 So you guys seem to love Scrapyard Wars, and don't worry, we'll revisit that concept soon enough, but for now we've got a fun way to address some critical feedback from our viewers about the choice to use secondhand components for our builds. Now you can see the original series and the machines that Linus and I constructed in the links here and here, but while the showdown between Linus's kind of all-rounder Q6600 platform and my R9 290 with a tin can around it was interesting, it left out the option that many of you pointed out, which was new stuff. Now in our minds we bought used to gain an advantage in price per performance over new in box, but without actually testing it, how do we know how much of an advantage we actually gained? Let's find out. Stay subscribed to Linus Tech Tips for more adventures like this. This Corsair's H80i GT and H100i GTX all-in-one liquid coolers improve both the appearance and cooling of your PC. Click now to learn more. So how do we compare our used machines to something new? Well, we could give ourselves a fixed budget to put together a new $300 machine for comparison, but I'm pretty sure a lot of you would cry foul because $300 isn't really enough for new parts, and if we did the spec ourselves, then we could potentially rig it. So we decided on a $400 US budget, which allowed Linus and I to combine our machines with the best parts of each and challenged the forum to spec out a rig with brand new pieces to try and put it in its place. They had to factor in stuff like shipping and taxes into their price, but were allowed to shop from anywhere in the US or Canada. This gave them actually a number of advantages. They were able to use a $400 budget instead of $380, which ours totaled, and that was in US funds instead of Canadian, which makes it a lot more valuable currently. And lastly, they were able to shop from any US stores, which gave them a generally lower markup than Canadian stores, just in case. Then we took to Twitter to pull more people in and had people vote on the users submitted builds. It was a fairly close battle between members Lord Gaben and Sauron, but in the end Lord Gaben won with over 45 votes. Linus and I actually didn't think that Lord Gaben's build was the strongest submission, and ended up picking our own Editor's Choice Community Build to compete with, and we went with STR Mapes. That leaves us with the Linus and Luke Thrift Machine 4001 quarter rocking a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8 gigs of DDR2 RAM, a 500 watt power supply, and an R9 290 with a TJ04, an Arctic Cooling CPU cooler with a Star Cooler strapped to it. In the other corner we've got Lord Gaben's Shrine, with an A6 6400K, 4 gigs of RAM, a 400 watt power supply, and an R9 280. And in the third quarter, we've got all these kinds of triangles going on. We've got STR Mapes Prometheus, featuring an X4 866 gigs of RAM, a 480 watt power supply, and another R9 280! Oh! I actually don't have an R9 280, so we upgraded both the Prometheus and the Shrine to an R9 280X, and just decided to make it a little bit more fair, we just didn't overclock it. There's three main performance determining parts here. We have the CPU, the GPU, and the RAM. All these machines have their CPUs overclocked to varying degrees, but only the GPU of the Thrift Machine 4000 is actually overclocked. For a CPU, the Thrift Machine 4000 and Prometheus are sitting on quad cores, but the Q6600 is running a little slower at 3.2 GHz compared to the 4 GHz of the X4 860K. Also, don't forget they run on completely different architectures. The big outlier here is Lord Gaben's Shrine, with a dual core A6 6400K running a lot faster at 4.4 GHz, but remember, two cores instead of four. For GPU, things are much more similar, both being submitted with an R9 280 and resulting with an R9 280X, running at the same speed while the Thrift Machine 4000 is sporting an R9 290 running at about 1,000 MHz. RAM gets interesting again though. Check out this video to see what Linus's talks about the differences between DDR3 and DDR4, but will going all the way down to DDR2 cause our Thrift Machine 4000 any issues? Or will its greater capacity and proper dual channel operation compared to the Prometheus' 6 GHz and the Shrine's 4 GHz be worth it in the end? Time to find out. Now as we go through the results here, some of you will undoubtedly point out on the forum that this isn't the whole equation. And in conclusion, while our Thrift Machine 4000 may be doing quite well in the performance results, there are many potential issues when buying used. Hygiene, for example. Linus had to spend a fair amount of time getting his machine to an acceptable level of cleanliness. And missing accessories. Again, Linus had to hunt through boxes for more than a couple of missing things while building his PC. Something that may not be an issue for the seasoned techies out there, but folks who don't have bins of spare parts or of hardware and whatnot, this may be a show-stopping issue for you while you wait for parts. And of course, used parts can come bruised or even damaged. For example, again, Linus's case came with some scratched parts and missing a foot. Maybe not a huge deal in the end, but not great. Then you have even more issues. Seller may ship you a DOA component or straight up scam you if you aren't careful enough and or if you're just unlucky. And even then, some things may come with a too-weak warranty, as they sometimes do with eBay, but who knows if they'll even be properly honored in the end. And while the promises of a lifetime warranty for BFG Tech customers who bought their cards new probably stung, at least if you buy from a reputable retailer, your butt is probably covered even if a manufacturer does go out of business. It's hard to get that kind of protection shopping second hand. And the pain train keeps on coming, sort of. Parts longevity is actually not a clear win either way. A lot of people are going to point at the used machines here and say, well, they'll die sooner, they'll have some problem with them, and they're right to some degree. But don't forget, many of the new machines specced out here on the forum were using terrible power supplies that we would generously describe as super sketchy. And while both the used machines were using well-built continuous power and tech power supplies. So in final conclusion, the best strategy may be to buy some things new and some things used, and it's just going to come down to your risk tolerance. We would recommend getting your case new so that it's in pristine condition and comes with all of its accessories and whatnot, and your storage new since losing data sucks so freaking much. And it's comfortable knowing that as long as you didn't drop your hard drive, it probably hasn't been dropped. CPU and RAM can probably be bought used as they're very rarely fail, and RAM often has a no questions asked lifetime warranty, but other things can largely rely on how good of a deal you can get. Things like motherboard or video card will depend heavily on their current condition and warranty coverage status as well. Let me know what you guys think is a good strategy. And speaking of good strategies, I will be attending PAX East and surprise surprise, our friends from Intel will be as well. Actually that's not much of a surprise, but anyways they usually have some pretty sweet community giveaways to go along with their presence and PAX East is no different. This year they'll be hosting a hashtag my Intel build contest which is focused on sharing your favorite Intel based PC build. Whether it's one you've done yourself or one you see on the show floor at PAX East, you can enter whether you're attending the show or not, it doesn't really matter. Just submit a picture of your favorite Intel based build on Vine, Twitter, or Instagram with the hashtag my Intel build and you're entered into a chance to win one of three Intel Core i7 processors. You can enter as many times as you want and you can showcase as many different systems as you want, just make sure that you use the hashtag with each entry. The contest has already started and it closes on March 13th so get your entries in now. Alright guys don't forget to comment on the forum or I guess in the comments down below what kind of build you guys liked more and if you guys think buying new or used for different parts is a good idea. Also a shout out to the kind of build contest thing in the builds new builds and planning section of the forum. It's a pinned at the top and they constantly have different contests going on for different people speccing on different systems. Running this was really fun but they run that all the time and that's a really cool community so be sure to check that out. Also while you're on the forum if you click the support us link in the top right hand corner it can bring you to a really cool page where you can see all of our sponsors and stuff and maybe even change your Amazon links so that we get a small kickback whenever you buy things. That helps out a ton. In the in the description below the video you'll be able to see a shirt link where you'll buy things not based on Star Wars and yeah anyways don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already like the video, dislike the video depending on if you're a Star Trekky or Star Wars kind of person. This is a shirt that you can buy from Linus Tech Tips that Linus just took off. He's half naked off screen right now. Anyways guys thanks for watching I'll see you next time.