Sell your old gaming system as a whole or sell it in parts?

[Mustey]

Say you have a 5 year old system and it's doing alright but you are itching to build something on the newfangled stuff.
Wondering if I could leverage the experience of people who have been doing this a lot? I've only ever sold one used GPU on ebay when I upgraded...

Here's my current thinking:

Pro's selling as a whole system:
- Less ads and sales work
- Can overhaul and optimize the system so that the buyer is as happy as possible (I take pride in doing that)
- Maybe people will pay more because it's a working system out of the box?
- Everything gone. You won't be left with some dead-end Intel mobo nobody wants

Pro's selling parts:
- Can get money sooner, assuming at least some of the parts are interesting to someone
- Can keep things like Case, PSU, SSD for next build
- Much easier and less risky to pack and ship parts rather than shipping a built system

Wondering what you have found that works best

 

[Mustey]

In my experience, parts. People want a particular part card or cpu or ram rather than an entire system. Cases in particular are heavy and people don't want to pay the shipping (and unless its a Lian Li or something similarly desirable they're simply not wanted anyhow). Its like breaking a car its always parts that sell not the entire unit.

damn, I was hoping to get rid of my case (Be Quiet! something). It's a great case but I want a change