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The second-hand computer market in the Facebook marketplace has become a major point of online trading for pc parts and components as the consumer base for computers in Bangladesh has grown substantially over the years.
The recent surge of price in the global computer market has affected the Bangladeshi PC market too and for many PC parts, the price has spiralled out of control, pushing many customers towards the second-hand market with the hope of a lower price. But this comes with circumstances.
Many new PC customers lack the necessary knowledge about computer parts and their performance which invariably misleads them about component prices.
A lot of individuals, who are looking to sell their used components not as a business entity but as informal sellers, have taken full advantage of the recent pricing situation.
The most common scenario is that these individual sellers selling the ‘processor+motherboard’ package where the components are 4-5 years old and charging money with which new ‘lower-end’ processors can be bought.
A common misconception among customers is that the new ‘lower-end’ processors aren’t powerful enough and they would rather opt for an old but ‘higher-end’ component. Let us see a performance comparison below.
Photo: UserBenchmark
This is a benchmark comparison between a current lower-end Intel processor and an older higher-end Intel processor. The newer lower-end processor is a substantial 6 per cent faster than the older processor, although most buyers would think the older processor would perform better.
The scene in the graphics card market is also dire; people are charging original prices on their 4-5-year-old GPUs and the Facebook marketplace is full of such advertisements.
This creates an illusion of inflated prices even among knowledgeable customers. If one sees a particular GPU model is frequently being advertised as BDT 30 thousand, whereas it should have been 15 thousand, that person would automatically think that the reservation price should be higher than 15 thousand for those second-hand GPU models, even after knowing the advertisements are misleading and grossly overpriced.
The price of components such as RAM, SSD, and monitors are also on the rise and often advertisements can be seen where sellers are advertising their used old components just slightly below market price and trying to maximise their opportunity by trying to sell them to new less-knowledgeable customers.
The most serious issue with these old and overpriced PC components is that these components, almost invariably, have no credible papers and warranty support, and buying from individual sellers can never ensure any sort of after-sale services.
A PC component that has been used for more than 2-3 years is likely to degrade from its original performance and buying these overpriced, degraded and not-so-credible PC components with no after-sale services are almost always a bad purchasing decision.
The money one saves from these sorts of purchases can easily be spent on repairing and other hassles that come with old parts.
So, it is always recommended to do some research before buying PC parts from the Facebook marketplace and compare them to the actually credible market alternatives.