That post is more legit that those BS listings that say things like "MASTER RACE GAMING PC PLAY AT 300 FPS PWN NOOBS ON ALL AAAAA TITLES WILL NOT PART, INCLUDES WINDOWS 11 WORTH 300 DOLLARS, INCLUDED MOUSE AND KEYBOARD, ASKING $5000, TAKES PETS LIKE NO PROBLEM, THAT'S A GREAT PC RIGHT HERE"
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
@@TheBlueBunnyKen um well I don’t think so and also I’ve never heard of that but I installed a key from vipcdkeys or sum like that everyone uses it it should be fine like I said I turned it on one morning and it jus sent me in to bios and I’ve tried everything possible 2 days of research and dis plugging things and connecting them back all Ik is that all my parts work is sum type of software issue I think and idk what to do Yk anything about it every time I turn it on it always brings me to bios and i can’t get out of it I’ve tried everything
These systems can bring a lot of value to a home as Fileservers/NAS systems (Depending on how many drives you can add). Alternatively, if you wanted to start a Home Lab you could use this thing as a Domain Controller. Run an E-Mail-Server, Smart-Home apps. Etc. Old Hardware has some good uses. Restrictive is the power costs most of the time. But better than E-Waste.
I deal with computers like this all the time, companies upgrade their hardware and for the most part will give their old systems out for free. I would argue that $40 is actually a spot-on price for what you received, at least in comparison to my local market regarding old business computers. For instance, I regularly sell i5/i7 3rd generation, windows 10 pro, 256gb ssd, 8gb-16gb memory fully functional rigs including monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers for $100. i5/i7 4th generation with the aforementioned for $150, i5/i7 6th generation for $200 and i5/i7 7th generation for $300.
I used an 2500k for about 12 years and I added an ssd in November 2019 and it was still fine for internet and Skyrim so I was happy. I thought about selling the working parts with the 16gb of good ram but have not yet. I have picked up a base of an 10100f and MSI Z490-A Pro for $105 and another 13100f with MSI Z690 Tomahawk for $185 since April.
Greg saw this -- challenge accepted. Edit: I watched to the end and I just knew you were considering giving the machines back. It's exactly what I'd expect from you. Someone grounded and genuine, I wish there were more tubers like you. Not looking for likes or a comment -- this is how I feel and thought you should know it. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Later Greg!
I am with you on this one. being honest and true is rare these days. Happy to see this spread instead of taking advantage of people just because you can
I do these systems all the time for senior citizens and such!! I've actually got 22 PC's that run the gamut from i7-3770 to a Ryzen 5 3600x. There is a market for these pc's.. Hey.. I love this video!! I have been called "King of the budget box"!!! Keep up the good work Sir!
I have a near identical Lenovo PC that I took out of rotation earlier this year when I upgraded to a newer office PC for mid-level gaming. It still works. I expect that the seller or someone else will get some use from this rig. As long as they don't expect too much from it.
Great video Greg. I've bought a few of these towers in the past and I guessed you might have had a 4th gen system but 3rd gen is still viable too. If you stick a cheap 4 core 8 thread xeon processor in there it will still be able to play some newer titles. The power adapter cables for these are also quite cheap so upgrading the psu to add a better gpu is also easy to do. Of course you can only go so far with an older pc before the money you spend is ridiculous, but with used parts I've upgraded a few similar pcs for friends and family who would have probably thrown them in the trash. They are great for tinkering with linux too as they are so cheap. Looking forward to seeing the other system you got. That was also a nice message from the seller after you contacted them.
@@vinlandviking I assure you that I have thought about it but unfortunately I don't have the time to do these things... we would need someone already qualified, with a suitable structure (a shop) and perhaps with some sponsors, who would try to do something similar.
Pretty cool video! Maybe you could do a series on what things this rig could be turned into? A HTPC? Maybe turn it into a box full of HD or SSD for media or data backup?
Years ago I bought a at that time pretty new Toshiba C660 (Sandy bridge i5-2430M I believe it was) off of eBay for €25. The seller stated that the laptop wouldn't power on AT ALL. Sure enough when I received the laptop it indeed did not want to power on... Because the power button was stuck. That was the only issue. A jammed power button. Sometimes you really get lucky!
Finally you got something I can relate to! It is the same vintage as my daily driver! Only wish I could afford the new stuff. Like your fix or flops keep it up .
From another standpoint, recycling used electronics does cost money so it was basically free to ship it for them assuming they don't have a recycling center nearby. But also because the parts in it are super old, it would probably make sense just to give it away for the cost of shipping.
I'm a fan of these repurposed office desktops. I recently purchased a refurbished a SFF Dell Optiplex 7010 (16GB/250GB) from eBay that had the same CPU as your unit. I installed a GPU that could be powered by the 75W PCIE slot and have been having fun with it ever since.
A PC like this is perfect, since a lot of the best PC games of the 2000's would run no problem on that. Would be great as a retro rig, especially with the integrated DVD drive.
A retro rig , or a Home Theater PC. I got a dual core Pentium (3d gen I think) , paired with 6GB of RAM and using an RX 460 with it, and use it as an HTPC (my TV may be android TV , but some things are much better run off this PC ). It does the job just fine, Just a cheap-o SSD in it (A Patriot Burst I think) and it's completely fine.
I actually have a ThinkCentre with this exact chassis (although with a 2nd gen Intel instead of 3rd). I got it for 75 dollars off of marketplace, slapped 16 gb of ram and a Quadro P2000 in it, and currently use it for a somewhat overkill Jellyfin media server.
