TLDR: I wanted to upgrade my PC to current gen with a 1080ti but on the cheap as I didn't want to spend too much money, then I went and bought not one but TWO complete systems in the space of an hour at a cost of almost £2200 so I've ended up with 3 PC's. FML
This all happened last night in the space of 2 hours, below is my account of it and its long AF so by all means don't read it, but if you like a good story you can maybe relate to then by all means read on. I only decided to to write it up as 1.) I am full on buzzing, and 2.) I am kind of crapping myself and I want some reassurance that I might possibly have done the right thing and all will be okay.
Chapter 1 - The Plan
I guess we've all been there, recently I would imagine, given the current prices of high end GPU's. I really want to upgrade my current Rig which is still running a 4670k, DDR3 Ram and Dual 780's in SLI. It's still a good PC but lack of vRam and wanting to try out VR later this year made me decide it was time to upgrade. I ruled out selling off parts separately and building inside my current case as I would need to replace pretty much everything so it would be a bit of a pointless endeavour. With that in mind I figured I would buy a second hand EVGA 1080ti (for the transferable warranty) off Ebay, then buy most everything else new including an i5 8600k (the i7 8700k was too expensive for me to warrant it) so I would have warranty, and go from there. When I tallied everything up it was going to come close to the £1400 mark which really is more than I want to spend (spoiler, i'm a tight arse) but at the time it seemed like it was going to be my best bet for reliabilty vs Cost.
Chapter 2 - Change of Plan
I've been spending a lot of time on Ebay these last couple of weeks and I've seen every now and again a good Spec PC with an 8th Gen CPU and a 1080ti will come up and sell for £1200 ish, sometimes a little bit under (not often, but it does happen) and sometimes, they will go for a little bit more but with a decent monitor that I could sell on and bring the overall cost of the PC down even further. There are plenty of others with older CPU's but I am kinda set on getting Coffee Lake. At this point I was even more confused on what I was going to do and what the best option is for value vs cost, should I try grab a second hand bargain, or should I just get a second hand EVGA 1080ti and swallow the cost of buying most of the other parts new for the warranties . Then today happened......
Chapter 3 - New Plan
So there I am yesterday evening scanning through Ebay trying to find myself a bargain when I came across a PC sitting at £1100 with no bids and less than 2 hours left. I check it out like I have 100 others and I see it had an ROG Strix 1080ti. These cards go regularly second hand from around £550-£600 on ebay, so the rest of the PC is effectively only costing me as little as £500 (the PC is only 1 year old!) as I want me some of that 1080ti goodness. Fortunately it also has a EVGA 750w Gold PSU which was on my list of the parts I was going to buy new as well as 32GB 3200MHZ Ram that I can sell second hand on ebay and buy 16gig of Ram saving me a bit more money overall. Unfortunately though it was an AMD build (Ryzen 7 1800X) which I don't want as my PC is strictly for gaming and the i5 8600k that I was going to buy would net me a decent improvement in fps in most titles. I bought a second hand ROG Strix Z370-e motherboard on Friday for a bargain £80 so I figured I could just sell the 1800x and motherboard and use that money to buy an i5 8600k and call it a day. Or so I thought.
Chapter 4 - Slippery Slope
While waiting to see if the price of PC no.1 was going to increase in the remaining hour and a half, I carried on searching and came across PC number 2. Now little did I know it at the time, but this PC was about to turn into something a little bit special, it was at £1200 with a really good spec, the only caveat, and the reason it hadn't sold, was that it had a 1070. Now £1200 for a 1070 build is a lot of money in the used market, people do put them up for sale at that price but they rarely sell as you can get a used 1080ti build for the same price and most people care way more about the GPU than they do anything else. What made this one special is the rest of the spec. This PC is a real bargain spec wise for the money, it has an i7 8086k, ROG Maximus X Hero motherboard, Samsung 970 Evo NVME SSD, another 750w EVGA Power supply and some other good but not as noteable parts BUT it comes with a 28inch Asus 4k Monitor. After speaking to the guy I looked the Monitor up and its £300+ new, so overall it was an okay deal but still not great for me as even if I sold the monitor for £200 (worst case scenario) I'd still be left with a 1070 build for £1000, albeit a pretty damn well specced one, which is a little over the average price second hand anyway so not ideal. I was ready to write this one off as I thought £1200 was a bit on the expensive side for it second hand as it really relied on being able to reliably sell the monitor which isn't always easy, when I noticed he had the make an offer option. So i got in touch with the guy, ended up giving him a call and long story short he was a really nice guy and was willing to let it go for £1000 collected from his home as he was struggling to sell it. Now its a pretty good deal, as if i can sell the monitor on then any money i get for it knocks off the £1050 ish price to my door, which for the spec is nice imo, it's even nicer when I found out that he only built the PC 3 months ago and it had a 1070TI not a 1070 !!!.
