Alienware Prebuilt Flip (~$200 profit)

Back at the end of October, I picked up an Alienware Aurora R7 that popped up on Facebook Marketplace. According to the listing, the PSU needed replacing, but everything else functioned.

The specs were:

The listed price was $200. Since it had been up for a few weeks, I figured the asking price was a bit high and offered $130, which the seller accepted.

After testing, the OEM 430W Dell PSU was indeed bad, and the PC booted up fine with a Thermaltake Smart 500W PSU I had picked up on OfferUp for $20 a week earlier (always pick up parts at a good price when convenient - you never know when you'll need them!).

When removing the OEM PSU, I noticed the cables were custom length and much shorter than that of a standard retail PSU, leading me to worry there wouldn't be enough space for cable management. Luckily, the PSU installation was quite simple, needing only 4 screws - the R7 case is well designed, with removable toolless panels, and the PSU is in a swing out bay, with plenty of room to fit additional cables underneath the GPU. The OEM PSU also comes with an adapter for the 24 pin ATX cable that provides additional GPU power.

I had also picked up an Nvidia GTX 1070 Founder's Edition for $40 recently (again, grab parts at a good price when they crop up!) that I thought would be a perfect upgrade to the included GTX 1060.

Of course, it's very rare for builds to go without a hitch, and after installing the GTX 1070, the PC turned on but refused to display video out. The most common solution when searching Google is to turn off Secure Boot in the BIOS, which did work, but I find that was more of a hack/workaround than a true solution, especially since games like Valorant require Secure Boot for their anti-cheat. It turns out that the underlying issue in this case was an incompatibility with UEFI BIOSes, and could be fixed by updating the GTX 1070 with Nvidia's firmware update tool. After running the tool, the PC displayed output on boot just fine even with Secure Boot on.

With that resolved, the final issue was that to change the AlienFX lighting, you needed Alienware Command Center, but link is nowhere to be found on the Alienware Aurora R7's support page, and versions 5/6 don't support the R7. Luckily I was able to find version 4 with some Google-Fu, and I've uploaded it here for anyone else who runs into this issue. With that installed, I'm able to customize the lighting. I threw in a new 512GB Silicon Power SATA SSD ($25.99 on Amazon), installed Windows, and the PC was ready to list!

As far as the actual sale, I listed it on 11/9/2024 for $450 on Craigslist/OfferUp/Facebook Marketplace. I was hoping to capitalize on holiday shopping, but I think my asking price was a bit high. After a couple weeks, I lowered it to $400. I was getting offers for $300-350, but I wanted to test the waters at $400. In addition, I had an international trip and was out of the US from 12/2 - 12/17, so I wasn't really bumping my listings and was unable to set up any meetups for impulse purchases. After getting back, I even accepted 2 offers for $350, but each of those flaked.

Finally, yesterday, 1/4/2025, somebody offered full price if we could meet up that night. Note that this was around 11:30PM and they'd drive an hour(!) for the meetup. Luckily I live near several grocery stores, one of which is open until 1AM. I confirmed they were on their way and we met up in the parking lot at 12:30AM. I was curious why the buyer wanted to meet up so late, and apparently he just really wanted a PC and it was an impulse buy - I benefitted from being flexible in this case. Did the usual demo process and made the sale - a $210 profit. Overall, this PC took a bit longer than I'd have liked to sell (exacerbated by me being out of the country), but it does prove again that if your price is reasonable and you keep renewing your listings, eventually someone will be interested.

Here's the cost breakdown:

*I value the Dell OEM GTX 1060 at $30, which I subtracted from the $130 purchase price.