I Ordered the Cheapest GPU in the UK...It went wrong!

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

🟢Had anything similar happen, leave a comment, some interesting stories coming out.

[@RoswelliVideos]

Ordered a Q9450 on the basis of your Core 2 Quad video from CEX. Received a box set of 90210. @_@

[@mikedonalds]

I was trying to trade in my RX 570, but they quoted me the trade in price for a GTX 570. Otherwise, CEX has always been spot on for me.

[@Mini-z1994]

That could would get returned quite quickly if i was specifically after a gts 250 & got that garbage. Also might overclock the card further btw with a program called " Nvidia inspector " Pushed a 8500 gt too 710mhz core & 420 mhz on the memory with that & a larger cooler i had laying around.

[@brokeandtired]

CEX sent me a GTX770 once that had clearly been baked in an oven (to try an fix solder on gpu), because the board was bent like a banana.

[@KomradeMikhail]

I recently ordered (not from CEX) a GeForce 8800 GTS for the collection... and received a 6800 Ultra instead. This was actually a wonderful mistake. Despite being older, the 6 series is the last supported by Win98. Making the 6800 Ultra the top-tier card for a retro 98 rig.

[@KomradeMikhail]

Everybody keeps calling it the GeForce GT 210... but it was so low-end that nvidia refused to even give it the GT label. It is technically just the GeForce 210.

[@emir4707]

True story

[@johncate9541]

They're worried about those silly little letters when they have already diminished their GeForce brand by selling garbage like the 210 under it?

[@randomchannel9331]

@@johncate9541 Imagine a card even lower just called the Force 210 lmao

[@AlexandruLipan]

Added fun fact: is one of the least powerful graphics cards supporting DX11, at a whopping 39 GFlops in 32 bit calculation. 39 Gflops is what, graphic wise, was the Galaxy S4.

[@randomchannel9331]

@@AlexandruLipan damn im glad this gpu can play angry birds at 60fps lmao

[@TheVanillatech]

The local store of CEX near me had a habit ... for MONTHS ... of not identifying cards properly and their pricing was seriously out of whack. I bought 5 cards over the course of half a year and made £350 profit selling those cards on gumtree compared to what I paid CEX for them. Whoever worked there at that time who got the job of pricing and identifying GPU's was my best friend. Even though I never met them.

[@mrN3CR0]

we dont price them instore, the pricing team do that externally... all we do is type the model and spec into the till system and then quote whatever the system says for cash and voucher so NO instore colleague has any control over pricing be that in corporate or franchise stores, Most colleagues that work instore are NOT upto spec on pc hardware at all and will just wing it (sales colleague in a northern corporate store)

[@TheVanillatech]

@@mrN3CR0 Ah. So someone was typing it in wrong. I guess that's possible. I've watched guys in the store googling to try to identify cards and whatnot. They can get a little confusing given the number of different models and variants. I can be constantly advising them what it is, but they don't listen. So just leave them to it, right? Thanks for the clarification though.

[@mrN3CR0]

@@TheVanillatech Hey no worries, ive been a customer for cex for 17 years but only worked for them for the past 2 years swapping over from 5 years at currys pc world and most of all my shifts were training people up on hardware variables and how to identify stuff lol , It can sometimes happen where things are mis-bought/sold and we call that a buy in error, such things are supposed to be corroborated on a buy in report and checked over by supervisors and management but alas it looks like SOME stores (cough franchise cough) just dont seem to care about standards xD

[@TheVanillatech]

@@mrN3CR0 Shit I worked at PC World during the Christmas season of 1999 into 2000. I was only a youngster, needed some Christmas money etc. It was the time of the "millenium bug" that was gonna kill us all and end the world, exploding computers at random and shutting down missle defense systems and life supports. Nothing actually happened though. Was an anti-climax. I was shelf stacking but the repair guys were fucking baboons and knew nothing, came to me every day asking how to fix this or that the other. Same with salesmen, who I fucking hated, slimey robbing bastards at that store! I used to advise people and be honest etc and when it came to the sale, I'd hand over to a slimeball and was told I'd get the commisson. Which I never did. That entire experience was a fucking nightmare, so I left with a handful of brand new RAM and a working if slightly battered VooDoo 3 from the returns bin in the back. Told them to ram their job. In a way they lost a potential beast in treating me so badly, but it wasn't a nice environment for me. Was sick of seeing old people getting robbed blind by scumbags, or tech guys talking all day and then coming to me to ask for help doing their job. Don't know if you can relate to any of that. Cheers anyways!

