I tried FLIPPING a PC..... Lessons were learned.

so in a recent video i rounded up eight different craigslist ads that were selling pcs and i basically gave them a letter grade based on how good or how bad of an offer they were and at the end of that video i told you guys that i would take the best offer the one that had the best deal and the best savings and actually reach out to the seller to try to buy the pc well i'm excited to let you guys know that i'm actually on my way to meet with the craigslist seller of the pc that had the best offer it's a custom build that he put together himself with the core i7 8700k and a zotac gtx 1080 amp so it's obviously a little dated a few generations old but if it's in good condition i have no doubt that it can still run some serious games at 1080p at the very least and maybe even crunch out some some 1440p gaming as well but we'll take a closer look at the build once i get it back into the studio we'll take a close-up look to see what kind of condition it's in if there's any room for improvement first of all if it's working uh working properly or working at all and then once that's confirmed i'm gonna start looking at the pc to see if there's any adjustments that can be made any improvements any way that we can add value to it to make it more appealing on the secondhand market making any of those improvements and finally putting it back on craigslist to see if we can sell it for more than what i paid for it okay i've arrived at the designated meetup spot i'm here a little early i'm about 15 minutes early he's not here yet obviously and we we decided to meet at this uh this coffee shop i don't really drink coffee but i've got some time to kill so yeah ah that's hot that's right coffee's hot you know what that tastes like coffee okay i got the craigslist pc right here and actually the seller has been kind enough to be my videographer for this moment so i'm gonna check it out really quick not that i don't trust you or anything but uh you know as they say in the industry trust but verify so very nice h510 case here all right it actually looks nicer in person than it does uh in the ad it's uh it's all the craigslist compression all right what am i doing oh yeah it's only this guy right here very nice okay with the nhd15 connectors are plugged in it's already better than the walmart pc got two 120s the front here oh you actually got one of those fantastic led strips at the top i didn't notice that that's fancy looks good i don't i don't see any immediate red flags i think we're good to go all right then uh let's bring this guy back to the studio before we continue this video is brought to you by hetzner hetzner is a hosting provider and data center operator that offers high performance cloud servers for a super competitive price to performance ratio and no minimum contract term their web interface cloud console can be used to create cloud servers quickly and easily and they're ready to go just seconds after creating them you can use their 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could find a super cheap bracket or something like that it's fairly dusty in here it's not the worst i've seen by far but you can just tell there's some dust caked onto those fan blades at the front definitely some dust build up on our cpu cooler fans nothing we can't fix with a quick data vac session this is it hanging down it's hanging down a little bit right there so we'll have to reapply some some adhesive and then motherboard it's kind of hard to see actually i'm just probably going to take most of this pc apart so i can deep clean everything and then put it all back together plus i'm pretty sure we need a reapplication of thermal interface material on the cpu hard to say if you ever reapplied that periodically but i would imagine not and if you built this pc roughly four or five years ago then it's definitely due for a reapplication why don't we take a look at the backside say our cable management little nervous should i be nervous life is like cable management you never know what you're gonna get all right hey you know what it's actually it's actually not bad not bad not the best i've seen not the worst i've seen is that a temp sensor oh my gosh he's got a temp sensor back here why is he measuring the thermals of the back of the motherboard tray anyway uh we have our power supply oh this is our first look at the power supply evga 750 g5 nice okay it's got a 750 watt in here but it's 80 plus gold that's pretty good and it is semi-modular semi-modular units that's a fairly decent unit i forgot to mention there's no drive in here so as listed on the ad this pc was supposed to include a 256 gig inland premium nvme m.2 ssd but when i reached out to him and told him that i wanted to pick it up today he said that it would have to be a couple days until he could meet up because he would have to uninstall the drive wipe it completely and then reinstall it and he was just super busy but because i wanted the rig asap and i didn't want to take the chance of you know some other seller coming in offering him something more than i was and then snatching it from me i told him to just remove the drive and keep it what i'm gonna have to do is just purchase another drive the exact identical one and then obviously install that into the system load windows up onto it and all that stuff there are some little tweaks and maybe upgrades that i want to make here now bear in mind whatever parts i purchase for this build to kind of spice it up and make it a bit more