I think I nerded out a bit while watching this LOL. Seeing the Intel case badge I knew it was 2nd or 3rd gen. Then seeing the USB 3 ports at the back I confirmed it was 3rd gen. Only thing I saw that was off was around 3:15 of the video with the Intel case badges the one you mentioned Ivy Bridge is actually the first gen Nahalem. Apart from that its a solid vid and nice to see it was a simple problem to fix and it was very nice of you to offer to send it back to the seller and let them know it just needed a drive and an OS install.
Pc like this (with the ssd) may suck for games but is still good for office use like some basic web, typing, accounting, inventory. Glad you got it running, would have been sad to see a functional machine in a trash heap somewhere.
I have a feeling the seller got a bunch of these kind of systems when a company or school or something was dumping them after upgrading or closing down. It happens all the time, and would explain why this one at least had a v-Pro enabled i5 in it, which isn't typically included on the consumer SKU's of the same CPU model. It would also explain the lack of drive, which as you say is good security practice. Never sell a used system with a used drive! Even if it's been wiped! Unless you're fine with whatever being on there at some point being recovered (even if that scenario is very, very unlikely). A 2.5" SSD is cheap as hell these days too so hardly going to be an issue for most people to slap one in.
That’s what we used to do sell off incomplete/partially working units as parts/repairs that came from computer surplus pallets just to clear out the junk in our warehouse. Our cost was generally around $15-20 a unit and the cost of the missing parts made them uneconomical to refurbish and resell to make a profit on it so they were sold as scrap online.
I’ve had an experience like this with a PC for my dad that’s used every day. For $50 I got a Dell XPS with an i7 4770. It came with a 460 watt PSU with pcie power so I got a gtx 1060 and it’s been a nice $140 PC that can essentially run all games
Fun video. A stranger left a slim desktop on my gallery step. Though it was full of dirt inside which a compressor easily rectified, all it needed was a drive. That was eight years ago, and my wife still uses that Core 2 Duo to this very day.
I get the idea - but a Haswell (4th gen) i5 office PC is no more than $40 regularly in working condition. You can throw a $15 Xeon E3 1230 v3 into these no problem. You way overestimated the value of what you have. The HP Z240 are Skylake and have a C series chipset, so you can throw a $15 E3 1230 v5 into those. The HP ProDesk 280 G1 MT and 400 G1/G2 MT are even standard ATX and will take any new PSU without an adapter. Those are regularly $40 and below.
For security purposes what you should consider is securely wiping your drives before sale. For modern NVMe it's a couple of seconds for the drive to rotate the encryption keys safely and erase it with no damage. For HDDs it takes a while but you can just boot DBAN and leave it running until it's done. Somewhere in the middle it's a bit annoying, but if you're sensible and use full disk encryption always you don't really have to worry about it either.
I work in IT and we have these at my job and one of them died recently, currently trying to create a sleeper build inside the case. It's also impressive how these still hold up with just a simple SSD upgrade!
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
About a year ago, I had the same experience with someone selling an old HP for $40. It came with an i5-6400, 16GB of RAM, 500GB SSD with valid windows 10. All that was wrong was the power supply. I used until last week when I migrated all the parts into a server case and upgraded the motherboard and RAM. I love finding a good deal.
Wow, $40.00 and free shipping! I have several older pc's similar to this and would sell them, but shipping usually cost more than the rig is worth. Great deal. Thanks for sharing.
Kudos for offering to return it and explaining that it was still working albeit missing a boot drive . Many others (like your viewers) would flip it for profit
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
7:23 I've never seen a monitor port of any kind directly on the motherboard. And this one has a second DisplayPort in the middle of the motherboard for some reason.
Old OEM systems are great fun if you can get them before they go to recyclers or get a cheap "parts" PC like you did. You can get a drive cage to turn the 5.25" bays into a bunch of 2.5" or 3.5" bays and make a NAS/webserver/HTPC/whatever you need. Snipe an auction for a 3770 for like $10 and it'd be even faster.
im still using a i7 3770 and it still works like a charm (and very powerfull for its age) ive got it for about 30€ once from ebay and a nice gigabyte board
I did almost exactly the same thing except I got four thinkcentres with I5-4570 and ddr4. So I combined the ram, threw in a couple of ssd’s and added 1630ti slims. Now my kids both have decent gaming rigs!
I don't know why but i freaking love this video. I have a stashed unused hardware feels like rebuilding those with moderate components and see if its actually working! Can't wait for the next one!
You can use these old systems for all kinds of stuff! I buy them at yard sales all the time for $20-$30...They are usually Dell Optiplex computers with an i7 3770 and they usually have displayport instead of HDMI just like yours, i'm guessing it's an old office thing...I used one to make a DIY NAS last year for dirt cheap!
My suspicion is they get these basically free in bulk from offices and stuff that are upgrading or shutting down and it would cost them more in man hours to check all machines with working windows installs so they just do a basic power on test then list them on ebay as broken so they dont ahve to deal with annoying customer returns and such
I got a Lenovo with a i7 7700 with 8GB DDR4 the other day for 55. Again like yours no hard drive and onboard graphics. But runs good for the price. Good video :)
I work for a company who sells PCs like thin on Ebay, these systems are used in MASS by colleges, government buildings, Companys then there sold in bulk and people like the company I work for buys them them resells them individually to make some money! Also most of these PC Are bought for 7 to 12$ a piece and cost around 12 to 20$ to ship so they are still making a profit just not a Massive one.
i found one exactly the same in the garbage and got it going with a few spare parts i had laying around and it works great the only problem is the CPU fan starts off quiet but revs full tilt so it's a bit loud but for a second computer i can't complain .
