best way to ship a desktop?

Thoughts and prayers…

Guys, I am getting ready to repair this PC and would like to use the hive mind as a sounding board about how to approach this.

So, to recap:

  • I want to repair a PC that was damaged during shipping pretty badly
  • I want to do it in the most cost effective way (so reuse parts that aren’t bad)

Here is where we stand:

I took a quick look at it. The plastic cowling on the case is trashed. The PC won’t post. One of the arms that holds the heat sink to the CPU snapped off. We took it to one of the big box stores and while they wouldn’t touch it, they did do some testing of the parts and offer opinions:

  • HDD is definitely gone.
  • SDD appears to be intact.
  • Memory is probably good
  • Power supply is probably good

My questions:

Where do I start?

I guess we need:

  • motherboard (that matches specs for old so we can reuse memory and CPU)
  • CPU cooler (I guess give the old chip a visual inspection add the new cooler and cross fingers?) Is there a way to test the CPU I have?
  • a case (without a PS).

With those parts (and luck), I should be able to get it to post. In not, troubleshoot until it posts. Once it posts, I can test the video card, discs, and optical drive.

Does that seem like a good plan?

What can people tell me about video cards? I understand the price for gaming video cards is super high right now because of bitcoin mining, but that there might be a way to get a reasonable price on a video card if you’re building a new PC. Is that accurate? This is something I heard, but I’m not even sure it’s legit. What is the conventional wisdom about purchasing a video card, if I have to get one?

We probably won’t start ordering for a bit yet, but I just want to get straight in my mind what I want to do. I have built PCs before for myself, but that was a long time ago. I thought I would start here for high level advice before digging around for specific parts or how-to guidance.

Thanks guys. Any help is much appreciated.

IIRC, the prices on video cards has come down to retail levels, so the crisis is over. Although memory prices are still high, meaning you probably won’t find a fast one on sale.

What I do is just get the fastest one I can reasonably afford.
Which means I don’t buy them often. So I hope you don’t need to replace it, as a fast one still won’t be cheap, although much cheaper than they were recently.

I’m familiar with that strategy! Thanks for posting Giles.

Video cards are actually fine price wise right now. There is retail pricing at the top end and sale prices in the 1060 RA 580 range. Memory still sucks but those little sticks can be pretty beefy, so if they’re fine you might be good there.

Cases are frequently on sale.

There is still a budget concern right?

I offered to help him out on this one, if it gets super expensive. We were kicking around the idea of soliciting donations from friends and family, but that hasn’t gone anywhere. I don’t think it’s going to be that bad, honestly.

All right then. The SSD prices are dropping pretty quickly too. Might be worth getting a second or larger one to go with the other.

Thank you Nesrie, you’re awesome. I appreciate the tips and positive vibes.

Not to the that guy but at this point… wouldn’t it be better to buy a prebuilt and drop a video card in? Surely Dell refurb or ebay has some lightly used computers. This is just a me thing but… i am so done with building computers. So, so done. I mean if you’re talking about $200-$400 i’d just… buy something. It just sounds to me like you’re going to be going through the exact same problem building and shipping another computer again.

Worse comes to worse i could maybe send my old Alienware Alpha R1 model to you. I love that computer but it’s kind of slow for modern gaming.

Well, you could do what the Eastern European car theft rings do and ship the entire car, with the PC in the back, in a shipping container.

My god it’s foolproof!

Yeah, I mean the car might get a little banged up, but the PC will be just fine. Priorities.

I feel the same as you about building computers. I guess I’d like to see him get to that same place but without the specter of having had it all end with a shipping accident. We will have to figure out shipping for the future. I think our process has room for improvement. :)

My worry is QAing the CPU. Having the heat sink break off is a scary thing.

I’m surprised the HDD failed. With everything rattling around usually the HDD/SSD are screwed in/held in place.

As far as video cards, i wouldn’t order used unless from a very reputable retailer like B&H you can send it back to since it’s likely a high but random proportion of used cards today are old miners being dumped. Of course the power supply needs to be large enough for the card.

Really though he needs to build it on-site (ie where he lives) rather than this being assembled and shipped; that’s the key, imo. I built my first computer at age 19 or so, it’s not at all impossible. I’d help him get some parts but let him put it all together. He will need that experience anyway because putting it together gives you a sense of how it all works when you need to support it.

And there are so many videos helping you now. They take you step by step and everything.

HDDs though can be damaged with semi okay shipping. Newegg had this problem, all the time, still probably still low statically but high enough to notice. Their crappy return policy helped ship my purchase of those to other sites.

Sorry for your loss!

I agree with Enidigm, final build needs to be at his place. Teach him somethin’, make him a man :)

For affordable graphics cards, I’ve used evga.com b-stock. Used, but you get a 1 yr warrenty and at least you know it’s tested. The discounts can be significant at times, just have to keep watching them.

Another strategy to save money is to use pcpartspicker.com Setup a build list using thier parametric filtering, which allows the site to scrape data from most of the usual retailers (Amazon, newegg, B&H, etc) so you can find the best prices across sites.

Never ship a PC? Huh. If that’s your advice, it seems … old fashioned.

He already knows how to do it. He put this PC together.

I know you guys mean well, but I’m not at all interested in your thoughts on parenting or any of that nonsense. I’m just trying to troubleshoot a PC. I asked in this thread because it’s hardware and technical forum. If you don’t think ti’s going to work, that’s good to know. Thanks.

That site is good. I’m not sure if it’s teh same one, but I’ve used something like that in the past. Thanks.

Sorry, just joking a bit. Glad to read he put it together.

It’s totally cool. I’m not offended, but just trying to keep the thread productive. I do appreciate your help.