Overview
This guide talks about what is really important to make money on PC bay. It covers how parts, benchmarking, and overclocking affects how much a PC sells for. It does NOT cover how changes in the market affect resell price.Also included is data used to make the conclusions.
What You Need to Know
- The amount that you sell a part for directly from your inventory is 1/3rd its regular purchase price.
- A PC that has used parts has the same resale price as one that has all new parts.
- Due to the above 2 points, you will NOT make money if you sell PCs on PC bay using only new parts.
- Benchmarking DRAMATICALLY increases resell price.
- I think a computer’s benchmark acts as an amplifier to the computer’s base cost, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know how to test this and I don’t want to spend the time testing it.
- If you change parts, you MUST re-benchmark to get the price increase. Even you are replacing it with the same part.
- If it successfully turns on without crashing, the resale goes up by $100.
- It doesn’t matter if the parts are connected, just that they are inside the case. Example: Filling a case up with 10 HDDs when you only have enough slots on your PSU for 3 of them.
- As the cost of the hardware inside the PC increases, so does the markup of resell when you benchmark (even if those parts don’t increase the benchmark score). Example: Assume you have 2 PCs both bench at 8369. One of those PC’s pre-benchmark resell price is $1,055 and the other PC’s pre-benchmark resell price is $2,113. The former’s resell after benchmarking would be $2,679 (an increase of $1,563) and the latter would be $3,296 (an increase of $3,296).
- Overclocking does NOT give any (significant) bonuses, other than simply increasing the 3D mark score
- SLI does NOT give (significant) bonuses beyond increasing 3D Mark score.
The Long Version
I’ve heard people discuss how and what makes money on PC. Some say you need to Benchmark the PC’s, some say that overclocking gives a big boost, some say that high end coolers and storage make a difference. Since I couldn’t find any actual data, I decided to do my own research. I’ve attached a link to a Google Sheet where I wrote down the results.
[link]How to Read the Google Sheet
The sheet is divided into 2 sections. The first section is where I tested money received from PC bay. I sold 3 PC’s that had the same hardware, but each had some differences. One was build using only used parts, one was built using only new parts, and on had 3D Mark run on it. I build all 3 PCs, put them up on PC Bay on the same day, skipped 5 days into the future, then recorded what each of the PCs sold for. I then reloaded to a save point to when the PCs were initially put on PC bay. I did this test 10 times.
The second section tests some of the things that some people say increase selling price. I tried to make each PC as similar to each other as I could in order to reduce error. Any changes made are noted in parentheses by the title of each test.
Things I did not Test
Because I am not high enough level in the game, I was not able to test:
- GPU Overclocking
- Custom Water-cooling
I’m not sure whether these things make a difference, but based off of my previous experiments they probably do not give any additional bonuses other than the bonuses for using more expensive hardware and for getting a higher benchmark score.