Are Open Box PC parts worth it? - This PC is almost ALL Open Box items!

so we're at Micro Center today and we're going to do an interesting video you guys know in my lately I've been doing a bunch of like Marketplace purchases or like credit purchases and Sh what kind of deals you can get in the use space but what if you don't want to take the risk of having some shady skevy guy sell you something that's either stolen or doesn't work we're going to talk about open box items today so today we're at Micro Center we're going to shop for as like best open box items that we can find to save as much money as possible and talk about things you need to consider when you buy an open box item from a brick and morar store like today's video is brought to you by the new really super cool Jus sense melty connector shirt you know paying tribute to one of the best designs that's clearly ever existed and if you don't like the vapor wave colors we got our OG gray and red colors available now so get yours by following the link in the description below nice ow I have a thigh cramp okay so huge thanks to Micro Center for sponsoring today's video and letting us come into the store and really just sort of per peruse and look at whatever we want when it comes to open box so open box is interesting um Microcenter has basically a 30-day return polic on even all PC components including CPUs and stuff so there's a real opportunity to be able to find some good deals on items that have been returned now the first question you probably are asking yourself is why was the product returned there's many different reasons uh maybe the person bought it realized they couldn't quite afford it or they had some buyer remorse for whatever reason performance aside they take the product back to Microcenter what Micro Center does is they open up the box check to make sure everything looks like it's there make sure there's no physical damage to it um gpus actually get bench tested to make sure make sure they're working they slap a sticker on there that has a um basically can tell you even if there's missing items like we'll talk about this GPU in a second and then they discount the price because of the fact that it's no longer considered brand new unopened so there's a lot of deals that you can find there um other things that you let's talk about a little bit on the Shady Side of why people might return something to a store and this is something that definitely exists in like CPUs overclocking and or silicon Lottery often times people will buy buy CPU test it try and overclock it not get the scores they want or it's not necessarily a great overclocker package it up return it to the store go to another store or buy another one at the same store and do this multiple times until they get one that they want so that means there's nothing technically wrong with the CPU but it's kind of somebody using an exploit of a return policy to be able to try and get an advantage for themselves I've never personally done that but I know of a lot of people that have done that another reason why people might return something to the store is they might have accidentally physically damaged it and then what that means is they're going to return it cross their fingers hope and say it's not working hope the person taking in the return doesn't notice any sort of damage on it and then next thing you know you are going to be the one absorbing any of the damage fortunately though when it comes to that sort of risk it's offset by the fact that you bought it at a legit brick and mortar in our instance here Micro Center which has the same return policy on open box items so if you get it and something is weird and not working you do have the recourse of taking it back to the store getting it looked at and or returning it to get your money back to then buy another product so that's where it's a little safer to deal with open box items when it comes versus buying used on a Marketplace the difference is used on a Marketplace is typically going to have lower prices than even openbox items at a store so this is kind of like a perfect Middle Ground between new and pre-owned used and being sold for someone upgrading or needing money or whatever we're going to kind of shop around right now and see what we can find uh I've already looked at the gpus they keep all the gpus in the back they're not in like uh like with all the regular gpus this is a MSI uh RTX 460 TI I feel like people shopping open box even though they have open box all the way at the top tier as well they have several 4090 uh open box items back there at like $3 to $400 off the price it's actually a pretty significant cut but I figure most people looking at open box are looking for significant discounts are probably shopping in a more mid-tier or maybe even entry level type of price point so shopping really high although everyone loves saving money I feel it probably is going to make more sense to sort of Target this mid-range mid highend mid lowend like right in the middle to uh to to make it incentivizing for people so as you can see here this GPU was $514 99 it's sold as is um and then $463 is the current price so I guess I should start keeping a tally here of what everything would have cost and what it's actually going to cost us so how much did we save right right here so went from 514 463 so we save $51 on this part alone you're not going to be able to necessarily do this in the store but we're going to do this right now to sort of show you guys let's open it up and see what's inside so this one actually has a box but they have several