Building a budget gaming PC from thrift store hardware - best way to get Windows?

[Shmael1053]

Hey there. I've been trying my hardest to game on a mid-grade laptop for three years now with about as much success as you'd expect. After a good two weeks of binge-watching LTT and Craft Computing (particularly Linus' Scrapyard Wars and CC's budget gaming PC video) I've learned that supposedly I can build myself a serviceable gaming rig for $200-300 USD by buying used components and an old office PC. I haven't bought anything yet but I'm currently doing research to make sure I can actually pull this off.

Fortunately for me, one of the Goodwill stores in my area has a "Goodwill Computer Works" next door. It's basically just a room full of old office PCs and ancient accessories, but their prices on the office PCs seemingly blow Newegg out of the water, and they include a monitor, mouse, and keyboard with all PC purchases. Most of their full systems are actually outside of my budget (their systems on display are $200-350 alone, which wouldn't leave me with enough for an add-in GPU) but I found a stack of towers in a corner that were very reasonably priced.

 

The main two I'm interested in are:

Dell Optiplex, Intel i5-3470, 250 GB HDD (RPM unknown), 4 GB RAM (generation unspecified), Windows 10. $69.99 USD

HP Pro series, Intel i7-4590, 8 GB RAM (generation unspecified). No hard drive and therefore no OS. $99.99 USD

 

Obviously, the HP is by far the more attractive option. A $30 upcharge for a Haswell i7 and another 4 GB of RAM? Yes please. The only problem is, since it doesn't have a hard drive or OS, I'd need to buy one elsewhere, and the cost to buy a drive and a copy of Windows 10 would be well above the $30 savings and cut into my GPU budget. So, is there a better way for me to get a drive and copy of Windows for a currently driveless PC? Or should I just go the budget route and buy the Dell?

 

TL;DR

I'm building a budget "starter" gaming rig out of a thrift store PC. I found a well-specced HP tower for $99 but it has no hard drive or OS. The same shop is selling a Dell tower with worse specs but a hard drive and Windows 10 for $69

Should/can I:

• Buy the HP tower, then get a used hard drive from Craigslist/eBay/Newegg, and a fresh copy of Windows?
• Buy the HP tower, and the Dell tower, and move the hard drive from the Dell to the HP, giving the HP the Dell's copy of Windows and giving me an emergency spare parts PC?
• Just buy the Dell tower and use the savings on more RAM and a GPU, as even the best GPU I'm likely to get (GTX 1050 low profile) won't be bottlenecked by an i5?

[Phentos]

You can either run Windows without activating it or buy an el cheapo key from a grey market site such as Kinguin. 

 

Not activating Windows merely means you lose out on most of the customization features and you'll have a permanent watermark on the bottom right corner of your desktop that stays there no matter what you do.

[Guest]

You can run it inactivated, you won't be able to change the wallpaper and your "personalize" your desktop but it's free and infinite. Here is the ISO download link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

[iamdarkyoshi]

Nab the windows 7 key off an old laptop.

 

They'll still activate windows 10!

[PopsicleHustler]

I bough Win 10 Pro key on eBay for 10 euros, not sure if I got lucky for what.

[TechMasterMind]

On 8/16/2018 at 1:53 PM, Shmael1053 said:

-snip-

OK so there is actually a few moral decisions to be made here:

If you buy a cheaper key off of a site like king guin not only are you probably partaking in money laundering you're also costing you and Microsoft money by doing so (worst choice).

Pirate it - it's free and you're not losing Microsoft any money. (This is ok if you really don't want a watermark and want backgrounds really badly. Or just need that feeling of completion in your life)

Download it - it's free. Only downside its that egregious watermark that... I hardly ever notice. (This is the solution I recommend.)

 

Basically get the i7 and download windows 10 Ram is surprisingly expensive and it should perform up to 35% better + 1TB of storage is like 20$ these days ++++ you can actually use the integrated graphics for older games while you wait AS you should! Wait for the next gen nVidia GPUs as even if they only perform 25% better and don't interest you, you can point out to sellers of gtx 970s or gtx 1050s whatever that their cards are 1 or 2 generations behind and x however many years old tech and they will be cheaper even i you don't try and haggle them down.

Also pro tip for buying ebay items: picclick is a website where you can search up your listing and look for how long it had been on ebay this got me a 1440p monitor recently for £80 because it had been on for 45 days.

[Herman Mcpootis]

7 hours ago, Shmael1053 said:

The main two I'm interested in are:

Dell Optiplex, Intel i5-3470, 250 GB HDD (RPM unknown), 4 GB RAM (generation unspecified), Windows 10. $69.99 USD

HP Pro series, Intel i7-4590, 8 GB RAM (generation unspecified). No hard drive and therefore no OS. $99.99 USD

 

Obviously, the HP is by far the more attractive option. A $30 upcharge for a Haswell i7 and another 4 GB of RAM? Yes please. The only problem is, since it doesn't have a hard drive or OS, I'd need to buy one elsewhere, and the cost to buy a drive and a copy of Windows 10 would be well above the $30 savings and cut into my GPU budget. So, is there a better way for me to get a drive and copy of Windows for a currently driveless PC? Or should I just go the budget route and buy the Dell?

a used HDD doesn't cost much and will get the job done, you can get the CD-key off reddit for $25. or you can just leave it unactivated for now and buy the key when you have money(or just live with the watermark). BTW, there's no i7-4590, that's an i5.

[Shmael1053]

On 8/16/2018 at 9:01 PM, Herman Mcpootis said:

BTW, there's no i7-4590, that's an i5.

I'll have to go back to the shop tomorrow and look... Goodwill doesn't let people take photos for some reason and I didn't think to write it down, so I got that model number from the Google search history on my phone. The (handwritten) sticker on the HP tower definitely said i7, but given the fact that they had their spare processors on display by either putting them loose on shelves or taping them to notecards with packing tape, pins-side-down, I'm not ruling out the idea that they mislabeled it.

 

Oh yeah, general reply, this thread was actually super helpful so thanks to everyone who replied. My ballpark for HDD prices was based on googling "used hard drive" while still in the store so I kind of assumed they were more expensive than they actually are. I also have two disused laptops I can probably steal the Windows Key from to unlock a copy of 10, so problem solved. Once I actually start buying parts I'll probably start a build log thread; when that happens I'll definitely link it here in case anyone is interested.

[Shmael1053]

On 8/16/2018 at 10:01 PM, Herman Mcpootis said:

BTW, there's no i7-4590, that's an i5.

Went back to the store, and yeah, my Google search history was not an accurate source of information. They actually had 2 HP towers, one with an i7-4770 and one with a 4790. The 4770 tower actually comes with a hard drive, but as it turns out, all of the towers in the discount corner (even the ones with drives) don't have Windows. So it's a good thing this thread ended up being about the best ways to get Windows 10...