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Comment by freetime2 | Hacker News Reader

I have an old PC that I built that I’ve been meaning to take to Hard Off. I wonder if it would if it would be better to sell the parts individually, or as a single unit. For reference, it has a Ryzen 9 3900x, 64 GB DDR4, an RX 5700 XT graphics card, and 512 GB NVME. Probably not worth much anymore, and I’ll probably just sell it as-is to save myself the effort of taking it apart. But Hard Off occasionally surprises me with how much they pay for a piece of old gear.

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When you said you had an old PC I didn't expect you to list parts that were built in 2019.

That's a perfectly fine modern PC. Similar to or faster than what some of my casual gaming friends use.

The RAM alone would probably sell for $350 or more.

Yeah it’s still totally usable, but I just haven’t booted it up more than a handful of times in the past couple years. I built it for software development on Linux (with a little extra graphics capability for occasional gaming) in the era when Apple was making those terrible “touchbar” keyboards. But have since switched back to a MacBook (and a Switch 2 for gaming), and now it’s just taking up space.

Wow RAM prices have gotten absolutely insane.

Wow. Your old PC is more powerful than any computer I own. Faster version of my CPU, double the RAM, newer generation GPU. A fraction of the storage, though. I built it in 2020 to replace the desktop that I built in 2008.

That's part of the reason I want to sell it - and hopefully get it into the hands of someone who can give it a second life before it becomes e-waste. I feel a bit guilty every time I think about it sitting and collecting dust.

The specs are still more than enough for any of the development I do. My main issue is just the form factor - a laptop is so much better for my current situation. The power consumption also kind of bugs me - things have improved a LOT in that regard since 2019 - although it's kind of nice for heating my office in winter. It also doesn't help that I built it with a full ATX motherboard and a giant case (Fractal Design Define R6), which is kind of ugly and takes up a ton of space.

If you put a contact method in your HN profile, I think I have a buyer for you that would be happy.

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