appealing when it goes back onto craigslist i will add the cost of those parts to what i've paid for the bill what are we actually going to change here what what needs to be changed what can stay i think for the most part everything can stay but i think for now what i what i kind of want to do because the blue and yellow i like it but to make it more appealing to a wider audience i think i want to actually get some of the the white tips i'll go on amazon pick up some some white rubber anti-vibration pads from the noctua chromax series and i think i'm just going to do white because the case is white white is just very color neutral people don't have to worry about it clashing with whatever rgb color they want to go with and i think it'll just look a little cleaner overall uh we also need to do the same thing for for these guys or maybe we'll just take them off and we'll just leave it black and without anti-vibration pads you don't really need vibration pads on that side of the fan anyway and then if it's not too expensive i'm kind of considering getting some some cover plates some heatsink cover plates for the nhd15 noctua sells them their chromex cover plates they come in different colors and stuff i might do that as well just for aesthetics and then of course i got i gotta throw in like a 30 kit for uh for sleep cables because these these aren't cutting it for me honestly i know this none of this matters to the performance of the pc whatsoever and yes it is going to cost me some some dollars that's going to add to our total cost of this build but i'm taking the gamble here with my theory that if the pc looks nicer it'll sell for a higher price and i'm going to test that theory uh within this video so i'm kind of interested to see how that goes so we're going to do that we'll do the rubbers we'll do the heatsink covers and then a drive a 256 gig ssd alone is not going to cut it someone looking at that is gonna be like i can't even we gonna load like half of a game on there these days so i think i'm gonna do like maybe just like a cheap one terabyte hard drive that we can stick in the bottom here and then i think that should do it but before i add up the total cost of all those things let's make sure the pc works all right i got the power supply plugged in and turned on you can see there's a little led letting us know that we're getting power there that's a good sign right off the bat also an led on the gpu and on the motherboard as well let's see what happens when i press the power button well the leds certainly work as do the fans fans are spinning fans are spinning oh oh wait okay this is this is because i i unplugged that that was me i actually popped this off to see how much dust was behind the fan i did that earlier off camera so this this was plugged in when i when i got it uh but it's uh it's okay that's not spinning right now we're just idling and look at that yay we have poster and we can also confirm right here asus rg strix z370e gaming we have the 8700k and 32 gigs of ram okay good he didn't scam us all right i think we're ready to see how much all those add-on parts are gonna cost me all right here we go so we got our one terabyte hard drive it's a toshiba 5700 rpm i don't care it's cheap 30 there we have the anti-vibration pads for our noctua fans that's gonna be seven bucks for a pack of 16 and then we also have the heatsink covers for the nhd15 at 30 a little pricey for that cosmetic touch but i think it's going to go a long way i think it's going to look a lot nicer than the bare heatsinks and then finally we have the sleeved extension kit from cool cat which i have never purchased from before but it was about 10 bucks cheaper than most of the other comparable uh sleep cable options out there that's gonna give our total to about 96 96 dollars and 17 cents that's with tax and that brings my total cost of this build to roughly eleven hundred dollars we'll just call it an even 1100 to make things easy i'm gonna have to sell it for more than that in order to turn a profit on this build but for now i guess what we can do is clean it let's let's go ahead and take this thing apart i'm going to reapply thermal paste and all that stuff and once all those parts arrive i will reassemble the build create a craigslist ad for this pc and figure out what exactly i'm going to sell it for but for now let's do a little teardown and cleaning [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] all right the pc is complete all of the new parts came in and it's looking really good the nhd15 looks a bit more high-end now with that new chromax kit uh but i did make a mistake when ordering the the rubber the rubber corners the anti-vibration pads i initially got these which are just for standard 120 and 140 millimeter fans but uh these fans are different they have they have the more elongated corners on them so i actually had to buy these separately while i was building the system i was like oh crap so these finally came in i added these after the fact but it's all looking good now sleeve cables rgb it's looking good but we are running into one technical difficulty here and i believe that's with the motherboard because when i went to go install windows on the new ssd i noticed that the system wasn't really booting properly let me show you what i mean so right here it's like it's clearing post and stuff but once i go into uh the bios let's see if it'll actually watch it's gonna be working perfectly now that's how it always is as soon as i start recording it looks like the ssd is