I recently got a PC with Gtx 950, phenom 1090t, 16 gb ddr3, 650w chieftech psu and a premium board + very nice case and a 1080p monitor for around 120 USD. Did some testing for fun (6 core phenom!) paired it with a 6950 xt and so on. Love those old beasts❤.
Good PC for a home set up of PFSense. Last week I purchased on eBay a Dell XPS 8940 with an I7-10700, 32 GB of RAM and a 1660 Super for $340, a deal I can live with.
Have found a few pcs like this at the thrift store for single digits and was able to turn them into decent flip pcs and make pretty decent profit, especially looking at it from a percentage standpoint.
A few years ago I went from a Core2Quad Q9550 to a Ryzen5 2600X. I remember those tempting Ivy Bridge i5 cpu's. I skipped a lot of generations pinching pennies raising kids. Thx Greg for the video.
G'day Greg, I bought 2 DELL PCs both 3rd Gen like this one for Home Schooling my niece & nephew during Human Malware, one was just a Tower with i5 + 8GB for $30AUD & the other was a complete PC with i7 + 8GB + Monitor & ⌨🖱for $90. From my spare parts I added a RX460 for the i5 & 8GB + GTX1060 6GB for the i7, worked great for School work then some gaming while kids were waiting to be picked up.
Man seeing 3570 brings back some memories, I built a pc with the 3570k when it launched was a good computer man thinking back to when quad cores were actually good enough.
Love this Video Greg, that would be a great rig to rip the billions of dvd's and blue-rays i own into a digital library, sadly modern pc's dont come with optical drives.
The difference in what they sold it for vs what they could have sold it for when actually testing it in these cases often doesn't make sense because you have to pay someone to test it or do it yourself, which can get very time consuming if you're not really familiar with the item. I have bought several items from ebay that were listed as parts but came in working perfectly fine, especially if the seller is quite big and does a lot of sales.
I guess these systems were decomissioned from an old office or something and hard drives were removed before retiring these but anyways nice to see ultra budget builds
Wow Greg you're such a nice guy, it's very nice that you contacted the seller thinking you got a steal but people have been buying this old work stations for budget PC builds for a long time and many content creators did vids on it too like gaming PC under 200$, usually they sell for a bit more 60-80$, yeah 40$ is a good deal but not a steal, the seller probably just didn't want any headaches with returns that's why the "for parts" listing + when you have a lot of them it's better to sell for less $$ but fast as they take a lot of room too and that cost $$.
I bought one like this for about $50 4 years ago, added another 4gb ram & SSD & it still does all the basics fine & quickly enough. Unless it dies I don't see it being retired for another 4 years. Like the old Dell Optis
Could've been part of office buy where the seller according a stack of computers and just did a basic test to see which worked and which did not. Then sold them based on whether they could boot.
It's fun to watch videos like this where systems that are really not terrible can be bought for little money. You don't see this in Australia because, even 2nd hand, we are still trying to recoup some of the shipping costs and exchange rate markup which really hits hard down here. I personally would be a bit careful as to how these PC's were sourced. So long as it was all legal and above board, I'm good with it. I used to work in the service dept. of a major electronics retailer here and I remember a tech telling me, back in the days of Windows 98, that he scored a PC less than a year old from a company because the boss thought that when his hard drive filled up, that was the end of his PC's life and told his PA (the tech's mother) to get rid of it. Yeah, I Know!
a good casual lightweight gaming rig/minecraft/etc along those lines. semi-useful for basic web use and office stuff, still. excellent for linux purposes.
At first I'm like: OMG! You didn't. 😅 Later on I'm like: Hey, not bad for a few bucks, Greg. I'll bet it would make a decent emulation rig. Older retro games would probably run great. Good job. 👍
I used to get this kind of unit and then make a give away during my office even. Last time give away an i3 6100 + Gtx 750ti. The other one is I7 3770 + RX570. The person who received it still using it well. Relatively, all these kind of old pc are still good to go for simple job.
I have some old stuff from this gen. Like a couple sticks of Ripjaw 2GB DDR3 and a couple EVGA 4GB DDR3. An old Zotac GTX 970 (HDMI only works with old drivers). An Nvidia NVS 310 (dual display port). There's no realistic chance I'll ever use this stuff. Is there a way to send it to you? Maybe for the cost of shipping? Would probably all fit in a flat rate box from USPS.
For parts on the office pcs are usually a company paid a recycler to take it away, don’t want returns for any reason just selling for whatever you’ll pay and it’s considered recycled. After shipping and fees they may have made $5 off of you, $50 off the company that paid to have it recycled The workstations are generally work horses, you’ll get sick of looking at it and it’s well deprecated before they stop functioning. It’s dead for windows next year when windows 10 ends support but you can probably run supported Linux on it for the foreseeable future
They probably listed it for parts because someone would surly buy it not get it to work and leave them a bad rating, I would be surprised if they want it back they’re probably in the biz of buying storage units and flipping them!
You see a lot of people view a computer as one thing, and when that one thing is broken you throw it out, like a lot of products. But like a car, what people don't understand is that many issues can be fixed by a cheap replacement of a particular part, but a lot of people don't understand or care enough to do that so this is pretty common in my experience. A "broken" computer sold for cheap because people don't view PCs as a dynamic collection of swappable parts and as one big thing that in its current state is "broken" even though it takes me less than ten minutes and about ten dollars to fix it.
2010's gaming, emulation, MAME arcade cabinet... this is a great system for the money. The SSD makes it run even better than it would have when it was new. Excellent find IMHO.