[@acid3129]

I orderd a gtx 580 3gb for £20 and got a rx580 4gb the other day I don't know what the shipping department are up to but I'm not complaining

[@ngtv_777]

As an ex-employee of CeX, basicly what you've got there, is called a "buy in error". They bought the wrong thing (most stores dont even test things out), and when they found out about it (most likely due to it being returned from a customer), instead of "price adjusting", they just crossed out the name. This and many other things are company policy, aka they just dont care.

[@Prof.Pwnalot]

Imagine being a computer store, that doesn't test their products. That's a worry but not uncommon... :( Had an issue with a motherboard. Was tested within the 2 hours of lodging a return. Was a recent motherboard b550 less than 2 years old Anyway, x570 i brought, i returned that same day within the 2 hours as it was faulty and not responding. Turns out, i got the luck of the draw, but worked out well, B550 was cleaned out, CPU socket had some crap in there that i failed to see. (not the best eyesight) So i saved my money there. Upon return they greeted me lovely, and said, we were just about to call you and say that your motherboard is fine. That's centrecom in Australia. Guy even told me, hes bound to the company, was a beginner like us all, was sick of getting rolled from "professionals", takes his customers more seriously than his job for the company since he goes above and beyond and genuinely wants to help people. Good and bad people around i think. Guy even offered to slot my CPU in for me, since i had some issues with the heatsync releasing tension, and didn't wanna fuck my AMD pins up. Luck of the draw, like a brand new computer part, or interaction with an individual. You just never know.

[@MrDontclickthislink]

That makes so much sense! I bougth a CPU from CeX a couple of years ago, got home and put it in my computer... nothing... put my old one back in.. computer booted up as usual, thought it was a problem with my computer and maybe somehow I've got confused and got the wrong one? Put it in my friends computer, nothing again! No obvious marks on the CPU to tell me it's broken.. Tried another friends computer, he's a bit more tech savvy than me, he put it in and it didn't boot up.. He told me it's not the fault of the computer but the CPU is broken. I took it back to the shop and had the WORST experience with the guy on the till, told him everything and he replied with "Well it was working when we tested it" to which his mate stood next to him side eyed him like he knew he was lying.. said well it's not my computer because it hasn't worked in either of my friends machines, he said I must've broken it, I literally took it out of the package it was placed in and placed it in the computer, nothing rough about it at all. He said he'll take it back and test it, his mate immediately shook his head, I said fine, came back in an hour and he'd gone, his mate served me, apologised and issued me a refund.. I love CeX because the staff there are usually cool but this guy was a prick.

[@1bodyproblem]

I bought a ring doorbell clone from CEX - the app was removed from google and apple stores, the base unit was completely missing, and the doorbell part was burnt where the missing battery was supposed to be - I will only sell to cex from now on - i have a broken PS3 i'll take in on monday

[@garrettturner7383]

The card had me fooled- My first upgrade was a Dell Nvidia GeForce 210 with 512MB of vram, that looked exactly like that card. I enjoyed minecraft at normal settings at about 30fps, for a couple of days before the card died.

[@2048Megabytes.]

Wow that’s kinda sad

[@aleksazunjic9672]

How did you manage to destroy 210, they are like cockroaches - virtually indestructible :D

[@MattTheTekie]

I'm guessing they mis matched it for that one as a result then something ridiculous happened causing the mis label. I don't know how someone destroies such a card tho

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

My first "upgrade" was from a 6200 TC to a 7300 GT. Which was stable on a 60% overclock and still works. The 7300 GT was actually pretty neat, with oc close to a 7600 GS in performance. That's like buying a 1650 today and clocking it to 2060 performance.

[@255gecko]

As an ex CEX employee who was the only person in the store who knew anything about PCs I can confirm there’s maybe 12 people in the company who actually take the time to look at the card their buying or selling is And most of them are franchise workers

[@zuyvox]

Its nice to know that a HD5450 is fast in comparison to this

[@2048Megabytes.]

Yeah

[@erisdelta5950]

even better when it's one of the "higher end" models.

[@scotttait2197]

So did you actually return it to cex? Bought am alleged R9 390x ... was sent a 2gb 7750 ... cex tried to deny it was thiers despite having their sticker

[@najirulislam3444]

did you get sorted though?

[@dabombinablemi6188]

Considering my local one didn't pick up the blatant corrosion damage on the back of an MSI Armour GTX 970 - full blown green residue + swollen & cracked capacitors on the backside directly behind the GPU. Suffice to say no sli GTX 970 for me (and later my brother). They also sold 1 of 2 HD7970 GHz dead, so no crossfire either (of course the dead card was one of the blowers). Portal 2 would have been an interesting test - it runs well on even my old Celeron M380/Pentium M770 based laptop with its intel 915 and proves how craptastic a low end card is.