back there that are just either an anti-static bags uh those tend to be refurbs that came back from the manufacturer um in the re in the anti-static bags or maybe just a vanilla brown box some of them um have like different boxes that they didn't originally come in sometimes it has just the GPU that was returned so microcenter's return policy is interesting and that they'll take pretty much any they're like they're like Costco Costco will take anything back like even years from now now micros is 30 days but they'll take it back even if you're missing stuff it's it's kind of crazy in my opinion I think that's that's a little nuts but that's just me all right so opening it up here's the foam nice to see that we do have the anti-static bag I'm going to do a little inspection on this right now and you know what to be fair you can do this with the um associate in the store if you're like can we open it up and take a look they'll absolutely say yes let's open it up together and they'll look at it with you um if you have any questions or concerns you can even go over to the tech bar with the associate if you want and they can kind of look at it for physical damage too all the pins do appear to be in pretty good shape I don't see any damage or wear on there I don't see any scratching or anything all the plastic has been removed um but I don't even see any dust in this like I don't see a lick of dust on this at all and I know for a fact they're not taking the time to go through and like clean these gpus and stuff so this was probably very lightly used I did ask them like what's the number one reason a person returns a GPU and it's almost always they decided they wanted something more powerful so they get it home they didn't they couldn't turn their settings as high as they wanted so then they take it back get a full refund and then put that money into another card we still have our warranty card so this is good but it even has the GPU bracket or S anti- sag bracket which is so unnecessary for this GPU cuz it's very light so this is actually a pretty solid deal right here I don't feel like this is one I would feel concerned about using so there we go let's go ahead now and take a look at motherboards and the reason for that is although they do take CPUs back they do have a return policy for CPUs it's 30 days AMD or Intel but they don't really keep them in store and they don't really resell them as open box they send them back to the manufacturer and then they might get those back as a Reverb even though there may be nothing wrong with them because they went to the manufacturer went through the testing process again and were sent out a second time it qualifies as refurbished even though that means nothing may have been physically touched inside of it so refurbish will be a whole another discussion we talk about in the future so I want to shop motherboards to find my platform then shop a CPU to put on there and today's goal is to hopefully make the CPU free by Saving enough money by getting open box items everywhere else that we can Okay so this might be the sketchiest section when it comes to nerves because first of all there's a lot of motherboards these are all open box right here and my very first first question to the to the associate today was why are there so many because in my mind I go there's a lot of opportunity for bent pins there's a lot of opportunity for something maybe that was damaged so you kind of look at it and go why are there so many here however the response was well a lot of times people buy a bundle and they return the bundle whether they returned it because they wanted a different CPU or whatever they return the whole bundle so a lot of the motherboards get returned as part of a bundle return not because there necessarily wrong with the motherboard so I think I want to go I want to find an Intel motherboard because that's the one that has the most the highest likely of damage when it comes to the pins so Intel is actually LGA which is a land grid array which means all the pins are on the motherboard whereas AMD up to through am4 is PGA which is a pin grid array which means that their pins are on the CPU am5 motherboards from AMD however also LGA now like Intel where the pins are on the motherboard so I'm going to find myself I'm kind of targeting the a 14700 K to see if we can pay for that if we can just pay for the CPU at of open box savings here's an MSI Pro z690 $229 now $95 now it does say right here incomplete so that means there's something missing out of this box this would be like an amazing deal at 95 bucks it's a z chipset from $229 to 95 I did ask about the return policy on motherboards he did say that they opened it up they will look for damage um and they will look at the pins however they do not plug it in and they do not put the CPU in there and they do not do a a post test so this is the one thing where it's like okay um you might be really crossing your fingers here that there's nothing damaged so here we go it's got the chip Co chipset orc me the CPU cover which is nice the pins appear to be so it's hard to see but the appear the pins do appear to be in perfect condition so okay I think this these two items alone are pretty damnn close to paying for my CPU let's see what other accessories are in or not in the box cuz this is where I'm curious as to what is considered incomplete so here's the io sh it was never even opened so we do have our antennas so that's good cuz it is a Wi-Fi board so these could have been missing and then we have our two SATA cables and then this is our m.2 hold down