I'm currently using a 1050ti, and honestly it's a pretty good. My computer has a 4670 I5, and 12gb of slow ass ddr3 ram, i was able to run VRChat pretty good with oculus link. and it runs rocket league very well. But yes, newer game titles and more demanding applications, it certainly isn't a power house. Good video Greg, it'd be fun to see more older computer videos.
I have a system like this one that I got from work as they upgraded all the PCs in the office. I made it into a NAS server. got 3 500GB HDD drives for free from work as well (fully formatted) and 8gb DDR3 RAM. while a bit loud its a champ!
Saw the sticker and the USB 3 ports on back....yeah that's probably 3rd gen. 4th gen stickers are taller then they are wide and I recently got a third gen sticker to replace the previous one on a Lenovo all in one machine as I had upgraded it to an i7. :P Though it was the USB 3.0 ports that gave it away for me. I don't think USB 3 was on gen 2 stuff yet.
I used a very similar pc up until this year because I simply couldn't afford to upgrade. I did me well for the 8 or so years I had it. Never really gamed on it much but surprisingly was able to beat Resident Evil 2 Remake on low settings.
I have a old Dell XE2 with a i7-4770S 10GB of Ram 365W PSW and a 1650 Super! I love this thing and it is a beast! I love old systems like this and they can be easy to get :)
The thing about running a 3D mark score and seeing that your result is only better than 20% of all results or whatever is that the software by its nature self selects for people running relatively high end computers. I mean I would call this pretty entry level but it's not all that bad. $40 for a BYOD isn't even that uncommon a price actually, though usually at the lower prices it's the small form factor models.
I have two great systems, but for hours and hours of just watching Videos and Facebook browsing, i like to use a third old system, that can work all day for simple stuff, and not add up hours of abuse on my thousand dollar systems, love DVD drives to convert old DVD to digital, but that DVD Tray Mustache was hillarious Greg, have an awesome day. i look forward to your fix or flop videos over any other tech channels from the last 6 months. keep up the great work Greg
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
Snagged a ux305 laptop from some guy who was leaving the country a month ago. Only 50$. Has a I5-5300u, integrated graphics, the battery is dead but everything else works just fine. I can actually run some games on it - Transistor, Hades (actually ran it, didn't test it fully yet), HOMM5 , Neverwinter nights... heck I got 30 running games installed on that thing's 250 ssd. Alot of india stuff and bit-y stuff. Love them games anyway. Using it at night shift at work, word/excel at evening shift. Just awesome for the price. Sometimes, you just find finds. Gotta love em'.
IMO, with V-pro on there you have a system that could be used as a NAS or something similar... it could be run balls and managed using RDP or over the V-pro interface.
The nice thing about these older pc's is that they have extreme low idle power draw, unlike today's gaming pcs that pull a lot more than 100 watts doing nothing. Great for small scripts that need to run all day/night.
At the end it is a Lenovo Thinkkcenter so it is a brand and it can do a lot even though quite too big for me cause I got a thinkpad centre mini with an i3 and 8 gb memory without an SSD which I got for 15€ to run Home Assistant. It was 56€ and from 2015 so quite a good deal of cause without anything else except the usual external power supply I like it a lot, performs smooth and W10 ran quite well before I went ahead for HomeAssistant.
One thing to watch out for with these systems is GPU white list. I made this mistake a few years back when trying to build a cheap rig for my son. I had the i5 2400 variant and bought an AMD RX 570 which wouldn't work as it wasn't on Lenovos GPU white list. Only a select few very low end ATI GPU's but most nvidia cards will work. I ended up throwing a GTX760 in and it worked well.
That post is more legit that those BS listings that say things like
"MASTER RACE GAMING PC PLAY AT 300 FPS PWN NOOBS ON ALL AAAAA TITLES WILL NOT PART, INCLUDES WINDOWS 11 WORTH 300 DOLLARS, INCLUDED MOUSE AND KEYBOARD, ASKING $5000, TAKES PETS LIKE NO PROBLEM, THAT'S A GREAT PC RIGHT HERE"
Takes me back to the good ol' Savage Studio days of roasting ridiculous Craigslist ads 👀
takes pets like no problem,
🤣
i won't even buy a pc unless it takes pets.
I was a military postmaster. There is no such thing as 'too much packing' material. There is only one rule: Pack it like you want to see it again.
It's great seeing old systems on this channel, cause it's usually modern systems
Agreed, shows what we started with compared to technology now a days
Lol
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
@@yt_miguel1264 like windows os uninstalled itself?
@@TheBlueBunnyKen um well I don’t think so and also I’ve never heard of that but I installed a key from vipcdkeys or sum like that everyone uses it it should be fine like I said I turned it on one morning and it jus sent me in to bios and I’ve tried everything possible 2 days of research and dis plugging things and connecting them back all Ik is that all my parts work is sum type of software issue I think and idk what to do Yk anything about it every time I turn it on it always brings me to bios and i can’t get out of it I’ve tried everything
These systems can bring a lot of value to a home as Fileservers/NAS systems (Depending on how many drives you can add). Alternatively, if you wanted to start a Home Lab you could use this thing as a Domain Controller. Run an E-Mail-Server, Smart-Home apps. Etc. Old Hardware has some good uses. Restrictive is the power costs most of the time. But better than E-Waste.
Not only do I learn stuff from your videos but you are an amazing human being for reaching out to the owner. I salute your mentality.