Chapter 5 - **** get's real
It's at this point of the story where I knew I had a decision to make, now I could easily sell the 1070ti, maybe even the monitor and invest that money into a 1080ti and maybe if i get good prices I wont have to pay a penny for it so I end up with a really good spec 1080ti build for under £1100, far better than the spec I originally settled for on account of being the aforementioned tight arse, and for less money to boot. That's pretty much when it occured to me. What if I bought both PC's?? I mean PC no.1 already has the 1080ti, I wouldn't even need to go look for one on ebay. What if I took what I considered two reasonably good value PC's, Frankenstein'd them together, sell off all the parts that I didn't need in the hopes that as long as I can manage to sell everything, and at reasonable prices I could end up with one PC that is exceptionally good value. I could potentially end up with my dream PC for substantially less cost, maybe even under £1000. It's at this point where **** got real.
Chapter 6 - Savant mode engaged
I grabbed a paperpad and Pen and went full balls to the wall Rain Man. I had around one hour before PC no.1 ended to list everything both PC's had to offer, note what I wanted to keep, what I wanted to sell, and find out what prices I could reasonably hope to get for them, then weigh that up against the cost of my original spec that i was begrudginly settle for. The end result is, if I manage to sell everything at expected prices (baring in mind the stuff from PC no.1 has only been used a year, and from PC No.2 only 3 months so should help expedite sales) then I could possibly end up with a PC I could only dream of for under £1000.
Final Chapter - Am I mad??
It had never even occured to me to try something like this, I honestly wouldn't have thought I would have the balls to do it as all said and done i'm looking at an almost £2500 investment, but I've looked at the second hand market and i'm confident that so long as I can sell everything (the Monitor and AM4 board worry me the most) I can end up recovering a large amount of that money back and end up with something special and if I don't, well at least I tried. So with that thought in my mind and on paper (and much to my Mrs's dismay)I went ahead and bought both PC's. Below are the full specs of the PC's
PC No.1 (£1125 delivered)
EVGA 750W (Modular) Power Supply
1 TB Seagate FireCuda (Hybrid SSHD)
1 x 1.8 Metre UK Mains Power Cable
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 BIT (Code will be provided)
Corsair Crystal Series 570X (4 x RGB Fans)
512GB Samsung PM961 M.2 SSD, Read 3000MB/s, Write 1150MB/s
BE QUIET Dark Rock Pro 4
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Asus CROSSHAIR VI HERO (AMD X370)
Corsair 32GB Vengeance LPX 3200MHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - 11GB ASUS STRIX OC
PC No.2 (£1040 collected, 6h round trip though. Sad face)
Phanteks Enthoo EVOLV Mid tower ATX
ASUS ROG Intel Z370 MAXIMUS X HERO
Intel Core i7 8086K Limited Edition 40th Anniversary CPU
Noctua NH-D15 Dual Radiator CPU Cooler with two Fans
Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz
Samsung 970 EVO 250 GB Internal SSD - M.2
ASUS GeForce GTX 1070TI 8 GB ROG STRIX Graphics Card
GAME CAPTURE HD60 PRO CAPTURE CARD - PC (1GC109901002)
750w EVGA power supply
Asus VP28u 28 inch, 4K/UHD, 1ms Response, FreeSync™ Gaming
Flash drive with windows 10 pro pre loaded
AFX keybored AFX gaming mouse AFX desk mic
Here is what I hope the finished Spec will be (I will have to buy the Case and the CPU cooler for £250ish, selling off the two unwanted cases and CPU coolers will pretty much pay for both).
CPU - i7 8086k
GPU - ROG Strix 1080ti 11GB
MBD - Asus ROG Maximus X Hero
Case - Lian-li PC-0qq Dynamic
RAM - 16GB 3200MHZ Corsair Vengeance
AIO - NZXT Kraken X62
SSD - Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVME SSD
PSU - EVGA 750W Gold
HDD - 1TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit
Hope you enjoyed the read, Wish my luck lads (and ladies).
