PC with secondhand components, or might just get the budget components?

TukangUsapEmenq · December 15, 2020

Well, got a laptop that you can know the specs on my signature. Laptop's kind of struggling with game nowadays (and man I can't bear 88+ temps on this thing, poor thing), so, yeah. Consider the second price on the market of the laptop is nearly the same as the budget of the PC below.

Budget (including currency): Around $400 perhaps. Kind of Rp 5.500.000.

Country: Indonesia

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:

Games: Dota 2 (mostly the time), Red Dead Redemption 2, GTA 5, Cyberpunk 2077 (maybe?), etc.
Programs and workloads: Android Studio for littly-bittly experiments with Android apps, standard Office use, light editing with Premiere, few Photoshop, few Handbrake H.265 encoding (preferably using QSV as it's fast enough for me), etc. Perhaps later on would use some kind of web framework for late-semester assignments, or even maybe MATLAB.

Preference and things:

Already got a 120GB M.2 SATA SSD and a 480GB 2.5" SATA SSD from the laptop that I can reuse. Perhaps another 1TB HDD would be a nice.
CPU must be 4 cores as I'm kind of felt not-enough yet with this dual-core power already. Probably, if really possible, it could have Hyper-Threading/SMT.
USB 3.0. I hate 20 MB/s.
1050Ti, or older generation, or just newer, as long the performance's par with it. Brother got a system with the same card and it's actually good enough for me.
Basically can touch 60 fps with V-Sync in game nowadays, probably would get a 1080p IPS monitor, I don't really mind of quality and resolution on the game, I'm kind of frame-rate guy.

Now what's confusing is of should I really get old components or, just 'lower' perfomance but newer ones, consider something like on the Haswell era like i5-4460, or I'd get something newer that on the same price, with Athlon 3000G.

Bombastinator · December 15, 2020

On the subject of used vs new there is some variance. There are some components that should not be bought used and this tends to show in their pricing. PSUs and Storage are particularly iffy as they wear out and one doesn’t know how many “miles” are on them so to speak. CPUs are usually good. This shows in ther pricing though, there is rarely a lot of markdown for a used cpu. CPUs used to be more scary because there was the risk of buying one that had been burnt out by the previous owner. This is somewhat less of a problem with newer chips though. A cpu that has not been overclocked still has some additional value over one that has though. Motherboards can vary. If they’re good they’re good, but they can be blown occasionally. The big question with all used stuff is why is the owner selling? There is always a reason.

TukangUsapEmenq · December 15, 2020

41 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

On the subject of used vs new there is some variance. There are some components that should not be bought used and this tends to show in their pricing. PSUs and Storage are particularly iffy as they wear out and one doesn’t know how many “miles” are on them so to speak. CPUs are usually good. This shows in ther pricing though, there is rarely a lot of markdown for a used cpu. CPUs used to be more scary because there was the risk of buying one that had been burnt out by the previous owner. This is somewhat less of a problem with newer chips though. A cpu that has not been overclocked still has some additional value over one that has though. Motherboards can vary. If they’re good they’re good, but they can be blown occasionally.

I wouldn't dare to get used PSU and storage media somehow. Of course I'll get a new one for those. As for motherboard I probably have to research more of the price difference between them, and if it's doesn't that far I'd just get the new one, just to be safe. Few friends of mine actually got their CPUs secondhand and those run pretty nice so far.

In the context of performance, somehow. This what get me confused of should I get the new or secondhand one. I know, some newer, lower-budget chip could beat an old processor that's basically tiered higher (as like the example of 3000G vs 4460 above), and they can run pretty efficiently. But for example I'd like to run RDR2 on low-medium settings that can reach 60fps at least, without bottleneck of the CPU itself, what should I choose?

Used i7-4760 got the same price as the newer i3-10100 somehow here, yet the i3 got better performance. What I consider either is how the motherboard price is. But to be honest I'm not-so into Intel nowadays (especially since Ryzen), so probably should I go AMD either (although would be sacrificing QSV, in exchange of unlocked CPU)? i3-10100 with R3-3100 price aren't that far either.

Quote

The big question with all used stuff is why is the owner selling? There is always a reason.

Agree with this actually.

Bombastinator · December 15, 2020

4760 is a quite old part. I suspect it’s selling to people who already have motherboards and memory for it. An i3 10100 is a very similar chip but fits the current intel boards. The 10100 won’t overclock. The AMD equivalent is the 3100 and would need am4 stuff. It depends on what prices out cheaper in your area for the whole machine. I suspect it’s going to be the 10100, but one never knows. The AMD stuff used to be preferred because it was cheaper for equivalent performance, but prices on it got inflated so this is no longer necessarily the case.