I deal with computers like this all the time, companies upgrade their hardware and for the most part will give their old systems out for free. I would argue that $40 is actually a spot-on price for what you received, at least in comparison to my local market regarding old business computers. For instance, I regularly sell i5/i7 3rd generation, windows 10 pro, 256gb ssd, 8gb-16gb memory fully functional rigs including monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers for $100. i5/i7 4th generation with the aforementioned for $150, i5/i7 6th generation for $200 and i5/i7 7th generation for $300.
I used an 2500k for about 12 years and I added an ssd in November 2019 and it was still fine for internet and Skyrim so I was happy. I thought about selling the working parts with the 16gb of good ram but have not yet. I have picked up a base of an 10100f and MSI Z490-A Pro for $105 and another 13100f with MSI Z690 Tomahawk for $185 since April.
Greg saw this -- challenge accepted. Edit: I watched to the end and I just knew you were considering giving the machines back. It's exactly what I'd expect from you. Someone grounded and genuine, I wish there were more tubers like you. Not looking for likes or a comment -- this is how I feel and thought you should know it. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Later Greg!
I am with you on this one. being honest and true is rare these days. Happy to see this spread instead of taking advantage of people just because you can
To be honest I doubt anyone would like to get back over 10 years old computer that they just got rid of🙅♀
@@jarnovilen5259 It would be like getting back that Ouija board you tried to throw away.
I do these systems all the time for senior citizens and such!! I've actually got 22 PC's that run the gamut from i7-3770 to a Ryzen 5 3600x. There is a market for these pc's.. Hey.. I love this video!! I have been called "King of the budget box"!!! Keep up the good work Sir!
Love to see this kind of content, Greg. Would you consider doing a full hot-rod rebuild on the next one? Re-case the motherboard, etc.?
I have a near identical Lenovo PC that I took out of rotation earlier this year when I upgraded to a newer office PC for mid-level gaming. It still works. I expect that the seller or someone else will get some use from this rig. As long as they don't expect too much from it.
Great video Greg. I've bought a few of these towers in the past and I guessed you might have had a 4th gen system but 3rd gen is still viable too. If you stick a cheap 4 core 8 thread xeon processor in there it will still be able to play some newer titles. The power adapter cables for these are also quite cheap so upgrading the psu to add a better gpu is also easy to do. Of course you can only go so far with an older pc before the money you spend is ridiculous, but with used parts I've upgraded a few similar pcs for friends and family who would have probably thrown them in the trash. They are great for tinkering with linux too as they are so cheap. Looking forward to seeing the other system you got. That was also a nice message from the seller after you contacted them.
I love this channel. Unfortunately a service like yours doesn't exist in my country (Italy)... yet it would be a very useful service for everyone!!
Sounds like an opportunity for you to start a service like Greg's. If you have watched enough of his videos you are probably qualified. 😉 Ciao!
@@vinlandviking I assure you that I have thought about it but unfortunately I don't have the time to do these things... we would need someone already qualified, with a suitable structure (a shop) and perhaps with some sponsors, who would try to do something similar.
Pretty cool video! Maybe you could do a series on what things this rig could be turned into? A HTPC? Maybe turn it into a box full of HD or SSD for media or data backup?
Years ago I bought a at that time pretty new Toshiba C660 (Sandy bridge i5-2430M I believe it was) off of eBay for €25. The seller stated that the laptop wouldn't power on AT ALL. Sure enough when I received the laptop it indeed did not want to power on... Because the power button was stuck. That was the only issue. A jammed power button. Sometimes you really get lucky!
Finally you got something I can relate to! It is the same vintage as my daily driver! Only wish I could afford the new stuff. Like your fix or flops keep it up .
From another standpoint, recycling used electronics does cost money so it was basically free to ship it for them assuming they don't have a recycling center nearby. But also because the parts in it are super old, it would probably make sense just to give it away for the cost of shipping.
I'm a fan of these repurposed office desktops. I recently purchased a refurbished a SFF Dell Optiplex 7010 (16GB/250GB) from eBay that had the same CPU as your unit. I installed a GPU that could be powered by the 75W PCIE slot and have been having fun with it ever since.
A PC like this is perfect, since a lot of the best PC games of the 2000's would run no problem on that. Would be great as a retro rig, especially with the integrated DVD drive.
on low this might run COD, I know it could run apex or fortnite with no problem.
Perfect Emulation station
yh was about to say @@anthonylong5870
A retro rig , or a Home Theater PC.
I got a dual core Pentium (3d gen I think) , paired with 6GB of RAM and using an RX 460 with it, and use it as an HTPC (my TV may be android TV , but some things are much better run off this PC ). It does the job just fine, Just a cheap-o SSD in it (A Patriot Burst I think) and it's completely fine.
Yep, you could get a like a GTX 1650 and have an awesome emulation machine...
I actually have a ThinkCentre with this exact chassis (although with a 2nd gen Intel instead of 3rd). I got it for 75 dollars off of marketplace, slapped 16 gb of ram and a Quadro P2000 in it, and currently use it for a somewhat overkill Jellyfin media server.
I think I nerded out a bit while watching this LOL. Seeing the Intel case badge I knew it was 2nd or 3rd gen. Then seeing the USB 3 ports at the back I confirmed it was 3rd gen.
Only thing I saw that was off was around 3:15 of the video with the Intel case badges the one you mentioned Ivy Bridge is actually the first gen Nahalem.
Apart from that its a solid vid and nice to see it was a simple problem to fix and it was very nice of you to offer to send it back to the seller and let them know it just needed a drive and an OS install.
“Cmon man, don’t make me look like a chump on front of my friends” made me giggle like a little girl. Great find Greg!
Greg. A proper bloke. You're really one of the best on here.