screws right here so I well it's one of them anyway it's just the little latch I feel like oh here's the other one we got all of our m.2 hold Downs our antennas I'm not entirely sure what's missing to be honest I want to see now if there's anything nearly as crazy for maybe a ddr5 cuz ddr5 Ram is not that expensive anymore if not screw it we'll go ddr4 I'm okay with that so looking through all the open box uh there are like four or five of these Asus Prime z790 V Wi-Fi boards that are ddr5 uh was originally and this one's been here since January of 2024 so in in case you're wondering how this works um they were telling me every 30 days it sits on the Shelf as an open box item they reduce the price again until there's there obviously got to be a point where they stop reducing it or it becomes zero right but it was $175 it's currently $19.96 cents so this has been sitting here for six over 6 months about six months actually but anyway so I just want to point this out we're going to stick with the ddr4 board but for $15 more could have gone with u ddr5 so just with everything going on with all the Asus stuff right now I really don't want to support that brand so what we're going to do is we're just going to stick with the MSI and ddr4 which should hopefully make our ddr4 a little bit less expensive so one thing to mention uh too is that they do not do openbox Ram here he said they used to but they don't anymore so we're going to be looking for something new when it comes to Ram but let's see what have we saved already so far so this originally was a $229 board 99 and it's currently $95.95 that's 100 $34 in savings right there plus the 51 we've already saved we're at $185 in savings so far by just going open box on these two items now the 14700 K was $289 so you can see we're only $100 away from paying for our CPU we've still got power supply we've still got a cooler we've still got um storage which is going to also have to be new we' got a case I think there's an opportunity for open box cases as well that's one where you might potentially be missing a lot of stuff so we need to look at that let's go look at Power Supply so in the power supply aisles here um they keep the open box stuff mixed in so anything with a yellow sticker is an open box now power spec people may not know is actually Microcenter in-house brand um the only non-power speec open box item that I see is a Thor from Asus Rog it's 1,200 Watts it's $300 we don't need anything like that we have an sfx option for $ 850 we have an ATX uh 3.0 right here $850 watt for $71 with 850 watt uh 80 plus gold non PCI or ATX 3.0 not pcie Gen 5 so $71 so between these two I'd go i' obviously go for the Gen aex 3.0 but then we also have a 650 watt right here for $63.95 I would personally go for the $850 at $7 more or $8 more because it gives us forward compatibility on going with a bigger GPU 650 watts is fine up until about a 4080 anything beyond then if you try and go 480 super 480 TI does 480 TI even exist whatever 4090 whatever the next gen is going to be in its nuclear capacitor needed level of power delivery I'd rather have the Headroom so I'm going to go ahead and take the ATX 3.0 where did I stick it which is the same price and because of the fact that it's a Microcenter in-house brand uh I feel comfortable with this because if anything was weird with it we we could bring it back to the store this is all Al also assuming you live close enough to a store so let's open this up make sure all the cables are there the one thing people may not like is the red connectors but at this point we're trying to save money here so I would take the red connector and save money is fully modular so here's our 24 pin everything's there wall plug so this is CPU power 24 pin PCI Express here's our SATA here is another SATA another SATA sata's a floppy or MX a floppy adapter okay and then here is our plug right here for the 600 watt or it's a 450 watt I take that back so it's eight it can't do 600 that doesn't leave enough so yeah it's a 450 which means technically we wouldn't be able to run an overclock 490 with this but it could run a standard 4090 um but anyway I think the $850 for $8 more is just better in terms of efficiency curve then going with the $650 and saving $8 this is not an ultra budget build this is a what can we save build so the original price of this was $89 it's $79 now so that's a $18 savings plus the15 we already sold we at $23 the sense is incorrect cuz I'm not putting sense in there really but we're at $23 of our $289 for our CPU so we're we're well underway here um we need to look at CPU coolers now we are going to probably have um open box stuff there that's one where every screw bracket hold down spacer it all matters if you're missing any of that you can't mount it right so let's go see if we can take any chances the downside about trying to stick with open box everything as much as we can is sometimes there's just not any open boxes to choose from so we have a pure rock 2 from be quiet dang it just got returned yesterday so what I was going to be like is if it was on like the cusp of being 30 days I like what's the next step down it's only a $44 cooler that's down to $35 so we're saving n n bucks I do have a 13700 K I kept calling a 14700 earlier in this video I apologize it is a 13700 K but check this out the screen printed thermal paste jeez maybe that's why they returned it they couldn't get the plastic off okay whatever the screen printed thermal paste is still on there so it was never mounted so that's a good sign uh this should be our here's our fan right here