Refurbished PC's from Ebay - Recommendations/Experiences?

r_peggio

So I'm looking at getting into home recording but the pc I have is about 10 years old and slow as hell. I'm thinking I need to upgrade but with a limited budget I'm looking (hesitantly) towards eBay. Has anybody bought a pc from Ebay specifically for recording and if so was it worth it? Anyone know any decent sellers? I see you can get Intel i3 and 4gb PC's for under £100 but that seems a bit too good to be true.

By the way I'm planning on getting the Steinberg UR22 as my interface if that makes a difference.

Any help appreciated.

Heartfeltdawn

Best thing is to throw some links up to the machines you're looking at so we can cast the eye over them. The UR22 is a good starter interface, very easy to use and good drivers. 

bazxkr

I've bought refurbed pc's off the bay but not for recording. Had no troubles and got great deals. Many times it has been cosmetic scratched case etc.

Many of the major brands have outlets sites. 2 pcs I got came from currys on ebay & had 3 month guarantee IIRC

Couple of years back now but basically got a stonker spec machines about 35% of it's cost new. Still using them in fact.

Had no troubles.

People on here will have better input than me as I don't record. The first question might be what is better for recording ?

PC or MAC ? May depend on the extent of work you are gonna be asking it to do & how powerful software suites you want to run.

ecc83

You say "PC" do you mean a desktop? If a laptop you will struggle I fear and in any case you will get a lot more bang for buck with a desktop, especially second hand and fewer potential problems and of course DTs are easier to fix/upgrade, e.g. more ram.

That said a few weeks ago I bought my wife a 2 core 1.9G Celeron lappy 2Gram from a local repair shop and that is pretty good, runs my NI KA6 and an i02 quite happily tho' you would not want to get too deep into FX with that CPU!

If you don't mind a bit of work you could probably pick up a very decent XP DT for well under £100 (I bought one  2 years ago for a TENNER from a charity shop!) . Download Win 7 then see about buying a license for it.

I upgraded my living room Asus MOBO XP machine to W7/64 a year ago. AMD Ath 2 3G 2 core. That runs an ESI 1010E very well. And of course, once you have a kosher win 7 machine you will be offered W10 for free!

Dave.

wave100

I got an HP Z400 workstation off the bay for 300 bucks - 3.2 gig Zeon processor, 12 gig ram and 1T HDD (plus 64 bit Win 7 pro). I upgraded the graphics card with a passively cooled model I had recently got for my old machine and put another HDD in there. I'm very happy with it. It's a machine that was designed for video editing/cad/audio recording and is actually mentioned on the Steinberg site as being qualified to run Cubase and so far has been very stable running Cubase Pro 8 and Komplete 10 under Win 10 with an SPL Crimson sound card (which is USB)

Any downsides? it's not the quietest machine on the planet - the HDDs chug away quite audibly, the processor isn't as fast as a modern I7 and the HDDs use a bespoke mounting system so I had to buy mounts off of the bay however for the money I think it's an unbeatable deal.

I would guess you'd have to pay 2 or 3 times the price for an equivalent spec Mac.

ChrisRG

I realise it's over budget but a middle ground between new and 2nd hand (Ebay) could be manufacturer refurbs.  Dell for example do this.  They come with a warranty too.  Just looked and they don't seem to have much in the way for desktops but the laptops start from £179.  I've known a few people buy these over the years but I've never done so myself (I build my own).  Maybe another option to consider.

http://outlet.euro.dell.com/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandId=7&c=uk&cs=ukdfh1&l=en&s=dfh

Danny1969

There's also plenty of companies do asset management and sell cheap PC's with warranty, people like 

http://www.rd-uk.co.uk/

http://www.elf.co.uk/

http://www.europc.co.uk/

I use a Dell Optiplex i3 I paid £110 for as a home recording machine

ecc83

Beware description on "the Bay"!

I bought grandson a Lenovo "laptop" a couple of years ago. First class machine and he has no complaints but, although plainly advertised as a laptop it was in fact a notebook or "Thinkpad" as Lenovo will have it and had no optical drive.

G'dad therefore had to stump up for an external USB drive and a special two to on e cable to power it. For a "music" laptop the lack of a CD player/burner could be a reet bloody nuisance!

Dave.

digitalscream

You can do pretty bloody well - for £130-odd, you can get a quad core i7-generation Xeon machine (but you need to be very careful which ones you get).

I just picked up a 12-inch Core i5 HP laptop with 4GB RAM (and, as it turns out, 4 hours' battery life) for £105 delivered. It's actually quite astonishing what you can get when you take the time to properly research them.

ecc83

"I just picked up a 12-inch Core i5 HP laptop with 4GB RAM (and, as it turns out, 4 hours' battery life) for £105 delivered. It's actually quite astonishing what you can get when you take the time to properly research them."

If that is of the same construction as my HP i3 g series beware of overheating issues. The guy I bought the Wife's Esys machine mentioned earlier from told that the g gets clogged up and overheats. Mine is fine, air comes out of the L/H fan port but now I have 8G of ram in it it gets a bit uncomfortable on your lap after an hour or so.

Mine is VERY quiet! I can easily record acoustic guitar (with the Magic KA6 of course!) with the computer only a foot or so from an SDC mic.

Dave.

digitalscream

ecc83 said:

If that is of the same construction as my HP i3 g series beware of overheating issues. The guy I bought the Wife's Esys machine mentioned earlier from told that the g gets clogged up and overheats. Mine is fine, air comes out of the L/H fan port but now I have 8G of ram in it it gets a bit uncomfortable on your lap after an hour or so.

Thanks, but this is one of the top-of-the-range Elitebook series - I've had it apart (to check for dust etc) and it's pretty damn good. The only annoyance - for a laptop that's too small to overhang - is that the intake is on the bottom of the laptop, which means that no matter how you arrange it on your knee it's always going to be blocked to a certain degree. With that said...it rarely gets warm enough to kick the fan in.