I want to sell my production PC but I have no clue what its worth. Sooooo I thought, I might drop a small topic to ask some advice. What could I get for this system on the second hand market?
Its a custom build music production PC, build in 2016ish. I rememder designing it in such a way that it has enough power AND runs quiet. With that in mind, I spent some extra money on big quiet CPU fans and the case (incl fans) are padded and designed to stay cool and reduce noise. It still runs rock solid and have never had any issues with it. Ive always used multiple instances of omnisphere and other CPU intensive plugins…
I here you ask, why get rid of it?? Well, honestly I’d like to try MacOS, I’ve never bought or owned a mac computer, however I have used iphones for years now. Basically I just want a change on scenery.
Sadly, ive lost the invoice of the parts over the years. However I do recall the total PC costing 800 euros.
*The 4tb storage, asus monitor and the babyface are external and not for sale.
Edit, I could add or instal and extra 0.5tb ssd 850 evo from samsung but i doubt it will change the overall price much
No idea about desktop resale, but it could be worth seeing how much individual parts go for if you were to strip it down. Other option could be to investigate if it can be turned into a hackingtosh.
I’m sure it can handle most of the task but people won’t pay that much to that config. It’s a bit low on ram and has a low end GPU. Maybe £300 tops if you have the barter skills.
As for mac, I know their price is a bit steep but get the new pro’s with m1 max/pro. To be fair mac os’es are designed to do your job without the headaches. I’ve been using mac more than i can remember and I don’t even remember installing a single driver last decade. Everything works as expected without any hiccups. I even seen people doing windows app development on mac just because it was more intuitive.
I think if your fans are expensive you might be better off selling those separately and then adding in some cheaper ones to sell the PC as a full unit. You probably aren’t likely going to find someone super particular about the cooling buying an older desktop pc used. Other than that I would just check Ebay for what people are getting for desktop PCs with the i56600 and maybe add a bit because you likely have a slightly better motherboard.
£300 seems pretty high. You might be able to get a new one that smokes for that much. I picked up a refurbished 2021 i7 laptop from eBay for less.
The PC was mid performance 6 years ago.
Agreed with the post that says the most money would be for parting it out, but that takes time
and annoyance. Get what you can for it, but it won’t be much with commodity hardware.
Hopefully coming off more direct than harsh here, but while this obviously has served you well potential buyers will not care about custom mods or builds. They care about spec and that can be achieved cheaply these days.
The only in-demand thing people will buy based on older spec is video cards and you’ve got onboard.
Thanks for all the input guys, seems it’s not as fruitful as I hoped. But! I’m very thankful for all the years of service this machine provided me. It’s done a great job and I’ve got my moneys worth for sure (800/5= 160 euro’s a year). And honestly I’d be able to squize a few more out of this setup.
Honestly I’d settle for 200, maybe even 150 if selling it too troublesome.
Your PC will always be useful, particularly alongside a mac
You can get very good, very cheap HDMI switchboxes at Monoprice if you want to share a monitor with your new mac
PCs depreciate like cars, and custom PCs depreciate like custom cars. Think carefully about the ratio of utility value you get from your PC today compared to the Euros you’d earn selling it. Just from a peace of mind perspective, it can be useful to keep your old machine around while learning a new system.
Apple is in the midst of switching it’s users from x86 to ARM. There will be plenty of holdouts who stick to x86. Instead of dropping to PC levels, the last generation of x86 macs will likely hold their value for some time as users who depend on software that requires x86 bid up the remaining machines.
Everything I read suggests that the ARM rollout is going more smoothly than the transition from 68k to PPC, or the transition from PPC to x86, so that’s good.
Double check the advice you get here with your local used prices. COVID radically changed used prices for a lot of goods.
TL;DR: you may save more money or get more value by paying close attention to the market dynamics of PCs and Macs before you pull the trigger on a new system than the usual sell old, buy new sequence.
What you say makes a lot of sense and I hear you. I gave myself some time to sit with the situation. Mostly it’s about exploring and being excited by a new OS/experience. So s a result, I concluded it doesn’t make sense to sell my perfectly working machine for a few 100 euros. I get more value out of it than that. So this PC is going to stay with me to the end of days.
I have a similar situation with my widows laptop however, also bought in 2015ish. It works fine, technically but the fan noise almost makes it unusable ( for me). Also it’s like a 1000kg which is no match for my 2019 iPad Air.
Sooo in conclusion, thanks for all the help. I won’t be selling my desktop. I’ll see if I can donate my laptop to charity. If I feel the need to change OS and go full on apple ecosystem (phone and iPad user already) I might get a used or refurbished basemodel MacBook Air M1 at some point. That should be a great spec up already and last me 3-4 maybe 5 years. Plus that would be a great inverstment for livesets too (no fans for clubs and smoke machines)
