Never Buy These PC Parts Second Hand

Life is EXPENSIVE nowadays, so it’s easy to be tempted by second hand PC parts that are sometimes available at a big discount to the full retail price. But is it sensible to buy used RAM, CPUs, motherboards and more? Are there some components you should NEVER buy second hand (like storage) and some that are always fine to buy used?

I dig into these questions and morein this video, and I also mention what used/refurbished products I have purchased myself.

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone, life is expensive nowadays with a box of 6 chicken nuggets costing almost £5 and some pet food shooting up by almost 60% in a single year. So when building a new PC it can be tempting to cut down on costs by going with used computer parts, but there’s some components you should ‘never’ buy second hand – apparently. Now, I should caution that some of the parts I mention in this video might seem a little bit controversial, but I’ll explain my thoughts as I go through this video.

Storage

The first bit of hardware you should “never” buy second handis storage. Everyone agrees on that. YouTube videos say to avoid it. The comments under the videos always say to avoid it. Reddit says it. And in general this is great advice but there are actually one or two cases when used storage is actually fine to buy. So let’s break this down. The reason that people say to avoid storage is that it can be hard to know whether a hard drive or solid state drive IS actually still healthy or not. YES you can check the SMART data for the drive because this shows useful stats like the power-on hours and how much the disk has been written to, but in some cases SMART data can actually be reset – a bit like how cars can have the mileage rolled back to a lower number. Now this isn’t EASY to do and I doubt many eBay sellers would go through this effort to reset the SMART data for a $20 drive, but it’s still good to know that you can’t ALWAYS rely on this ‘health’ data. Also, some people report general stability issues with certain drives – for example people who buy and sell report WD drives failing more than other types of drives, plus CERTAIN drives from Dell and HPE have been known to randomly die after running for 40,000 hours (known as the 40k bug) – basically 4 to 5 years, which isn’t all that much if you run these in a server 24/7. I guess my point is that it’s hard to know for sure whether the second hand drive you’re planning on buying will be a dud or not. After all, it’s unlikely that sellers will allow you to perform loads of tests on the drive before buying it. Now they might include a diagnostic screenshot on the listing page, but a simple image could easily be faked or Photoshopped so it’s not worth relying on that either. The only time when I WOULD personally buy a second hand drive is enterprise SAS drives. These are great for adding lots ofextra storage capacity to a serveror computer, and the drives often have much better reliability than consumer gear.

Motherboard

The second part I personally wouldn’t buy used isa motherboard. Now some people disagree here, and say that they’re fine to buy these second hand, BUT motherboards are fairly complex bits of hardware and because they do SO MUCH, any small defect can result in a bunch of weird, temperamental faults. I had a computer 5 or 6 years ago that would randomly lock up a few times a week and after LOTS of debugging, I tracked it back to a bad motherboard. It certainly isn’t easy to hunt down motherboard faults though. Plus it’s kind of difficult to PROVE that a motherboard is faulty. A bad RAM stick or graphics card is easy to track down because there are lots of different stress testing tools for them. If your single RAM stick crashes duringMemTest86, you’ve got some bad RAM. But a faulty motherboard? No dice.

It’s much harder to track this down. Also a motherboard can be more susceptible to physical damage than other parts – for example a screwdriver scratching through a trace can brick the motherboard. So I’m personally quite wary about buying a second hand motherboard unless I know the person that I’m buying from, or it’s an open-box return from a reputable retailer. But I know that some people freely buy used motherboards though – if this is you then please let us know why down in the comments, maybe I’m just missing something.

PSU

The third component that you should usually never buy second hand is the power supply unit – and this is a crucial point.The PSU is such a crucial componentbecause it literally “sucks” electricity from your wall (and YES I know that “SUCKS” isn’t the right term) and it distributes that power to the rest of your computer. A bad PSU can actually destroy other parts of your computer, in the worst case, and when youbuy second hand, you don’t know what conditions they’ve been run under. Maybe it was run in an overpowered rig 24/7. Maybe it ran in a humid area like a garage or shed for a few years straight. You just don’t know – you can’t really open up the PSU to find out. If you don’t know the seller, I wouldn’t risk it. But conversely, if your friend is selling a PSU from a reputable company like Corsair and they only used it for occasional gaming for a year or so, that’s likely to be fine.

