PC Master Race

What - if anything - do you insist on buying new and what do you buy second hand and why?

• I would get a used PC as a whole, if I needed one for some secondary role. I did that once for a media PC, where I had no need for new hardware and just needed to throw a TV-out card into it. Often available cheap, because someone just wants to unload it.

• I've never purchased used DIMMs, but as long as I was okay with the speed, I wouldn't worry much about it. Aging shouldn't really be an issue. Maybe you could possibly get damaged stuff somehow, but...shrugs

• I personally would not buy used rotational hard drives. Those all eventually die. If someone wants to badly enough deal with it, they can set up redundant storage and try to get a little more value out of drives that haven't died yet, just keep swapping drives and hope that they don't have multiple concurrent failures. In my book, it's just not worth the trouble. That being said, maybe someone has tighter financial constraints and less data concerns or needs to store a lot more data than me.

• CPUs...I dunno. Wouldn't be my first choice to deal with secondhand. CPUs haven't seen lots of single-threaded speed increases for a while, so for many workloads, older CPUs are fine. But you can get bent pins on them, and people might have overclocked them and had various forms of damage. And I don't really want to deal with whatever thermal paste is left on them or so forth. I would avoid 13th or 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs, the ones that gradually destroyed themselves internally over time. You don't know if any given CPU might have suffered damage.

• Motherboard. Not my first choice, since they tend to come with various spacers and screws and other things.

• Sound cards. Sure. I've used ancient sound cards. Technology hasn't changed much there. I think that external, USB sound interfaces have kind of taken over here, though (as you illustrate). I do run Linux on stuff, and once support is in the kernel, it tends to just kinda stay there.

• Network interface cards: Sure.

• GPU: Sure, depending upon the workload. GPUs have seen significant performance improvements, so if you want the latest-and-greatest, I don't think that an old GPU is a great buy. But if you just want video output on a server or something, then sure, anything will work.

• Keyboards: Not unless I was dead set on some vintage thing. These can last a long time, but keyboards are relatively cheap.

• Mice: No. I find that these things wear out. The buttons get a lot of clicks and eventually wear out. I've also generally had the little slidey feet detach over time.

• Webcams: Not unless I had some special use for them where I cared very little about image quality. Image quality has improved substantially.

• Monitors: Probably fine to do secondhand. Early OLEDs might have burn-in as a risk. If you specifically want high refresh rates or something, then maybe you want something newer, but for plenty of uses, older monitors are just fine. They'll probably be dimmer at max brightness than when they were new.