Craigslist SMH...

Trionicus

TL;DR Bought a GTX 770 for $90, am happy with it. Learned not to shoot my whole nut at new parts online ALL the time.

I'll preface this by saying, I've had a lot of good luck buying new AND used parts everywhere I shop, as in, I haven't had a card die on me in almost all of 2015 (mostly newegg & Amazon for new stuff).

I was in the market for an Nvidia GPU. I just wanted to play around with DSR and I'd sold my last Nvidia GPU about a week ago. I stumble into this cheap GTX 770 and I start thinking..  Will I be able to justify this purchase to Quizzical, then I think... well hellz yeah. Even considering power consumption the discount pays for itself, unless the thing dies on me, right?

I get to the place, the guy demos the card, it looks great. I take said card home and I now have more coin to spend on other parts or, you know, Christmas.
My point is, it isn't always necessary to bust your entire nut on brand new parts for not that awesome discounts just because there is a discount. Like the recent fellow gamer who lost his 7870 and was looking for a replacement. He was happy with his 7870 until it died, means he could very well have made good use of a deal like this, without having to buy himself an early present.

It's obviously not going to work for everyone but, take a look around your local area, you might find a gem.

Quizzical

Whether a GTX 770 for $90 is a good deal is really just a question of whether it's in good working order.  If you regard it as good as new, that card for $90 is a steal.  And if the reason it was for sale is that it's having problems and about to die, that's much less of a deal.  The discount is basically for the risk on a used card, but it sounds like you got a good deal, so good for you.

Oain

bought my rig on craigslist. bought my bro's rig on craigslist. great deals. but make sure you do A WHOLE lot of research to make sure you know what you are getting. ive been scammed before and its depressing. so make sure you do a lot of research.

Ridelynn

I used to do this a lot back in my college days, along with dumpster diving for "broken" parts. You can certainly come away with some neat things (we got enough parts to cobble together an entire Sun Workstation, several Macintosh SE & IIs, and a NeXT cube back in the early 1990s).

I have nothing against used parts. I usually don't recommend it though, because the part usually (not always, but usually) it outside of warranty, or the warranty does not transfer, or it's nearly impossible to determine the condition of a part.

It's not like a car where you can generally assume if it has XXXXX miles on it what state the car you are considering will be. There's no odometer on computer parts, and with electronics, it's usually an all-or-nothing case, either it works, or it doesn't work at all, and there isn't a lot of in-between.

Trionicus

Everything said here is true, there is definitely a lot of risk and the hassle. One thing I've found though, a generality of course, is that people tend to be a lot more honest when you know where they live lol. That said, when I do buy used I tend to stick to the major brands, they sometimes honor their warranties even without proof of purchase.