Equally some power supply companies actuallysell refurbished PSUs and I touch on this in another videoif you wanted to check that out, but my Homelab NAS actually has a refurbished Corsair PSU in it and I’ve had no problems with that – despite it running 24/7 for many months so far. So in general, used PSUs are a big no-no UNLESS you know and trust the seller. But really, you can buy a quality PSU for under £50 or $50 that can run up to mid range PCs without any issue – so there’s kind of a “risk-reward” question here. Why take the chance on a used PSU when you can buy a brand new one for such a small price? Unless you’re getting a REALLY really good deal on a used one, I probably wouldn’t chance it.

GPU..?

Next up, graphics cards. This is a difficult one because I’ve always kinda thought “oh, many old GPUs have been used in mining rigs, so they aren’t good to buy used”. And YES some sales listings are honest and openly declare that they’ve been used for mining (and then you can make an informed decision), but many people lie, too. They say the GPU has only been used for light gaming, but it’s actually been toiling away in a mining rig for years. The downside of this is that the graphics card’s lifespan will be lower because it has already run for a decent amount of its rated lifespan. So we should ALWAYS avoid used GPUs, right?

Well, this is actually a difficult one becauseLinus Tech Tips made an awesome videowhere they bought and tested 19 old mining GPUs and only one of them was faulty, the rest worked as expected. As a result, what I’d recommend with GPUs is that you should only buy used GPUs if the seller is trustworthy (in other words, you know them or they have great reviews) – and ideally there’s some way of actually testing the graphics card, and returning it for a full refund if it’s faulty. After all, if you can run Furmark on the GPU and return it if artifacts appear for example, then you’re fairly safe buying a used GPU. But it also comes down to price – there’s no point in taking the risk if you’re only getting a 5 or 10% discount, but sometimes a used GPU can be had at a big discount over the full retail price which is THEN worth considering for sure.

Watercooling Parts

The fifth component I wouldn’t personally buy used are watercooling parts. YES these can get surprisingly expensive so why wouldn’t you save money here, right? Well I always worry about leaks with watercooling (of course) and whether it’s a custom block or an all-in-one cooler, I wouldn’t fully trust that the other seller has treated the product with the care it requires for watercooling to help prevent leaks. It’s kind of a “fear of the unknown” type situation for me. Plus it’s not just leaks that are a risk – if the pump is broken or degraded, then your GPU or CPU could be running at way higher temperatures than it should be. Thankfully this will be easy to spot with HwInfo and then you can investigate the problem further, but I would still be concerned about buying a second hand watercooling part – especially because there’s some pretty effective air cooling products that would probably work out cheaper than buying used watercooling parts.

A Note On CPUs

Some people also say that you should avoid used CPUs because the pins could be bent on them, and in some cases FAKE CPUs are actually being sold by dodgy sellers who literally  change the CPU model number etchings on the front of the processor – which is really concerning, andGamers Nexus published a great videoon this a couple of years ago. For me personally though, this just depends on WHERE I’m buying a used CPU from. If it’s from a reputable hardware retailer then I WOULD trust it. But a random seller on eBay or AliExpress? Not so much.

Do You Trust The Seller?

And this goes back to a common theme that I’m mentioned throughout this video: who the seller is. I personally WAS happy to buy a “used” (well, refurbished) PSU because it came directly from Corsair with a warranty, so I trusted that. Equally I would happily purchase a used CPU, motherboard and GPU as long as I trusted the seller. But I would NOT buy from a random used hardware source, because the risk is too high for me – especially considering that sometimes the used price isn’t all that much less than the brand new price, particularly if you’re happy to wait for sales events like Black Friday  to come up. That’s my take on it anyway, but what about you? Which PC parts are you happy to buy second hand, and which would you always avoid? Please let me know down in the comments… especially if you’ve ever bought used storage. I’d be really interested to know your thoughts there, and how it worked out for you.

Building computers generally isn’t cheap, and it’s not always easy. I used to find that wiring up all the components was one of the hardest parts, especially when it comes to the bulky motherboard cable and powering the expensive graphics card – you don’t want to make a mistake there. That’s why I have created a full guide forhow to connect up all your PSU cables, and it’s updated for the latest ATX 3.0 and ATX 3.1 standards. It runs through all the different cables and what to do with each of them, and I also cover the best practices for powering your graphics card.

Tristan has been interested in computer hardware and software since he was 10 years old. He has built loads of computers over the years, along with installing, modifying and writing software (he’s a backend software developer ‘by trade’).Tristan also has an academic background in technology (in Math and Computer Science), so he enjoys drilling into the deeper aspects of technology.Tristan is also an avid PC gamer, with FFX and Rocket League being his favorite games.