At first, it caught my eye because it was a nice looking gaming PC. The cable management is good and there are some decent looking RGB elements (especially the sleeved cable extensions).
I then saw the asking price - £1920. When anyone is charging this much for a gaming PC, I just have to know what the specs are. I'll run through them here:
Ok, so we are starting strongly here. This is a top drawer CPU, capable of anything you throw at it, thanks to its 12 cores and 24 threads. It also makes use of PCIe 4.0 which doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0. This enables the use of new high end graphics cards and future proofs your rig for a while.
These retail at around £450, but you can pick up a used on for around £360.
Again, this is a very strong motherboard, which comes with all the bells and whistles. PCIe 4.0 support, 4 x M.2 slots for all the NVME SSDs you'll ever need, beefy heatsinks to keep everything nice and cool and, built in wifi and bluetooth connectivity. All that alongside the X570 chipset makes a very nice motherboard indeed.
New, these will set you back around £270. Used ones are quite hard to come by, so there isn't a huge discount for buying second-hand.
Make it 3 good components in a row! 32GB of RAM is solid and will handle most tasks with ease. Only the heaviest of video editing or modelling tasks would require an upgrade to 64GB. For gaming, 32GB is perfect. You also can't really go wrong with the Vengeance LPX series. They aren't the flashiest sticks out there, but the are great value, coming in at around £120, new.
GPU: EVGA GTX 780 3GB
Here we hit a bump in the road. The GTX 780 was released in 2013 and is, by far, the oldest (and worst) component in this build. Back in the day. it was a great graphics card, but in 2020 you can get much better cards for your money. You can no longer buy the GTX 780 new, but you can pick one up for roughly £220 on the second-hand market. Considering you could buy a NEW GTX 1650 Super for £170, which wipes the floor with the 780, you can see that this is not a great option.
THE REST:
CPU COOLER: Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro - £75. A decent cooler, needed for the powerful 3900x, although I'd prefer water cooling in the form of an all-in-one cooler. Better still, a custom cooling loop, but that would add a lot of cost, as discussed in our Guide to Customisation.
STORAGE: 1TB WD Blue SSD - £95. It is not specified if the SSD is of the 2.5 inch or M.2 variety, but a 1TB SSD is nice either way. I'd prefer some extra space, though. AAA games are hefty and will chew through 1TB alarmingly quickly.
CASE: NZXT 510 - £100. NZXT make some of my favourite cases. They look great and have fantastic cable management features built in, so a solid choice.
MISSING: There is no mention of the power supply or any extras like case fans and RGB elements. To be generous, I will assume £100 for a decent modular PSU and another £75 for other bits and bobs.
HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH?
Remember the asking price for this system is £1920.
Adding up the above, the total comes to £1505 new (except for the GTX 780) or £1230 used, which is again generous. I personally wouldn't spend more than £1000 on this used set-up.
That is a huge profit margin this seller is hoping for. It's criminal, in my eyes. I'd avoid this listing like the plague and spend your money on something else.
LIKE WHAT?
If you did have £1900 to spend on a new gaming PC, what should you buy? Some of the stuff above is good, but here is what I would spend that kind of money on:
CPU: Ryzen 9 3900x
MOBO: Gigabyte X570 I Aorus Pro
GPU: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2 x 16GB 3600Mhz
SSD: WD Blue 1TB M.2
HDD: WD Caviar Blue 1TB 7200rpm
PSU: Corsair RM 750W 80+ Gold Fully Modular
CASE: NZXT H710
CPU COOLER: Coolermaster ML360R RGB AIO
FANS: Coolermaster MF120R x 3
The most significant change from the Facebook Marketplace listing is the graphics card. The RTX 2070 SUPER is a beast, which will handle almost anything you throw at it and destroys the 780 in every way. It does come with a price tag to match, but if you are spending nearly £2000 on a gaming PC, you'd expect that. If you are serious about getting as much gaming performance as you can, you should be aiming to allocate a third of your budget to the GPU.
Another noticeable difference is the fact that this would be a newly built PC, complete with all the peace of mind that brings. You are covered by all the warranties you'd expect, which is worth a lot in itself.
I've also upgraded the case, added 1TB of HDD storage and beefed up the CPU cooling by installing an all-in-one water cooling system.
Now that is a system worth spending £1900 on. If you think so too, drop me a message and we can discuss it.
