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Buy refurb products? Share your stories!

R

rox1co

Senior member
i plan on buying some refurbished products from newegg & tigerdirect or maybe from Frys, anyone buy a refurb from them b4?

i'm the kind of person who likes to buy it all new or from my real life friends that i trust, the system i wanna put together is already over my budget so i'm thinking about taking a risk on buying used/refurb

thanks for your stories and feedback, etc 🙂
 
I think my motherboard is refurb from newegg, my vid card refurbed from monarchcomputer. Everything was fine till after 1 week, I did some overclocking on vid card and possibly went too high on the memory settings (also I slowed down the fan speed) so the lines started showing on vid card and then comp wouldnt start. So I went back to old parts and send x800xl powercolor to RMA direct they replaced it ($12 ship+handle b/cuz they r not the original sellers) and everything good now. I would recommend not to go refurb if you plan on serious overclocking, but it may be ok if everything stock. I like the $54 nforce4 motherboard works perfectly. I think its safer to buy refurb mobo/cpu but if its vid card try to buy retail b/cuz there are more things that can go wrong with vid card than mobo/cpu, in my experience. (+ it may have some converters you may need like dvi adapters and such). But if the deal is really really good on vid card (like saving $100 or more) then go with refurb 😛
 
Buying refurb is not a bad idea as long as it was refurb by the manufacturer. Otherwise, it's not advisable to buy refurb.
 
refub items also dont always come with manuals/cd drivers and many extras that the itemed contained are sometimes missing
 
I would never trust refurb from a website, but i would trust the FS/T forum. There are some great deals on older hardware off forums, but from a website... no way i would touch that stuff, I got burned on a motherboard once and will never try it again.
 
the only refurb i bought was a 9800pro for $90.00 from newegg.
It arrived and installed perfectly... Played all my games, everything was peachy.
Then a week after the one-week warranty was up, the card was FUBAR. Crap all over the screen, I couldn't see a thing.
There went my $90.00. I ended up selling the broken card on ebay for $30 (go figure) because the person thought they could fix it... I never heard back from them.

I'll NEVER buy another refurb again.
 
Had a piece of garbage Abit AX8 OEM board from Monarch. The rep assured me that the OEM MB is new. Turned out the board had about a dozen re-soldered joints.
 
I've been buying refurbed electonics and PC stuff for over 30 years, some stuff was great, some of it was trash, and some needed to be further refurbed, by me!

One of the first things I bought were several Technics cassette decks to sell, I had a business selling stereo stuff back in high school. They looked and worked perfectly, and I only recently retired the one I kept after a motor failed after about 33 years! A friend's still works fine. They made some great stuff back then, much better parts quality than now.

That having gone so well, I bought 6 Pioneer stereo receivers and they were CRAP. All of them had at least one function/mode that didn't work. Most of the problems were due to bad soldering, really bad soldering. I ended up fixing most of the problems myself.

I bought a few refurbed Kenwood components and it was a total train wreck. Bad soldering and really bad service made me steer clear of them for years afterwards.

I bought a refurb Panasonic VCR, a very high end one. It lasted about 18 years and was great. I just had to replace it when it started eating tapes one day. I got it for less than half what it normally went for, so I got more than my money's worth. Sad thing is, the replacement, another Panasonic is pretty junky, and weighs about 1/4 what the old one did.

The refurb first PC item I bought was a monitor, a 19" Daewoo. It died about 2 weeks after the warranty expired. They wanted almost exactly the same to fix it as it cost me in the first place. I replaced it with a Sony trinitron that I kept for years until I needed a bigger monitor for my old eyes.

Next was my first laptop, a TI 4600, a great machine that still works great at 10 years+ old for web browsing. The battery was half shot when I got it, but I expected that.

Next was a refurb desktop that I bought for a friend from Gateway. It was a huge dog, it had MOBO issues, the PSU popped one day, and it was finally replaced by Gateway after almost a year of hassles. That one was a good one.

I have recently bought several refurbed radios off Ebay, all have worked fine, and appeared to be brand new in every way, including that new radio smell. I'm guessing they were DOAs that had a minor problem.
 
It seems like buying refurbished mobos & video cards = horrible ideas

Other items can be okay, depending on brand, store, etc...
 
I dunno about refurb, but I've gotten a few decent used items from FS/FT on boards like this or eBay. I bought the soundblaster Live! 5.1 plus daughter card in my current system on eBay for cheaper than another auction was selling just the daughter card for. Wouldn't touch anyone with less than golden feedback ratings or someone who has no real history though.
 
Originally posted by: tanishalfelven
what about refurbished lcd monitors.
Click to expand...


Yes, as long as it was refurb by the manufacturer. Check Ubid and you'll find a lot of refurb units by manufacturer. Don't ever buy refurb units especially those done by shops other than the manufacturer.
 
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