showing up here the inland precision ssd but before it wasn't so let me try recreating this here uh just sometimes it'll show up and it'll boot into windows fine other times it crashes before it gets into windows and other times the drive isn't recognized at all in the bios it's just been very finicky i already tried clearing the cmos i tried different ram and sometimes it gets stuck on this screen as well i don't know if it'll get stuck here uh actually yeah i think it's it'll get stuck stuck at the the bioscreen okay so that's another thing that it's doing it's got it's doing all kinds of weird things it's behaving oddly and i believe it's the motherboard i've kind of narrowed it down at this point i spent a good hour and a half just troubleshooting it trying to figure out what was wrong now i could spend more time trying to figure out what's wrong with this board try to get it working but i've honestly exhausted a lot of the possibilities that i could think of and i've already spent a lot more time on this than i really want to i think at this point i'm probably just gonna swap the board for another z370 board that i have on hand like this prime z370a right here which is gonna be good for whoever buys this pc because it's actually a brand new board well it's it's not used it's not a used board i just it's kind of been sitting here in this box for for god knows how long i'll just have to notify whoever's interested in buying this pc that uh that the board's been swapped out for for a different model but it's brand new so hopefully that won't be an issue for them i don't think the craigslist seller who sold me this pc necessarily tried to scam me or anything i don't think he was aware that there was anything wrong with the board but that also begs the question if the board was working perfectly fine for him why is it giving me issues now the only thing we've really changed here are the drives and i can't imagine that's what's causing all these issues let me try seeing one more time what happens if we reboot it again okay we're getting the bio screen screen if i hit delete okay it's going to the bios this time and look at that no drives drives are not recognized the ssd i don't know why i keep saying drives because i haven't even i unplugged the toshiba hard drive because i just wanted to minimize you know potential issues or complications it's not recognizing the ssd anymore so this is exactly what i'm talking about every time i boot it it's like a different thing but it usually cycles between the same three or four issues whether it's freezing um or not recognizing the drive so at this point i think i'm just gonna have to swap it out for the new board and hope that fixes the issue all right motherboard has been installed it actually looks better in this system than the last board because it actually has some big beefy white accents over the i o area and apart from that the system looks more or less the same but did that fix the issue about to find out please please please oh i should probably plug in the freaking video cable oh my god i've been so nervous about this working or not that i totally forgot to do this huh oh hey no signal detected no wait no okay maybe it's gonna maybe i need to reboot maybe i need to reboot let's just do that just sometimes when you plug in the displayport cable or a video cable after you boot it doesn't always feed the signal through so you gotta reboot that's that's all this is aha okay got a splash screen splash screen's good wait so maybe it's not the board it froze again it's not the board it's not the board it's not the balls it's not the board okay so what the heck what the who heck in hooky so okay let me let me spend some more time with this even more time even more stupid time on this stupid build getting annoying all right i'll i'll be right back hopefully hopefully with a working system okay i got the build working and the issue was not the motherboard in fact it was actually the ssd the brand new straight out of the box inland professional or is it professional precision wait i thought it was precision okay it's professional i've been calling it precision this entire time throughout this video because i i can't read but at any rate it was the ssd as soon as i popped this out and this is weird because i actually swapped it out for a different drive uh initially that was one of my troubleshooting steps right from the get-go and it was still giving me issues but then i tried a different drive and then it's just it's flawless it's absolutely flawless so right now there's a 500 gig crucial p5 pcie gen 3 nvme m.2 ssd that's mounted right between the massive cooler and the gpu it's not it's not focusing because it's way in there but you can kind of see it a little fuzzy but that's got windows 10 loaded up onto it and it's been working phenomenally ever since i don't know exactly what's wrong with this ssd or why it's giving me issues or even why the other ssd that i tried was giving me issues which was also a crucial p5 honestly i have to spend so much time trying to figure out what's going on with these ssds that it would warrant in a whole other video so i'm not going to do it right now the point is is that the system is working thank god it's working i already made the craigslist ad which i'll show you in just a sec but a couple more things i wanted to mention about this system that i forgot to mention earlier so with the new motherboard uh one compromise that i had to make here there's actually two compromises one is that there's