This all happened last night in the space of 2 hours, below is my account of it and its long AF so by all means don't read it, but if you like a good story you can maybe relate to then by all means read on. I only decided to to write it up as 1.) I am full on buzzing, and 2.) I am kind of crapping myself and I want some reassurance that I might possibly have done the right thing and all will be okay.
Chapter 1 - The Plan
I guess we've all been there, recently I would imagine, given the current prices of high end GPU's. I really want to upgrade my current Rig which is still running a 4670k, DDR3 Ram and Dual 780's in SLI. It's still a good PC but lack of vRam and wanting to try out VR later this year made me decide it was time to upgrade. I ruled out selling off parts separately and building inside my current case as I would need to replace pretty much everything so it would be a bit of a pointless endeavour. With that in mind I figured I would buy a second hand EVGA 1080ti (for the transferable warranty) off Ebay, then buy most everything else new including an i5 8600k (the i7 8700k was too expensive for me to warrant it) so I would have warranty, and go from there. When I tallied everything up it was going to come close to the £1400 mark which really is more than I want to spend (spoiler, i'm a tight arse) but at the time it seemed like it was going to be my best bet for reliabilty vs Cost.
Chapter 2 - Change of Plan
I've been spending a lot of time on Ebay these last couple of weeks and I've seen every now and again a good Spec PC with an 8th Gen CPU and a 1080ti will come up and sell for £1200 ish, sometimes a little bit under (not often, but it does happen) and sometimes, they will go for a little bit more but with a decent monitor that I could sell on and bring the overall cost of the PC down even further. There are plenty of others with older CPU's but I am kinda set on getting Coffee Lake. At this point I was even more confused on what I was going to do and what the best option is for value vs cost, should I try grab a second hand bargain, or should I just get a second hand EVGA 1080ti and swallow the cost of buying most of the other parts new for the warranties . Then today happened......
Chapter 3 - New Plan
So there I am yesterday evening scanning through Ebay trying to find myself a bargain when I came across a PC sitting at £1100 with no bids and less than 2 hours left. I check it out like I have 100 others and I see it had an ROG Strix 1080ti. These cards go regularly second hand from around £550-£600 on ebay, so the rest of the PC is effectively only costing me as little as £500 (the PC is only 1 year old!) as I want me some of that 1080ti goodness. Fortunately it also has a EVGA 750w Gold PSU which was on my list of the parts I was going to buy new as well as 32GB 3200MHZ Ram that I can sell second hand on ebay and buy 16gig of Ram saving me a bit more money overall. Unfortunately though it was an AMD build (Ryzen 7 1800X) which I don't want as my PC is strictly for gaming and the i5 8600k that I was going to buy would net me a decent improvement in fps in most titles. I bought a second hand ROG Strix Z370-e motherboard on Friday for a bargain £80 so I figured I could just sell the 1800x and motherboard and use that money to buy an i5 8600k and call it a day. Or so I thought.
Chapter 4 - Slippery Slope
While waiting to see if the price of PC no.1 was going to increase in the remaining hour and a half, I carried on searching and came across PC number 2. Now little did I know it at the time, but this PC was about to turn into something a little bit special, it was at £1200 with a really good spec, the only caveat, and the reason it hadn't sold, was that it had a 1070. Now £1200 for a 1070 build is a lot of money in the used market, people do put them up for sale at that price but they rarely sell as you can get a used 1080ti build for the same price and most people care way more about the GPU than they do anything else. What made this one special is the rest of the spec. This PC is a real bargain spec wise for the money, it has an i7 8086k, ROG Maximus X Hero motherboard, Samsung 970 Evo NVME SSD, another 750w EVGA Power supply and some other good but not as noteable parts BUT it comes with a 28inch Asus 4k Monitor. After speaking to the guy I looked the Monitor up and its £300+ new, so overall it was an okay deal but still not great for me as even if I sold the monitor for £200 (worst case scenario) I'd still be left with a 1070 build for £1000, albeit a pretty damn well specced one, which is a little over the average price second hand anyway so not ideal. I was ready to write this one off as I thought £1200 was a bit on the expensive side for it second hand as it really relied on being able to reliably sell the monitor which isn't always easy, when I noticed he had the make an offer option. So i got in touch with the guy, ended up giving him a call and long story short he was a really nice guy and was willing to let it go for £1000 collected from his home as he was struggling to sell it. Now its a pretty good deal, as if i can sell the monitor on then any money i get for it knocks off the £1050 ish price to my door, which for the spec is nice imo, it's even nicer when I found out that he only built the PC 3 months ago and it had a 1070TI not a 1070 !!!.