I provide free PC/electronics repairs to a couple of my friends who then bring me every PC carcass they can find in town. This was a good find indeed.
Pc like this (with the ssd) may suck for games but is still good for office use like some basic web, typing, accounting, inventory. Glad you got it running, would have been sad to see a functional machine in a trash heap somewhere.
I have a feeling the seller got a bunch of these kind of systems when a company or school or something was dumping them after upgrading or closing down. It happens all the time, and would explain why this one at least had a v-Pro enabled i5 in it, which isn't typically included on the consumer SKU's of the same CPU model. It would also explain the lack of drive, which as you say is good security practice. Never sell a used system with a used drive! Even if it's been wiped! Unless you're fine with whatever being on there at some point being recovered (even if that scenario is very, very unlikely). A 2.5" SSD is cheap as hell these days too so hardly going to be an issue for most people to slap one in.
That’s what we used to do sell off incomplete/partially working units as parts/repairs that came from computer surplus pallets just to clear out the junk in our warehouse. Our cost was generally around $15-20 a unit and the cost of the missing parts made them uneconomical to refurbish and resell to make a profit on it so they were sold as scrap online.
Great win on he sale and was happy to see you reach out to the seller. Shows the character you have. Keep it up
I’ve had an experience like this with a PC for my dad that’s used every day. For $50 I got a Dell XPS with an i7 4770. It came with a 460 watt PSU with pcie power so I got a gtx 1060 and it’s been a nice $140 PC that can essentially run all games
Nicest guy in the world man huge respect to you for the message at the end
Felt it was the right thing to do 👍
Fun video. A stranger left a slim desktop on my gallery step. Though it was full of dirt inside which a compressor easily rectified, all it needed was a drive. That was eight years ago, and my wife still uses that Core 2 Duo to this very day.
the seller probably saw "no operating system found" and figured the pc just didn't operate lol
I get the idea - but a Haswell (4th gen) i5 office PC is no more than $40 regularly in working condition. You can throw a $15 Xeon E3 1230 v3 into these no problem. You way overestimated the value of what you have.
The HP Z240 are Skylake and have a C series chipset, so you can throw a $15 E3 1230 v5 into those. The HP ProDesk 280 G1 MT and 400 G1/G2 MT are even standard ATX and will take any new PSU without an adapter. Those are regularly $40 and below.
For security purposes what you should consider is securely wiping your drives before sale. For modern NVMe it's a couple of seconds for the drive to rotate the encryption keys safely and erase it with no damage. For HDDs it takes a while but you can just boot DBAN and leave it running until it's done. Somewhere in the middle it's a bit annoying, but if you're sensible and use full disk encryption always you don't really have to worry about it either.
I work in IT and we have these at my job and one of them died recently, currently trying to create a sleeper build inside the case.
It's also impressive how these still hold up with just a simple SSD upgrade!
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
I was gonna comment you should send it back since was so simple but then I saw you already tried! That is super awesome of you.
That CD eject scene cracked me the hell up for some reason.🤣
Love how you think Greg, good to know there is still honest people out there.
Sleeper build incoming?
About a year ago, I had the same experience with someone selling an old HP for $40. It came with an i5-6400, 16GB of RAM, 500GB SSD with valid windows 10. All that was wrong was the power supply. I used until last week when I migrated all the parts into a server case and upgraded the motherboard and RAM. I love finding a good deal.
Greg, make this a series. This is absolutely fun to watch!
ahhhhhhhh Greg, u awesome dude and geek - I love you man, thanks for the entertaining video brother. Godspeed with your new big home.
Wow, $40.00 and free shipping! I have several older pc's similar to this and would sell them, but shipping usually cost more than the rig is worth. Great deal. Thanks for sharing.
Wow shipping is crazy in you area! Around here i could ship it across the country for €5 and neighbouring,west-Euro, countries for less than 15
Kudos for offering to return it and explaining that it was still working albeit missing a boot drive . Many others (like your viewers) would flip it for profit
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
VGA port with Display, leads me into thinking Ivy Bridge. I'll find out soon.
7:23 I've never seen a monitor port of any kind directly on the motherboard. And this one has a second DisplayPort in the middle of the motherboard for some reason.
Old OEM systems are great fun if you can get them before they go to recyclers or get a cheap "parts" PC like you did. You can get a drive cage to turn the 5.25" bays into a bunch of 2.5" or 3.5" bays and make a NAS/webserver/HTPC/whatever you need. Snipe an auction for a 3770 for like $10 and it'd be even faster.
Interested to see a clean-up or "pimp my pc" version with these old pc. :)
im still using a i7 3770 and it still works like a charm (and very powerfull for its age) ive got it for about 30€ once from ebay and a nice gigabyte board
I did almost exactly the same thing except I got four thinkcentres with I5-4570 and ddr4. So I combined the ram, threw in a couple of ssd’s and added 1630ti slims. Now my kids both have decent gaming rigs!
I don't know why but i freaking love this video. I have a stashed unused hardware feels like rebuilding those with moderate components and see if its actually working! Can't wait for the next one!
You can use these old systems for all kinds of stuff! I buy them at yard sales all the time for $20-$30...They are usually Dell Optiplex computers with an i7 3770 and they usually have displayport instead of HDMI just like yours, i'm guessing it's an old office thing...I used one to make a DIY NAS last year for dirt cheap!
My suspicion is they get these basically free in bulk from offices and stuff that are upgrading or shutting down and it would cost them more in man hours to check all machines with working windows installs so they just do a basic power on test then list them on ebay as broken so they dont ahve to deal with annoying customer returns and such
I got a Lenovo with a i7 7700 with 8GB DDR4 the other day for 55. Again like yours no hard drive and onboard graphics. But runs good for the price. Good video :)
We love all PC’s round these parts. What a fun tinker.