no wi-fi there was wi-fi on the previous board that rog strix board no wi-fi on this guy so whatever seller contacts me and is interested in buying it i'm gonna be completely upfront be like hey there's been some slight changes to the to the system the motherboard is different it doesn't have wi-fi obviously the reason why i'm not including that in the craigslist ad is because i want to see if i can sell this pc the way that i intended to with the upgraded parts and the original parts from when i when i first bought it uh if i start swapping things out it kind of changes the game it changes the narrative of me trying to flip this pc in the most fair way possible so but i am going to be completely transparent with whoever's interested in buying it the other thing the other compromise and this one's not as big but there's no digital rgb header there's no digital three pin five volt rgb header on this board so i wasn't able to plug in the phantek's neon lighting strip so that's why it's not on right now again i'll notify the buyer of that as well before he decides to pull the trigger um and then i think that's pretty much it for the most part i don't know if i mentioned this before but i did fix the gpu there's a little bit of gpu sag i just took a piece of pet tubing cut it to size you can kind of see it right there it's see-through obviously so it's a little difficult to see but it's uh doing doing its thing it's it's actually very discreet because it is see-through so you don't really notice it unless you're looking for it or know it's there um but uh yeah why don't we talk about the system really quick and how it's performing just a really quick at a glance look at uh some afterburner figures here gpus doing well at 72c maybe i should put the side panel actually i'm surprised the the gpu only went up one degree i had it like this for about 15 minutes with the side panel on and it was chilling at 71c cpu is at 57c very nice 70 about 70 70 to 80 utilization we're eating up about 10 gigs of ram good thing we have 32 gigs on board there and frame rates we're at 1080p right now in halo infinite this is a pretty demanding game honestly i believe it's on medium a blend of medium to high settings or i think it's just actually on medium mostly medium but we're getting around between 60 and 70 fps sometimes it dips below 60 but i was running around this map and stuff i'm actually in the campaign right now i was running around this environment and i was definitely getting over 60 fps on average even though we were dipping below 50 on occasion uh so it's looking really good performance numbers are there temps are looking good let me show you the craigslist ad so this is my ad this is my pretty little ad i spent spending lots of time on it so super clean gaming pc corey 780 700k gtx 1080 1200 i'm selling it for 1200 remember i spent about 1100 on this thing so far with all the add-on parts and upgrades and whatnot so if i do sell it for this price i'll be making a hundred buckaroos on this flip assuming that someone buys it if no one buys it then i i don't know how this video is going to end but anyway look at my pictures look at my picture aren't they nice nice pictures but although leave it to craigslist compression to make my 6 000 camera look like it was taken from a crappy phone from 10 years ago um but uh those are the pictures and then this is what i put in the ad all the specs you already know those excellent condition recently taken apart each component deep clean sanitized and reassembled thermal interface material reapplied clean install of windows 10 all drivers up to date plug and play and slow your games go only available until december 25th will be giving the pc to my friend if it doesn't sell by then so it's going fast either way that is completely false i just put that there to put a fire under people's asses so they call me quickly at this point i've pretty much done all i need to do for this little project experiment of mine so i guess at this point the only thing i could really do is wait so i have failed miserably at flipping this pc it's been two months since i originally listed it on craigslist and i wasn't getting any bites so after about a month i switched over to trying offer up and still nothing for the first two weeks nothing actually there were a couple people who said that they were down to come pick it up they were in the area they had the money ready and they all fell through there were like two or three people that just just never came through for whatever reason they kind of just ghosted me and so i eventually dropped the price down to a thousand dollars which is a pretty hefty loss but i was pretty desperate at that point and still nothing a few more kind of so-so wishy-washy people came through but nothing concrete and now i'm sort of at the end of my rope so what i've decided to do is list it on ebay because that'll greatly increase the number of people who are viewing the listing because it's it's not just local anymore i'm opening it up to um anywhere in the states starting bid's going to be stupidly low just to get people to actually bite on this and at this point i'm just more curious to see what people think it's worth am i going to get 500 bucks out of it 800 bucks maybe it'll shoot up to a thousand maybe even 1300 if we're really lucky again since we're casting a wider net now but i've already gone ahead and made the ebay listing starting bid is at 420 for the walls shipping is 50 flat that's on the buyer got all the specs in here my only