I'll try and snag a really nice cooler and just take a bit of a hit on it, but one of the PCs I bought had a 360mm rad. Cool, I thought, I'll just use that. Wrong. The video card I got is massive, and the 360mm rad wouldn't fit in the case with the card. So, I looked up what some of the best air coolers are, and ended up buying a Sudokoo SK700V. It's actually a very, very well thought out cooler. It has a screen to show various system stats, and the fan slides on a rail instead of using those clips to secure to the tower. Harder to replace? Absolutely. Don't see that being a huge issue though, and if it fails I'll just buy another. Cost: $100 Profit from items sold: Included in case section Result: -$100 Motherboard: Forgot to take a pic of these before I sold them Was pretty happy with this grab, as it was right before the RAM prices shot through the roof. Got the Gigabyte X870 Aurous Elite WiFi7 motherboard, Samsung 2TB 990 SSD, and 32GB of RAM for $550. From this kit I was aiming to keep the motherboard, so I sold the RAM for $400 and the SSD for $425. Cost: $550 Profit from items sold: $825 Result: +$275 CPU: I managed to score 11 'as is, untested' CPUs for $650. This one was a real gamble, but with the price it ended at I had a good feeling I wouldn't be out too much money, even if only one or two worked. Also, people pay oddly high amounts for defective chips on eBay. Honestly I probably wouldn't have bought this if I was doing an AM4 build because damaged pins are really hit or miss, but I was only hoping one of the AM5 CPUs worked. I was actually pretty impressed, a lot of the CPUs included unused coolers! Score. One of the 9600x's, the most important CPUs, was just in the box floating around. Welp. I gave the CPUs that had bent pins to my dad, as he's retired and loves to tinker. I also bought several motherboards to sell the CPUs once they were straightened out, as it'd be easier and I could make sure they're functional. This is what it included: AMD 5900XT Only a couple slightly bent pins, ended up working great! Put in a motherboard and sold for $325. AMD 5900 Looked fine, tested and worked perfectly. Sold with motherboard for $300. AMD 5800XT Had a few bent pins, but they straightened out and CPU worked great. Thrown in a board and sold for $280. AMD 5800XT Mangled. Didn't even bother trying to fix it. Sold for $35. AMD 5500 Mangled. Didn't bother with it. Sold for $20. AMD 5500 Actually missing pins, didn't bother. Sold for $15. AMD 5500 Didn't have any signs of use and worked perfectly. Sold for $60. AMD 5500 Didn't have any signs of use and worked perfectly. Sold for $60. AMD 3600 Didn't have any signs of use and worked perfectly. Sold for $40. AMD 9600x No obvious damage or marks, however wouldn't boot. Sold for $65. AMD 9600x Success! I'm so glad one of them worked, and the gamble paid off. I tested the defective one first so it was a little stressful testing this one. It booted up after a pretty lengthy AMD memory training. Used in the build. Cost: $650 Cost of motherboards: $350 Profit from items sold: $1,200 Result: +$200 Storage: This was a pretty sweet find, I managed to grab this Asus m.2 add in card full of 2TB NVME drives. Since the 2TB is for game storage, I wasn't terribly worried about how much it'd been used. Sold the remaining SSDs for $200 each, sold the card for $60. I'll be using the 500GB that's the current game drive on my old system as the primary drive on this one. Cost: $500 Profit from items sold: $600 Result: $+100 GPU: This was one of my favourite finds in the build so far. I saw this listed on eBay. It was $500US, but it was listed as local only. I waited a couple weeks, then thought I'd throw him a message and see if he'd ship and that I'd pay what it cost. I woke up the next morning and he said sure, and added $120 shipping to the listing. I actually had a very similar system I missed out on before Christmas because the same thing happened and by the time I woke up someone had snagged it. System was a 13700k, 240mm AIO, 32GB DDR5 RAM, 1TB SSD, RTX 4070 Ti Super. Kept the card, sold the rest. Cost: $950 Profit from items sold: $800 Result: -$150 A Few Pictures From The Build Process Final Build: Gigabyte X870 Aurous Elite WiFi7 AMD 9600x CPU Sudokoo SK700V cooler 64GB 6000mhz DDR5 RAM 500GB/2TB NVME SSD storage Gigabyte RTX 4070 Ti Super GPU MSI 750W PSU Fractal North case I'm pretty happy with the build! I was thinking of trying to get an X3D CPU instead, but after a lot of thought I really don't think the games I play are going to see any considerable improvement by going with a faster CPU. At least, not one that I'll notice. Issues That Arose Nothing ever goes 100% smoothly, and here I'll lay out a couple of issues I had during this dungeon run. I bought a computer that stated it came with a 7800X3D, 7900 XTX, 32GB of RAM etc. However when it arrived, it only had a 7700x, RX7600, 32GB of RAM. I wrote him, the seller didn't really seem to want to do much (there were boxes of multiple PCs included that were for the higher end components, so I assume they were trying to pull a fast one and hoped someone who didn't know what they were looking at would buy it). They were going to offer some money back, or I could have filed a complaint...but it was right around Christmas, I got busy with Christmas things, and by the time I'd found some free time it was too late. PC was bought for $1,000, sold for $1,400. I bought a few things that I didn't end up using. I got a box of assorted fans for $60, mainly for the 2 boxes of unopened magnetic RGB fans. However, they're ARGB and don't work with the RGB hub I got. There's also way more wiring than I thought there'd be, and gave up on them and sold everything. I managed to get about $100, so I didn't lose out on anything, but it was kind of an annoying journey to go on. I bought a computer for the case, but when it arrived it had a broken foot. Not a huge issue, as I got it ridiculously cheap ($285), and had already ordered the Fractal computer as