[@smoothjamie4046]

This is my experience of CEX about 50% of the time. Half the time I will order and have no problems and half the time i have broken items, wrong items, or just discs full of scratches and scuffs. Hillarious, because since the time they have been offering a 24 month warranty they have been rejecting perfectly good items you want to sell citing the warranty as an excuse. Hit and miss.

[@warrengouldthorpe5091]

This has happened to me a few times where I've ordered games and films online and they've been soo badly scratched they might as well be binned, but I've tried selling them a few games and films in really good condition but they rejected them saying "there to badly damage"

[@Valkirth]

same experience with the one where i live, that is why I stopped using them for like 10-15 years now, got sick of their crap.

[@Ndlanding]

@@warrengouldthorpe5091 "They're too badly damaged." How can anyone make so many mistakes in 4/5 words? DId you have Liz Truss as a teacher?

[@sircampbelltenson7297]

A while ago I was looking to upgrade from a HD 4870(Yes I know but it was a hand-me-down PC), I bought an R9 270 from them (IN PERSON) and it was not working whatsoever, I did get a full refund but they claimed to have tested it. So out of spite I tried to sell them a completely dead (Green pixel artifacting everywhere) GTX 580. Got 35 quid for it, no questions asked. Absolutely ridiculous

[@user-te1le7ck6b]

You did gods work lol

[@Gatorade69]

That HD 4870 was a decent card... back in the day. I had one and rather liked it.

[@LieutenantD4]

A N G E R Y

[@sircampbelltenson7297]

@@Gatorade69 Still got mine today, sits in a Phenom II X2 545 machine that I use for XP/7 gaming, also has a secondary drive in dual boot running Ubuntu for Minecraft server hosting and as a file vault. Copes well enough for Minecraft since the server js just for a few friends but the 4870 holds up wonderfully in the games of the time

[@jrose-xp6tf]

That...was one shady transaction, double scammy.

[@leehastie12]

I remember I took my GT 1030 to my local store to sell and the staff there said their pc couldn’t detect the card, as if it were faulty. Was utterly confused at how they came to this conclusion because I knew the card worked fine so I didn’t bother arguing with them and took it home. Decided to sell it on eBay instead and the buyer left positive feedback for the sale. Ever since then, I only use CEX for buying PS1, PS2 or the occasional PC games not on steam. In my own experience, I defo do not rate CEX at all and would much rather use eBay for used parts or components.

[@justanotheryoutubechannel]

I don’t have a great opinion of CeX, I’ve had several PS1 and 2 PS2 purchases fail to work, and I had one broken SNES cart, but I have had many other successful purchases and thankfully they accepted refunds on all of my failed purchases, or were able to resurface the disc to fix it. They also refused to buy any of the games their website said they accepted. At the moment I mainly use them to buy Xbox 360 games, as I recently got one and they sell the games for £2 or less in CeX, I’ve filled out a fairly large collection at usually £1 a pop with some as low as 50p. They’re all worked so far, and at such low prices it’s hard to argue with since eBay usually costs £5-15 for the same games including shipping costs.

[@PoutingTrevor]

CeX either disappoints despite already having low expectations, or they genuinely surprise in some way. Unfortunately you must have experienced both feelings simultaneously when you got this card.

[@harpingon]

I got a mint condition PS4 Pro, and a superb Cellular iPad from them at prices I did not expect. I've also had busted and dirty controllers, scratched games, and games with no disc in the box. It's really variable!

[@Timmymantwo]

The worst CEX I had was an unboxed PS4 I ordered online. Arrived awfully scratched, took it into my local CEX and even they were appalled by the condition of it. Think the store that sent it was in shit afterwards

[@lewisyork3841]

Had the same with a Samsung phone, bought a grade A, received the worst condition phone I have seen. Screen had chucks taken out of it as well as really bad screen burn. For pc parts I had server ram delivered to me 3 times in a row... cex's policy says they don't even buy this in

[@ljrretropcs]

I have it in writing from a CEX that it is not their policy to pack PC components in any type of ESD protected packing. They sent me a CPU in an envelope wrapped in paper and during post a resistor had been torn from underneath the CPU. According to them this is acceptable.

[@BudgetBuildsOfficial]

Usually most stores send me CPUs wrapped in a plastic container and bubble wrap. But I have had just tissues tossed in an envelope before, some stores really give them a bad name.

