How much/should I buy this computer?

What kind of budget is your friend on? (How much can he afford to spend on a PC)?

What country are you buying in?

Its probably worth filling in this template, http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/261222-13-build-adv... so we can give more accurate responses.

One thing to note on used computers is their age and past use. Just like a car's mileage, it will come in to play with the life of the parts. Especially if the previous owner was a gear-head always trying to crank out more power (like a gamer over-clocking his processors).

For that reason alone I'd recommend against buying a used machine unless it's from some one you know personally.

Extremely good specs on that one on paper. Really depends though

1. At how much you're getting it ?

2. How old is the system? &

3. How much has the system been used and at what settings?

If used sparingly/moderately at stock or minimal OC, with decent cooling for a 2 year old PC, 300 may not be be entirely bad and 250 might just be a great bargain especially, if the system has been well cared for. Open it up and the tell-tale signs will all be there.

Thanks for the replies, guys. Yeah, he knows the person, and is buying in the US. Kind of difficult to say, though, as he's not really actively looking for a computer but his friend is upgrading and both sides want a "fair trade". Personally he wants to run games that are coming out (Diablo III, Skyrim at most, and not at any insane settings), and if it is possible to upgrade the video card or something to run even later games down the line that'd be good, too. But mainly he's just looking for a price range to offer and hit.

The motherboard supports 2x PCI x16 slots PCI 2.0 - The build also has a 750w PSU which is of very good quality.

You could pretty much shove any graphics card in there that you want  

its a decent system, but what really makes a difference is knowing how much the other guy wants to sell the system for.

A Corsair 750HX is just 'bout as good qualitatively as it gets. I also don't know what it's doing with a piddly little HD4890.

Even accounting for capacitor aging, that should be good enough for a GTX 480 or a 5870.

I dont see why it would have a problem running anything up to a GTX 570 / 6970 - they only required 600w PSU's

Yeah, but I was looking at aging capacitors, and you don't want that thing to fail in a year's time now, do you?  

True, true.

Given what I've seen some of those individual components go for on places like Ebay it's not worth it, unless it's in the region of 200 dollars or less. GFX isn't DX11, cpu will need overclocking to get anything good out of it (they do overclock well however).

I've seen q6600 go for 60/70 dollars,

ddr2 ram is also really expensive (heaven knows why), and those I imagine would cost 2x more than a brand new set of faster ddr3's.

My advice is that if you can squeeze it for 150 dollars or something that would be considered rediculous, it'll be ok for a while but I expect you'll be updating in a year or so, then you could use it for a home server or a doorstop.

@billybob

You get me that rig for 150, and I'll buy it myself right now, no questions asked.

And getting parts on Ebay/Craigslist is fraught with danger. Buying 'em from someone you know mostly takes care of that issue.

And DDR2 is more expensive than DDR3 'coz the manufacturers are utilizing more of their capacity making DDR3 and hence a demand supply mismatch.

Thanks everyone! They ended up settling for $300, though there was a little more to the trade. Guess we'll see if it was worth it!  

Glad to know. ~250 was always gonna be a gr8 bargain. 300 ain't half bad (especially depending on that what "little more to it" entails  ). But on paper at least, the components are stellar. Cheers