concern here is that this is a burner ebay account and so there's no like reviews on my account that alone is going to turn off a lot of people i'm hoping that the low starting bid price is enough to encourage some people to actually bid on it and i did open it up i did let them know to ask me questions if you know it makes them feel more comfortable if they want to see some verification that you know i really do own this pc and stuff but it should be really interesting to see what we get out of this i've already accepted the fact that i'm probably going to take a heavy loss on this rig i am really just curious to see what i get for it if anything this video might just end with me not even be being able to sell the pc little frustrated at this point this is my last hurrah my hail mary so to speak and i will be updating you guys soon now instead of wasting my money on this craigslist pc maybe i should have spent it on something better like the corsair k70 rgb pro it features axon hyper processing technology for lightning fast inputs linear mechanical switches pbt double shot pro keycaps iq integration and more for more info on the corsair k70 rgb pro click the link in the description below all right the auction is over after an intense five day long bidding war the top bidder won the pc for 760 that was the top bid that's not very good uh they are paying 50 flat for shipping which brings it up to 810 of course i'm gonna have to deduct whatever i pay for shipping from that figure but let's just say for the sake of argument to make it easy eight hundred and ten dollars that i made back on this pc i spent eleven hundred just shy of eleven hundred dollars on it with the cosmetic upgrades and that sort of thing and i guess that gives me a net loss of two hundred and ninety dollars i'm down to ninety guys i'm down to ninety i'm gonna keep my day job as a tech youtuber because clearly flipping pcs i'm just not cut out for it obviously this was my very first attempt at trying to flip a pc and it was a hot steaming pile of fail but you know i've learned some things i've learned some things from this video at the very least some takeaways that i have after doing this is that the cosmetic upgrades were not really a worthwhile investment at the end of the day um the the chromax kit and the the cable sleeving i could have done without those things i should have just cleaned up the system made it look a little nicer those things cost me an extra what 100 i didn't really see any roi i think i might have gotten more eyeballs on my listings because the system looked nice but that didn't really translate to any real legitimate offers for what i was asking in fact the 760 dollars or i guess the in total 810 dollars that i'm getting now through ebay from the seller or the buyer is pretty equivalent to some of the lowball offers i was receiving on offer up and craigslist which definitely stings a little bit i was hoping for a little bit more but whatever the other takeaway is timing is everything the fact that gpu prices have been declining steadily since the time i bought the pc initially back in december of last year i think a lot of people are looking at that and going well maybe i shouldn't pull the trigger on a used system right now i'm not going to spend a lot of money right now on a pc like this because i want to wait and see if gpu prices continue dropping if that trend continues then maybe now's not the time to strike and of course seller credibility the fact that i didn't have any sort of seller history or reviews or ratings on my ebay account or my offer up account i think definitely hurts me people are less likely to make a bid or an offer i may have to find a way to bump that up for the next time i do this because i definitely do want to try my hand at flipping a pc again i feel like i can only go up from here this was such a miserable fail that uh there's there's got to be hope there's got to be um a better way to do this i'm still figuring this out and just for fun obviously i'm not trying to make any real side change here it's just for the walls and the for the experience um and it's kind of fun it is kind of fun i do enjoy like fixing pcs up and stuff like that but uh yeah if you guys have any suggestions on how i can improve my pc flipping side project here feel free to let me know down in the comments below you guys always have much better ideas than i do and i'm sure there's something glaringly obvious that i could be doing here to improve my chances at actually selling one of these things for a profit eventually so like i said stay tuned for a part two or i guess uh not really a part two but when i tried to do this again um hopefully that'll happen soon i'll be looking at the markets the secondhand markets and stuff to see if there's anything juicy out there that has potential for uh making a bit of a bit of profit so i can hopefully make up some of those losses that i experienced in this video i'm bummed out that this video didn't have a happier ending a more profitable ending but uh you live and you learn i guess so that's all for this one guys thank you for watching toss a like on it if you enjoyed it get subscribed for more tech content coming at you really soon and i'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Bitwit

Views: 253,454

Keywords: bitwit, bitwit kyle, how to build a pc, computer, gaming pc, pc flip, flipping a pc, reselling pc, gaming pc flip

Id: u-O-y-WQJ0M

Length: 25min 22sec (1522 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 18 2022