Gaming laptop for $300

R

Roflcopter_Down

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 7, 2008
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Hello, my poor neet friend wants to buy a gaming laptop, he has at least $300. I told him to do a desktop but it needs to be backpack/public transit ready. $300 = 580m 680m 770m..maybe? He's probably only going to play fortnite and pugb stuff so doesnt need to run crysis 4d.
Shipping would be to Petaluma, CA. If you want I can have him send me the money and take responsibility/pay you
 
Just to temper expectations, I doubt you could play pubg reasonably well on a laptop with anything less than a higher end maxwell laptop GPU. Unless of course you are running 1366x768...
 
Pugb didnt run reasonably well on my 4790k 980ti lol..unless they (hopefully) optimized it in the last year. He's playing it on his iphone or xbox otherwise. I don't expect l33t performance, for the record
 
I flip laptops, a lot of laptops. $300 is possible to find something to game on but as the other guy said, temper any expectations.

I would suggest you install the Facebook Marketplace App and setup a notifying search for "gaming laptop" ... time is of the essence.

Before doing any of that I would go back 4 or 5 years and look at what GPU's were in laptops. High-end to mid-tier. Do that and familiarize yourself with those model numbers.

As the gaming laptops notifications come in you will know what you're looking at and will be able to quickly make offers. Did I mention time is of the essence?

The logic is simple. If your looking for a $300 gaming laptop, 20 other guys are also doing the same thing. As you can see, odds are will very quickly stacking against you for any number of reasons.

Facebook Marketplace is very quickly destroying the lure of Craigslist. I don't have any numbers but I'll start at 10 to 1. Facebook Marketplace is very active. You want to be in position to make offers very very quickly. Do not spend a lot of time haggling. I've lost a lot of potential buys this way. While i'm trying to save $20 dollars. The other guys that are also actively talking to the seller are not haggling. If you have $300, spend the $300.

$300 is going to be hard but it does / can happen. Know what you're looking at will really help hugely.

Laptops that age well are Alienware laptops. They are over engineered to a degree.

You can also trying reasoning with the owners of laptops that are 4 and 5 years old. Lot of these guys are idiots and oblivious to the fact that their 5 year old gaming laptop is never going to sell for the $1000 dollars they are asking. I see this a lot.

I just bought a new Dell 1050 ti based laptop and flipped it for $920 dollars. I made a nice $520 dollar profit. Yes, I paid $400 cash for it.

Also, always pay extra special attention a week prior to rent being due. Car notes and house notes being due. People get desperate and sell things they normally do not want to sell. I flip a lot of stuff this way. Especially consoles.

Literally anything posted on the 30th, 31st and 1st I will offer half of what they are asking. Not only that, I leave my number with them. I get a lot of last minute calls. Mostly consoles but a lot of laptops and cell phones as well.

Last but not least, you could try asking the HardOCP community. There are I'm guessing a lot of guys with old laptops that they might sell for $300 if you clearly and honestly explain your situation. I think it's very honorable that you're trying to help a friend out on a budget.

Good luck.
 
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Lots of great info there SixFootDuo. I checked the Chicago FBMP and it's not close to as heavily populated as the local CL is, but there are a few deals there that seem pretty 'last minute' like a guy selling an R710 server for well under $200 due to moving.

Have you run across some goods that you think are stolen? How do you identify those?
 
SamirD said:
Have you run across some goods that you think are stolen? How do you identify those?
Click to expand...

User doesn't know the password and has a really poor excuse for why.

These are pretty much the only computers we outright refused to buy when I worked a mom and pop pc repair store.
 
Its not impossible to find a decent deal, I got one with a 770m for like $250 but the laptop is huge (17" cyberpowerpc) BUT it has an mxm so you can upgrade it if you want. Search craigslist for Alienware and/or Gaming, sometimes you find people who just need cash. Good luck buddy :)


EDIT:
The post below mine makes a good point. You can easily get an optiplex and throw a decent gpu in it for like $300 or so, which would be a lot faster than most laptops in that same price range.
 
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Sager and Clevo are other key things to search for. They are generally a hair cheaper than Alienware right off the rip and drop in price quicker because they don't carry the brand name and come in like 3000 different models that confuse buyers. Great hardware though, and most are interchangeable, especially the older ones, plus most custom re-sellers are basing their builds on Sager/Clevo chassis so those names should bring up some hits there too

You mention he didn't want a desktop because he needed to fit it in a backpack. If he could settle on a small desktop like a itx build you could probably build a new AMD APU setup for him thats small enough to fit in a backpack. Obviously it's still a desktop but your money will go farther in that segment obviously and the new APU's can actually do some lower res 720p PUBG with just the CPU and some fast RAM

Fortnight on the other hand is more forgiving and much better optimized for older hardware
 
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