so it's a single fan and then we've got all of our Hardware here oh I almost knocked it off the thing I definitely almost bought it okay so here's our brackets AMD and Intel um everything I've put enough of these together to know that everything is in here both of the hold down screws for the centerpiece that goes across the center so there's that which is good those fortunately are standard thread you could find I think they're M3s you can find these um but you don't want to have to go searching for something if you saved eight bucks but then you have to go to Lowe's and take the time and the gas or whatever that sucks but okay so everything appears to be here I don't know about you but $8 is $8 so the nice thing about the case section at Micro Center is everything is out and built and on display so you know what it looks like the build quality the weight the size so you don't go oh this is too big or too small anyway um but for whatever reason people return cases quite frequently so they have an entire section of open box cases we're going to go see what kind of deal we can find fortunately we don't need anything crazy cuz we don't have a crazy high-end build happening here so we can get away with a pretty good uh savings I think hopefully it just depends on how much you're actually marking them down and if they're anything like me when it comes to cases they don't want to be storing these things forever because of the amount of space they take up so I hope they discount them deep that way they just get them out of the warehouse okay so this is a so they got a land cool 216 tempered glass which I really like right here for 79 bucks it's 20 bucks off of The $99 original price this was just returned yesterday or at least tagged yesterday but we also have the 205 mesh tempered glass ATX in white right here for $71 we do like the 205 a lot it's not a huge case it's only $8 difference from this I'm a little tempted because of the fact that I for eight bucks more I might go with the full sizee one that way we have room to grow cuz again we don't want the case to be so small then in the future we have a problem fitting any of the larger components let's go ah and open this one up I'm going to check this one real quick yeah so we have two intake fans and an exhaust fan so we're good there we have no fans for the top I don't think I'm going to add any to this but I'm telling you right now this was never opened okay okay so I'm at $223 saved by going open box now the 13700 K is $289 we're paying 65 bucks for our CPU by going all open box the stuff that we've looked at so far as you can see we didn't really compromise on anything other than the fact that maybe it didn't have as much of a shiny sticker on it that we had to peel off we still have to go buy storage and we still have to go buy Ram so let's go take a look at that stuff so it's it says $57.99 on here it's actually not um we got this this is the right set right yeah okay so it's $37.99 for 16 GB of ddr4 36 00 they had a $34 set three bucks cheaper for 3200 we'll go with the faster RAM and I found this it's $29.99 it is 16 excuse me it's two 16 gig sticks so it's 32 gigs of 3600 cl1 18 Neo Forza uh yeah it's by gold key so I don't really I don't know anything about this brand so I really don't want to try it I know they they worked in some other areas of PC components this is like the only one they have so I'm going to go with tforce we've used it quite a bit in our more budget builds um I think this is more in the spirit of like what we're looking for here if we were doing like Ultra budget benchmarking in some way I'd go with something like this but I think the tforce Vulcan Z is what we're going to go with here and then storage I'm just going to find one of the best like one tab deals of of nvme that I can find you see crucial on our Channel all the time but the reason for that is it's just really hard to beat the deals you get from them it says 19 on here right now for this 1 TB P3 plus which is a Gen 4 so it's 5,000 megabytes per second but it's 75 bucks so even shopping Inland which is like the the internal brand for Microcenter like we we we're looking at like the same price but we've just had such good success with crucial I mean crucial's Micron and this sounds like a sponsored bait it's not this is just the way it works out so there we go let's go ahead and add all this up let's see what our total prices cuz I honestly don't know cuz I'm kind of stuck with the open box items that were here but I think it's going to be fun to put this together and see how it actually performs too because I don't think we sacrificed anything in terms of quality risk and we still have the ability to return it to the store and we still have warranties on this stuff from the manufacturers so the total price of this build is $1,194 45 one thing I want to point out you guys may have already commented this uh yes this is a 12th gen board so we are going to have to do a bios flash on it it does have a bios flashback button I already checked that so we're we might have it was manufactured after 13 gen had been out for a while so we're hoping it has a late enough bios on it to be able to work if not we can use a USB stick put the BIOS flash uh on there through msi's utility and their bios uh on their website and then push that button it'll Flash and we should be up and running but anyway $1,194 so I'm not going to do that math in my head but anyway we were at $223 right plus $194 so that would have been a nearly $1,500 build so $417 is and this is prior to any sort of tax and stuff so that's