Chapter 5 - **** get's real
It's at this point of the story where I knew I had a decision to make, now I could easily sell the 1070ti, maybe even the monitor and invest that money into a 1080ti and maybe if i get good prices I wont have to pay a penny for it so I end up with a really good spec 1080ti build for under £1100, far better than the spec I originally settled for on account of being the aforementioned tight arse, and for less money to boot. That's pretty much when it occured to me. What if I bought both PC's?? I mean PC no.1 already has the 1080ti, I wouldn't even need to go look for one on ebay. What if I took what I considered two reasonably good value PC's, Frankenstein'd them together, sell off all the parts that I didn't need in the hopes that as long as I can manage to sell everything, and at reasonable prices I could end up with one PC that is exceptionally good value. I could potentially end up with my dream PC for substantially less cost, maybe even under £1000. It's at this point where **** got real.
Chapter 6 - Savant mode engaged
I grabbed a paperpad and Pen and went full balls to the wall Rain Man. I had around one hour before PC no.1 ended to list everything both PC's had to offer, note what I wanted to keep, what I wanted to sell, and find out what prices I could reasonably hope to get for them, then weigh that up against the cost of my original spec that i was begrudginly settle for. The end result is, if I manage to sell everything at expected prices (baring in mind the stuff from PC no.1 has only been used a year, and from PC No.2 only 3 months so should help expedite sales) then I could possibly end up with a PC I could only dream of for under £1000.
Final Chapter - Am I mad??
It had never even occured to me to try something like this, I honestly wouldn't have thought I would have the balls to do it as all said and done i'm looking at an almost £2500 investment, but I've looked at the second hand market and i'm confident that so long as I can sell everything (the Monitor and AM4 board worry me the most) I can end up recovering a large amount of that money back and end up with something special and if I don't, well at least I tried. So with that thought in my mind and on paper (and much to my Mrs's dismay)I went ahead and bought both PC's. Below are the full specs of the PC's
PC No.1 (£1125 delivered)
EVGA 750W (Modular) Power Supply
1 TB Seagate FireCuda (Hybrid SSHD)
1 x 1.8 Metre UK Mains Power Cable
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64 BIT (Code will be provided)
Corsair Crystal Series 570X (4 x RGB Fans)
512GB Samsung PM961 M.2 SSD, Read 3000MB/s, Write 1150MB/s
BE QUIET Dark Rock Pro 4
AMD Ryzen 7 1800X
Asus CROSSHAIR VI HERO (AMD X370)
Corsair 32GB Vengeance LPX 3200MHz
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - 11GB ASUS STRIX OC
PC No.2 (£1040 collected, 6h round trip though. Sad face)
Phanteks Enthoo EVOLV Mid tower ATX
ASUS ROG Intel Z370 MAXIMUS X HERO
Intel Core i7 8086K Limited Edition 40th Anniversary CPU
Noctua NH-D15 Dual Radiator CPU Cooler with two Fans
Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz
Samsung 970 EVO 250 GB Internal SSD - M.2
ASUS GeForce GTX 1070TI 8 GB ROG STRIX Graphics Card
GAME CAPTURE HD60 PRO CAPTURE CARD - PC (1GC109901002)
750w EVGA power supply
Asus VP28u 28 inch, 4K/UHD, 1ms Response, FreeSync™ Gaming
Flash drive with windows 10 pro pre loaded
AFX keybored AFX gaming mouse AFX desk mic
Here is what I hope the finished Spec will be (I will have to buy the Case and the CPU cooler for £250ish, selling off the two unwanted cases and CPU coolers will pretty much pay for both).
CPU - i7 8086k
GPU - ROG Strix 1080ti 11GB
MBD - Asus ROG Maximus X Hero
Case - Lian-li PC-0qq Dynamic
RAM - 16GB 3200MHZ Corsair Vengeance
AIO - NZXT Kraken X62
SSD - Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVME SSD
PSU - EVGA 750W Gold
HDD - 1TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD
Windows 10 Pro 64 bit
Hope you enjoyed the read, Wish my luck lads (and ladies).
