Is this pc any good?

[Brenfox]

I've been offered this pc for £300 & I'm wondering if its worth it or not. My pc knowledge is not good. It will mostly be used for emulation which I know it can do but some vr too.

 

* Intel Core i7-9700K
* be quiet! Dark Rock 4
* Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ELITE
* 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 (2×8GB)
* MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ventus 8GB OC
* Antec EarthWatts Gold Pro EA650G Pro 650W 80+ Gold
* Fractal Design Define R6 Gunmetal
* No storage included – SSD removed
 

[Finnegan]

OK. There's two questions: 
 

1. Is this a good deal
2. Is this a good machine

 

1.

If it's in genuinely good condition then the answer to 1 is, yeah not bad. A properly refurbished 2080 sold from a good vendor might go for 190ish? You could probably ebay one in alright condition for 160ish? The processor about 90-100ish. So chuck it all together, it's not bad. Somewhere like CEX would probably be trying to sell this for 400+. To iterate, though, all of that depends on this being in good condition.

 

It's not a complete machine, though, that "no storage included" is a serious issue if you don't know anything about PCs. You're going to have to buy an SSD compatible with the motherboard though and that would have been a trivial and cheap task a few years ago but the price of storage has started to balloon. So chuck another £100 I'd imagine minimum on really if you want a decent amount of storage. If you're comfortable following a YouTube guide and you're not clumsy with your hands, you can easily fit that yourself, it's like clicking in lego more or less. But if not you'll have to pay someone to do it for you which is probably another 20 to 30 on top. Honestly if you're not good with PCs you might want to pay someone that to service it anyway just to make sure it's clean, dust free and has all the thermal protection it needs.

 

 

2.

Again, going to keep saying it, depends if it's in good condition.

 

The 2080 was an extremely good graphics card 8 years ago. For context, Nvidia Graphics cards go up in generation like 10 series, 20 series, 30 series, 40 series and then each has the XX60, XX70, XX80, XX90 etc variants in increasing strength. The current generation is 50XX so the 2080 is several generations old but that doesn't mean it's worse than everything that's come after it. A 2080 in good condition is probably still better than a 4060. Any game 5 - 10 years old you should be running on pretty decent settings, especially if you're on 1080p display. You'll probably still be able to run a lot of fairly new games on okay-ish settings as well. I mean Wardogs is coming out this week, it's a brand new FPS game that'll make a big splash and you sit between the Minimum and Recommended specs for that. The biggest bottle neck, to be honest, won't actually be the raw power of the graphics card or processor, the reason this machine is still pretty decent is that the need for those things has plateaued slightly. It's generally the RAM and VRAM needed by games these days that keeps getting bigger and bigger and where this machine will eventually struggle.

 

This machine will absolutely piss emulating retro console games, though, I mean. Extremely easily. You could do that on something 1/4 of its power. Assuming by "emulating" you didn't mean just like PS5 games or something haha.

 

 

So in conclusion, yeah this is a decent machine for a decent price. You could do worse but you're going to have to do a bit of work to get it set up (don't underestimate the cost of the SSD plus a monitor to do it justice, mouse and keyboard, desk, chair, whatever else you might need if this is your first PC.)

 

BUT ONLY IF IT IS IN GOOD CONDITION. This is a machine pushing a decade old. Do not buy it off some scruff that doesn't take care of their shit. If everything is caked in dirt and dust and grime and nobody's bothered to take care of it, keep it cool, protect the internal components from thermal damage and they've spent the last 8 or so years rinsing it all day every day it probably isn't going to run like a dream.

 

 

 

Edited 6 September by Finnegan

[Brenfox]

Thanks for the detailed answer. Its been well looked after & its in great condition.

[Trav Le Bleu]

Also, with no storage drive, there's no operating system, so that adds an additional cost and need of some techy know-how too, though not too difficult.

[Finnegan]

18 hours ago, Brenfox said:

Thanks for the detailed answer. Its been well looked after & its in great condition.

 

Then personally I'd say it's a decent deal mate yes. 

 

Just be aware that you've got work to do once you exchange money and get it in your hands. Sorry in advance if you know all this, I'm probably mostly just bored over explaining shit you already considered haha but just in case:

 

Use Chatgpt or Google AI or something and tell it to help you find a compatible and affordable SSD for the motherboard. That's the AORUS ELITE in your spec list btw. It's a decent motherboard and that alone would probably cost another £100 second hand. With some patience you could probably buy this whole thing, strip it for parts, sell them and make a profit haha. Just. 

 

But anyway yeah, get an SSD that fits it that's step one. It's a £300 brick until you've sorted that. How much space you want is up to you, if you really are just doing some emulation of retro games and don't intend to play any modern games on it then you could make do with 500gb I guess. For my personal tastes that'd be a slight waste of the machine IMO though, you can definitely play some good stuff from Steam on this especially with the indie market being what it is. 

 

So I'd go for at least 1tb. 

 

Then you need to decide if you're doing everything else yourself or paying someone at your local repair shop. 

 

Before you switch this machine on for the first time your check list is a mix of essential and recommended steps:

 

1. Fit the SSD 

2. While in there, clean the internals

3. While in there, probably re-apply thermal paste so you know it's fresh 

4. Acquire an operating system install files and put them on a USB

5. Install said operating system 

 

A good repair shop would probably do all of that for you for whatever their standard rate for a service is, I'm guessing no more than £50. If you're in Leicester, there's an alright place on Woodgate I've used before. 