exactly how it works out all right there it is completely built even with our extremely contrasting white GPU I probably could have gone in the back and found the black one to be honest I'm the color at this point it's p personal subjective Sub sub P it's subjective on color and I'm sure we could find a black one or I could have found a white case anyway everything works nothing was missing per se so just as I suspected though the cooler was missing the two fan Clips I didn't notice them some people watching the the video might have noticed the clips weren't there and the four little O-rings that are used to hold the back plate screws in place on the back plate were also missing none of those were actually detrimental to us going like sh we have to make another trip somewhere to be able to make this PC work so all I did was put the four posts through the back plate sticking up like flat on the table here so they're sticking up and then I just put the board down on the back plate and then put the four retention screws to hold in place as it's supposed to be and then as you can see here I did my zip tie trick which is super easy I just run a zip Z tie through the cooler through the fan and then put another zip tie on the end and clip it and as you can see it's not going anywhere getting the job done fact getting the job done CPU is currently at 30C so clearly it is working just fine all of our Ram shows up we got 16 GB of uh our ddr4 and we do have an XMP profile of 3600 I haven't restarted the PC yet on enabling it uh one thing I want to point out though is even though this board was returned in April it has a build bios build date of 11624 this predates any of the Intel overvolting over power limiting that pretty much every motherboard manufacturing is doing so even though I did not have to flash the BIOS by the way to make it work uh I just want to point out the build of the motherboard is new enough to where that bios supports 13th gen which came out long before that so it makes I was hoping it would work fine it'd be different if 13th gen had just come out a month or two ago versus when I bought this then I would need to do a bios flashback but when I point out though is if I go over here now to advaned CPU configuration you can see it's got all of the ridiculously over basically unlimited power watts uh 56 seconds still on the on the um velocity turbo velocity boost but 512 amps again which is essentially unlimited so we would have to go in here and manually set those or update the BIOS to the latest safe bios otherwise this 13700 K with those settings with that cooler it's going to throttle if I did something like cin bench um the last thing I need to do is make sure our drive is showing up there it is right there there's our ct100 P3 plus SSD so drive is showing everything works as expected so I didn't install Windows on here cuz that's the one thing that we did not account for in the budget is the OS and we've talked about this a million times there's a million places you can get your OS whether it be through like some CD key vendor or whatever some of those are sketch some are legit I don't know I don't use them I have no idea which one you could trust you might even be building a Linux system so you wouldn't need windows at all and you're using a free open source OS at that point so there you go everything works I'm happy with the way it works we even got RGB I forgot there were RGB fans in the front of it so anyway there's that the real eyesore here to be honest is the red on the power speec cables and I think if I had gone with the older PSU that was not ATX 3.0 I don't think they were red actually but I like having that plug for future compatibility otherwise if we tried to step up to like a 4070 4080 GPU we would have needed an adapter to be able to go from PCI Express to uh ATX 3.0 plug or 12vt high power on the end I'm glad everything worked and I don't look like a fool I look like a fool all the time but I don't want to do it on purpose or accidentally accidentally on purpose just like you can accidentally subscribe and like this video if you like the idea of doing open box stuff I'm not sure what other types of approaches we can take to more budget stuff I mean we talked about use we'll continue to do the use series cuz there's as Generations move on Ed stuff continues to move along with it just usually a gen or two behind and um open box stuff will have the same thing now the nice recourse regarding this versus buying used is the fact that as I've already said if something was not working right we have recourse we can return it and get a full refund of our money if you buy it off you know hoodie wearing guy in a back alley that only accepts $100 bills good luck you can try to get your money back I guess but you know the second you message the guy and say hey this isn't working you're going to hear crickets and you're going to be ghosted like that in fact you were probably already blocked before you even realized it wasn't working if the guy was intentionally scamming you so anyway there you go it works thank goodness for that and $223 cheaper than if we bought everything with new thickers on it all right guys thanks for watching we'll see you in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 49,837

Keywords: open box, open box pc parts, are open box parts worth it, are open box pc parts worth it, intel, amd, nvidia, pc, pc gaming, pc building, how to build a pc, micro center, gaming, gaming pc, bequiet, z690, 13700k, 4060ti

Id: Vk18b_pDEMA

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2024