I work for a company who sells PCs like thin on Ebay, these systems are used in MASS by colleges, government buildings, Companys then there sold in bulk and people like the company I work for buys them them resells them individually to make some money! Also most of these PC Are bought for 7 to 12$ a piece and cost around 12 to 20$ to ship so they are still making a profit just not a Massive one.
The sellers reply was basically “nah you keep it. I stole it and don’t want to be in possession of it.” 😂
i found one exactly the same in the garbage and got it going with a few spare parts i had laying around and it works great the only problem is the CPU fan starts off quiet but revs full tilt so it's a bit loud but for a second computer i can't complain .
I recently got a PC with Gtx 950, phenom 1090t, 16 gb ddr3, 650w chieftech psu and a premium board + very nice case and a 1080p monitor for around 120 USD. Did some testing for fun (6 core phenom!) paired it with a 6950 xt and so on. Love those old beasts❤.
Your a good guy Greg. Your doing those people a solid 👍
i would use that system for emulating older games. it seems like it would handle it perfectly.
Good PC for a home set up of PFSense. Last week I purchased on eBay a Dell XPS 8940 with an I7-10700, 32 GB of RAM and a 1660 Super for $340, a deal I can live with.
Have found a few pcs like this at the thrift store for single digits and was able to turn them into decent flip pcs and make pretty decent profit, especially looking at it from a percentage standpoint.
A few years ago I went from a Core2Quad Q9550 to a Ryzen5 2600X. I remember those tempting Ivy Bridge i5 cpu's. I skipped a lot of generations pinching pennies raising kids. Thx Greg for the video.
G'day Greg,
I bought 2 DELL PCs both 3rd Gen like this one for Home Schooling my niece & nephew during Human Malware, one was just a Tower with i5 + 8GB for $30AUD & the other was a complete PC with i7 + 8GB + Monitor & ⌨🖱for $90.
From my spare parts I added a RX460 for the i5 & 8GB + GTX1060 6GB for the i7, worked great for School work then some gaming while kids were waiting to be picked up.
Man seeing 3570 brings back some memories, I built a pc with the 3570k when it launched was a good computer man thinking back to when quad cores were actually good enough.
Love this Video Greg, that would be a great rig to rip the billions of dvd's and blue-rays i own into a digital library, sadly modern pc's dont come with optical drives.
The difference in what they sold it for vs what they could have sold it for when actually testing it in these cases often doesn't make sense because you have to pay someone to test it or do it yourself, which can get very time consuming if you're not really familiar with the item.
I have bought several items from ebay that were listed as parts but came in working perfectly fine, especially if the seller is quite big and does a lot of sales.
I'd like to see you buy a Windows 98 machine and turn it into a retro gaming rig, that would be cool
I guess these systems were decomissioned from an old office or something and hard drives were removed before retiring these but anyways nice to see ultra budget builds
Wow Greg you're such a nice guy, it's very nice that you contacted the seller thinking you got a steal but people have been buying this old work stations for budget PC builds for a long time and many content creators did vids on it too like gaming PC under 200$, usually they sell for a bit more 60-80$, yeah 40$ is a good deal but not a steal, the seller probably just didn't want any headaches with returns that's why the "for parts" listing + when you have a lot of them it's better to sell for less $$ but fast as they take a lot of room too and that cost $$.
I bought one like this for about $50 4 years ago, added another 4gb ram & SSD & it still does all the basics fine & quickly enough. Unless it dies I don't see it being retired for another 4 years. Like the old Dell Optis
Could've been part of office buy where the seller according a stack of computers and just did a basic test to see which worked and which did not. Then sold them based on whether they could boot.
Enjoyed this as much as a standard fix or flop. I think it would make a great series where you buy a random broken PC from someone then get it going.
It's fun to watch videos like this where systems that are really not terrible can be bought for little money. You don't see this in Australia because, even 2nd hand, we are still trying to recoup some of the shipping costs and exchange rate markup which really hits hard down here. I personally would be a bit careful as to how these PC's were sourced. So long as it was all legal and above board, I'm good with it.
I used to work in the service dept. of a major electronics retailer here and I remember a tech telling me, back in the days of Windows 98, that he scored a PC less than a year old from a company because the boss thought that when his hard drive filled up, that was the end of his PC's life and told his PA (the tech's mother) to get rid of it. Yeah, I Know!
a good casual lightweight gaming rig/minecraft/etc along those lines. semi-useful for basic web use and office stuff, still. excellent for linux purposes.
At first I'm like: OMG! You didn't. 😅
Later on I'm like: Hey, not bad for a few bucks, Greg.
I'll bet it would make a decent emulation rig. Older retro games would probably run great. Good job. 👍
I used to get this kind of unit and then make a give away during my office even. Last time give away an i3 6100 + Gtx 750ti. The other one is I7 3770 + RX570. The person who received it still using it well. Relatively, all these kind of old pc are still good to go for simple job.
I have some old stuff from this gen. Like a couple sticks of Ripjaw 2GB DDR3 and a couple EVGA 4GB DDR3. An old Zotac GTX 970 (HDMI only works with old drivers). An Nvidia NVS 310 (dual display port). There's no realistic chance I'll ever use this stuff. Is there a way to send it to you? Maybe for the cost of shipping? Would probably all fit in a flat rate box from USPS.