well, but it's something you'll have to consider; cases often arrive with slight dents, broken feet, etc. Maybe 2/5 computers will come properly packed. I sold the PC for $750 and moved on. I needed to find a different PSU to go with the 16pin GPU. I probably could have just went with a different adapter, but this just feels better. The WiFi would not detect AT ALL. I did most of the setup with a driverless USB WiFi stick. I redid the BIOS, I pulled the CMOS battery, I updated all drivers, I installed both sets (they switched between two brands during the board revision)...nothing. Then I saw a Reddit post that said just hold the power button for 15 (or 30?) seconds. Did that. WiFi was instantly detected on the next start up. Things To Keep In Mind & Tips This process took time. I did manage to buy the majority of this over a 3 week period, but usually it takes a couple of months if you want to wait for the best deals. This build, in total, probably took me about 2.5 months. If you live in a small town, it'll be a lot harder to sell the computer components to recoup your costs. Know your market, plan around it. Cases have a high chance of being damaged. You need to be able to either live with small imperfections, or make sure you're only buying from sellers that are going to pack it very well. Personally I like the possibility of getting a damaged PC, as the person rarely wants it back and you'll get some free parts. I live close to the border, so I don't have to incur a lot of shipping charges (for other Canadians looking into doing this). There are several companies you can use to import things from the US, and some even ship from their locations to you at very reasonable rates. Shippsy is fantastic for this, and I strongly recommend them. Their customer service is also fantastic; once I called and got the we're busy message, so I hung up. 3 minutes later one of their CS members called and asked if I needed help. A+. This almost definitely requires a credit card to do easily. Though, if you're really good at buying and selling, you might be able to do this without being out any money at all if you can buy and sell before your bill is due. I don't recommend counting on that at all, but it's definitely a possibility. You will almost certainly win auctions that don't get shipped. Part of the game. Just know that eBay has you covered, but it will take around 2 or 3 weeks for that money to be refunded to your card. If you search for newly listed first, you can snag wicked deals. Send lots of offers! Offers galore! Best Offer auctions have led me to some fantastic bargains. Some people just get fed up when somethings been relisted 4 or 5 times and they've gotten no bites. I used to only go with the Auctions, as they're far easier to search through, but there's real gold in the Best Offer section. Buy a small box of assorted computer screws. They're about $15, but you'll be so, so thankful that you did. I have lots of spares so I didn't need to even open mine, but it's there as a backup. The little magnetic flashlight that I used to stick to my case as I built was a godsend. If you're aging or don't have the best eyesight, you should get one too. Make a spreadsheet. Figure out how much you'll sell each part or group of components from what you're buying and make sure the numbers make sense to you. Always assume you'll get less than you think. Conclusion That's the end! You've made it back to the surface. Here's where we ended up: Money spent: $4,375 Money recouped: $5,020 End cost: $0 (made $645) If you want to include the items that I didn't end up using in the build at all and the PCs from the Issues section, the numbers look like this: Money spent: $5,720 Money recouped: $7,270 End cost: $0 (made $1,550) Plus, if you include the money I sold my old PC for (which also didn't cost me anything), then my total profit from my new PC build journey is $2,550. Not bad for a full PC in today's market. I hope this shows how you, too, can go out and get yourself a great PC for not a lot of cash. Used parts are a goldmine! While it's easy to think "there's no way I'd be able to replicate this, the deals he got are probably super rare"...they're really not. They're there all the time, you simply have to look. It's taken me a while to write this all out, and last week I bought the following for $600: 9600x 16GB DDR4 RAM kit 16GB DDR5 RAM kit 1660 Super GPU 4060 Ti GPU My dad needed the CPU for his new build, so with the money I'll get for the other items it should come out as free. He also messaged a year old Facebook ad for a new 48GB kit of DDR5 that was listed for $150...they said they still had it, and he of course jumped on it. This is just to show that these deals are on there all the time, you've just got to take a gander. I'll probably keep this computer until the 6000 series is a year old, or on it's way for replacement, then build another. Though, perhaps I'll actually aim to spend $2,000. 6090, anyone? Insert your "but the 6090 alone will cost $15,000" joke here.

Seems trolly considering the additional cooler isn't even touching, thus only causes restriction for the fans.

I doubt you even make use of the drive you have now. IMO it'd be a waste of money.

I wouldn't get a Pixel now, we're only a few months away from the new one. I'd go Samsung personally. I haven't been the hugest fan of the Pixel so far. The camera is pretty good but I've had tons of little niggles that kind of make me wish I'd just bought an S25 Plus.

If you're using twice the average then it might help if you looked at what you're usage habits are. In terms of wages, if you haven't seen increases in a couple of years then I'd be asking for a raise or other employment. I've worked for a few companies that give cost of living increases. However, it's also normal here that you need to change companies to make more money.

20 Euro a month doesn't seem as extreme as you're implying. Ireland's energy prices seem insane though, you guys should really invest in a nuclear plant.