 

You can definitely do all of that yourself though, you'll find guides for it all on YouTube it just depends how much faff you can be arsed with. If you do it, Amazon yourself some little brushes to dust and some thermal paste. Won't cost a lot. Getting the OS installer on a USB and sorting that outs probably the biggest headache if you don't know what you're doing but Chatgpt will walk you through that too. 

 

 

5 minutes ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

Also, with no storage drive, there's no operating system, so that adds an additional cost and need of some techy know-how too, though not too difficult.

 

Just to clarify this: you can actually acquire and use Windows 11 for free these days. It'll be missing some features if you don't have a licence and I think you'll get a small watermark on your desktop but that won't stop you gaming. You might find that above mentioned local repair shops will magic up a licenced version for you if they're sorting you out. If not there are... ways to get one, online. 

 

Or yknow. You could Linux if you're feeling adventurous. 

 

[Trav Le Bleu]

39 minutes ago, Finnegan said:

Just to clarify this: you can actually acquire and use Windows 11 for free these days. It'll be missing some features if you don't have a licence and I think you'll get a small watermark on your desktop but that won't stop you gaming

Did not know this and yes I was going to mention Linux, but y'know, guy said he didn't know much about PCs.

[Zear0]

On 06/09/2026 at 09:30, Brenfox said:

I've been offered this pc for £300 & I'm wondering if its worth it or not. My pc knowledge is not good. It will mostly be used for emulation which I know it can do but some vr too.

 

* Intel Core i7-9700K
* be quiet! Dark Rock 4
* Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ELITE
* 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3000 (2×8GB)
* MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ventus 8GB OC
* Antec EarthWatts Gold Pro EA650G Pro 650W 80+ Gold
* Fractal Design Define R6 Gunmetal
* No storage included – SSD removed
 

What VR games?

[Brenfox]

20 hours ago, Zear0 said:

What VR games?

Probably nothing new & too taxing on the system. I have a psvr2 & Meta Quest but there's so many games I'm missing out on. Theres lots of mods of flat agnes out there too.

[Brenfox]

On 07/09/2026 at 10:18, Finnegan said:

 

Then personally I'd say it's a decent deal mate yes. 

 

Just be aware that you've got work to do once you exchange money and get it in your hands. Sorry in advance if you know all this, I'm probably mostly just bored over explaining shit you already considered haha but just in case:

 

Use Chatgpt or Google AI or something and tell it to help you find a compatible and affordable SSD for the motherboard. That's the AORUS ELITE in your spec list btw. It's a decent motherboard and that alone would probably cost another £100 second hand. With some patience you could probably buy this whole thing, strip it for parts, sell them and make a profit haha. Just. 

 

But anyway yeah, get an SSD that fits it that's step one. It's a £300 brick until you've sorted that. How much space you want is up to you, if you really are just doing some emulation of retro games and don't intend to play any modern games on it then you could make do with 500gb I guess. For my personal tastes that'd be a slight waste of the machine IMO though, you can definitely play some good stuff from Steam on this especially with the indie market being what it is. 

 

So I'd go for at least 1tb. 

 

Then you need to decide if you're doing everything else yourself or paying someone at your local repair shop. 

 

Before you switch this machine on for the first time your check list is a mix of essential and recommended steps:

 

1. Fit the SSD 

2. While in there, clean the internals

3. While in there, probably re-apply thermal paste so you know it's fresh 

4. Acquire an operating system install files and put them on a USB

5. Install said operating system 

 

A good repair shop would probably do all of that for you for whatever their standard rate for a service is, I'm guessing no more than £50. If you're in Leicester, there's an alright place on Woodgate I've used before. 

 

You can definitely do all of that yourself though, you'll find guides for it all on YouTube it just depends how much faff you can be arsed with. If you do it, Amazon yourself some little brushes to dust and some thermal paste. Won't cost a lot. Getting the OS installer on a USB and sorting that outs probably the biggest headache if you don't know what you're doing but Chatgpt will walk you through that too. 

 

 

 

Just to clarify this: you can actually acquire and use Windows 11 for free these days. It'll be missing some features if you don't have a licence and I think you'll get a small watermark on your desktop but that won't stop you gaming. You might find that above mentioned local repair shops will magic up a licenced version for you if they're sorting you out. If not there are... ways to get one, online. 

 

Or yknow. You could Linux if you're feeling adventurous. 

 

Would you mind if I sent you a pm with a couple of questions?

[Finnegan]

Sure. I'll answer if I can. I'll be honest if I don't know the answer. I'm about to head out but I'll reply in a few hours. 

 

[The Bear]

Only just stumbled across this thread. Did you end up buying this? 

 

Seems a more than capable setup for gaming once you buy a nvme ssd and install Windows 11. The graphics card is more than good enough for casual gaming. And 500GB storage would be plenty of space for a few larger games installed. 

 

I built my PC myself with a future proof DDR5 motherboard, and 500GB Nvme but still game using a GeForce 1650 SUPER graphics card!! And that still plays games on medium/high 1080p settings and does me just fine for casual gaming, including Hogwarts Legacy which is the last big game I played. It handled that perfectly.