For parts on the office pcs are usually a company paid a recycler to take it away, don’t want returns for any reason just selling for whatever you’ll pay and it’s considered recycled. After shipping and fees they may have made $5 off of you, $50 off the company that paid to have it recycled
The workstations are generally work horses, you’ll get sick of looking at it and it’s well deprecated before they stop functioning.
It’s dead for windows next year when windows 10 ends support but you can probably run supported Linux on it for the foreseeable future
My first pc in 2020 was a Dell optiplex, the low profile one. You really can't put a GPU. Well, you can, but LP GPU's are way too expensive
They probably listed it for parts because someone would surly buy it not get it to work and leave them a bad rating, I would be surprised if they want it back they’re probably in the biz of buying storage units and flipping them!
You see a lot of people view a computer as one thing, and when that one thing is broken you throw it out, like a lot of products. But like a car, what people don't understand is that many issues can be fixed by a cheap replacement of a particular part, but a lot of people don't understand or care enough to do that so this is pretty common in my experience. A "broken" computer sold for cheap because people don't view PCs as a dynamic collection of swappable parts and as one big thing that in its current state is "broken" even though it takes me less than ten minutes and about ten dollars to fix it.
2010's gaming, emulation, MAME arcade cabinet... this is a great system for the money. The SSD makes it run even better than it would have when it was new. Excellent find IMHO.
I'm currently using a 1050ti, and honestly it's a pretty good.
My computer has a 4670 I5, and 12gb of slow ass ddr3 ram, i was able to run VRChat pretty good with oculus link. and it runs rocket league very well.
But yes, newer game titles and more demanding applications, it certainly isn't a power house.
Good video Greg, it'd be fun to see more older computer videos.
It'd be fun to see a video of you updating the tower with newish components from ebay.
I have a system like this one that I got from work as they upgraded all the PCs in the office. I made it into a NAS server. got 3 500GB HDD drives for free from work as well (fully formatted) and 8gb DDR3 RAM. while a bit loud its a champ!
Great deal! Love the video!
Saw the sticker and the USB 3 ports on back....yeah that's probably 3rd gen. 4th gen stickers are taller then they are wide and I recently got a third gen sticker to replace the previous one on a Lenovo all in one machine as I had upgraded it to an i7. :P
Though it was the USB 3.0 ports that gave it away for me. I don't think USB 3 was on gen 2 stuff yet.
I used a very similar pc up until this year because I simply couldn't afford to upgrade. I did me well for the 8 or so years I had it. Never really gamed on it much but surprisingly was able to beat Resident Evil 2 Remake on low settings.
I have a old Dell XE2 with a i7-4770S 10GB of Ram 365W PSW and a 1650 Super! I love this thing and it is a beast! I love old systems like this and they can be easy to get :)
The thing about running a 3D mark score and seeing that your result is only better than 20% of all results or whatever is that the software by its nature self selects for people running relatively high end computers. I mean I would call this pretty entry level but it's not all that bad.
$40 for a BYOD isn't even that uncommon a price actually, though usually at the lower prices it's the small form factor models.
"I had to sweet talk it, but it worked!" Been there so many times lol
I have two great systems, but for hours and hours of just watching Videos and Facebook browsing, i like to use a third old system, that can work all day for simple stuff, and not add up hours of abuse on my thousand dollar systems, love DVD drives to convert old DVD to digital, but that DVD Tray Mustache was hillarious Greg, have an awesome day. i look forward to your fix or flop videos over any other tech channels from the last 6 months.
keep up the great work Greg
Greg, a mystery to you is just something else to us! Looking forward to watching!
or anyone can someone help me one night I finished watching TH-cam and then woke up the next morning and I turned it on and it jus went straight to bios and idk why I have had it for 2 years and all good it’s been 2 days I’ve tried clearing the cmos taking the battery out disconnecting and reconnecting. Ram wires, GPU m.2ssds both of them they both work I try f10 esc pressing the x in the top right restarting everything idk what to do can some one tell me how to fix it msi mb
Snagged a ux305 laptop from some guy who was leaving the country a month ago. Only 50$. Has a I5-5300u, integrated graphics, the battery is dead but everything else works just fine.
I can actually run some games on it - Transistor, Hades (actually ran it, didn't test it fully yet), HOMM5 , Neverwinter nights... heck I got 30 running games installed on that thing's 250 ssd. Alot of india stuff and bit-y stuff. Love them games anyway.
Using it at night shift at work, word/excel at evening shift. Just awesome for the price.
Sometimes, you just find finds. Gotta love em'.
IMO, with V-pro on there you have a system that could be used as a NAS or something similar... it could be run balls and managed using RDP or over the V-pro interface.
You genuinely made me laugh with the CD-ROM mustache 😂
The nice thing about these older pc's is that they have extreme low idle power draw, unlike today's gaming pcs that pull a lot more than 100 watts doing nothing.
Great for small scripts that need to run all day/night.
At the end it is a Lenovo Thinkkcenter so it is a brand and it can do a lot even though quite too big for me cause I got a thinkpad centre mini with an i3 and 8 gb memory without an SSD which I got for 15€ to run Home Assistant. It was 56€ and from 2015 so quite a good deal of cause without anything else except the usual external power supply
I like it a lot, performs smooth and W10 ran quite well before I went ahead for HomeAssistant.
One thing to watch out for with these systems is GPU white list.
I made this mistake a few years back when trying to build a cheap rig for my son.
I had the i5 2400 variant and bought an AMD RX 570 which wouldn't work as it wasn't on Lenovos GPU white list.
Only a select few very low end ATI GPU's but most nvidia cards will work. I ended up throwing a GTX760 in and it worked well.