[@gandi69]

CPU’s in paper bags are normal fare, i usually try to collect and take my own anti static bags. An rtx 3060 I ordered two weeks ago (@£340) turned up with no anti static bag - just in a box filled with shredded paper. It works fine but still would having a stock of anti static bags when posting a high value item really hurt? I’ll even pay extra for it just as long as ensure the item arrives ok!

[@efftee]

I got really lucky when I ordered my i7 3770 from them, it came in its original (worn) box and even still had the intel inside sticker and stock thermal paste on the cooler

[@noelisgod1]

I once bought a cpu from CeX, I think it was an old AM2 chip, pulled it out the packaging and some pins were bent. Took it into my local shop and the guy honestly goes... "yeah if you try and put a cpu in the wrong type motherboard the pins will bend" uh huh, no shit. I didn't buy a cpu just assuming I could brute force it into any damned board.

[@roasthunter]

tbh you don't need special packaging, brown paper is fine

[@punstartracer]

Jesus christ, I had this graphics card in my first job computer editing SVGs and Magazine layouts, the thing lagged on Illustrator CS3 I couldn't imagine it's capable of running games.

[@aleksazunjic9672]

Well, both CS3 and 8400 were released the same year (2007), and 8400 was a budget card even back then .

[@punstartracer]

​@@aleksazunjic9672 I think spec-wise it all makes sense but at the time I had a Core 2 Quad with GMA graphics integrated on the motherboard in my main machine, it could maybe reach 30 FPS in a lax source game like Portal with everything on low and even that could run Macromedia FlashPaper and Illustrator without lagging. Maybe it's behaving differently on a less restricted machine, just seems so odd to see it have any performance whatsoever.

[@ltredacted7034]

I actually work in a CEX store, these sort of things definitely should not happen, all label errors should be reprinted and loose parts should definitely not be sent like that.

[@jaklawrence4301]

I don't imagine CeX pays very well, so they probably have to make do with whatever employees they can keep a hold of. This is usually the problem with these kinds of stores, Curry's has this problem as well and so did Dixons and Maplin back in the day. If you don't pay enough to get people who know about tech to sell your tech for you, you'll end up with these sorts of problems where whoever's job it was to send this out wasn't paid enough to care.

[@willpemberton6823]

All of the DSG owned shops (Dixons, Curry’s , PC World) tended to have the most stupid staff in-store. My local Curry’s didn’t even know what DVD regions were when selling DVD players. As for PC world, the urban legend about asking if they had any spare IRQs and a member of staff going to check the stock for some might well be true.

[@wyterabitt2149]

@@willpemberton6823 Why would they need to care about DVD regions, they didn't sell anything other than the local region. I doubt they know what power requirements are in Nicaragua either.

[@willpemberton6823]

@@wyterabitt2149 I asked if they sold multi-region players (knowing they didn’t), their response was “what is a region ?”. Knowing bugger all about what they are selling is the problem, most of them aren’t even good at selling either. The mighty DSG, sellers of cheap crap at expensive prices.

[@another3997]

@@willpemberton6823 So, if you go to your local supermarket to buy some baked beans... do you expect the staff to know what kind of beans are used, what country they're from and how they taste? Trust me, I know from long experience that DSG aren't the best, but they're just a 'tech' supermarket. They sell everything from kettles, coffee machines, washing machines and fridges to TVs, Computers and Telescopes. I think your expectations are somewhat unreasonable.

[@nile2566]

This is the first time I've seen Project Zomboid used as a benchmark and you have no idea how excited it got me

[@TheSpotify95]

Oh wow - I've never had anything like this happen to me. The CeX that I have been in before is usually OK - with decently priced RAM and storage that has worked well. I might just look in the good stores to see if I can get a decent GPU for my 2nd gen i3 build/4GB RAM - that will be a good Windows 7 PC, so at least I can hopefully get a semi-decent graphics card, which would also allow an upgrade to an i7 and 16GB RAM later on down the line.

[@paranoidgenius9164]

I may have an explanation for this, I knew someone who worked at a CEX, & what they told me they witnessed was, the delivery guy knows someone at an electronic recycling plant, find GPUs, with similar branding, replace the ordered one with it, then keep the better spec GPU for themselves. I don't think CEX is to blame, it's the delivery guys!

[@petermichaelgreen]

"I don't think CEX is to blame" Ultimately it's CEX who decide who to hire, what contractors to use, whether to use any additional security precautions when shipping stuff and so-on. If they decide it's cheaper to use staff and contractors who are not paid enough to care and tolerate the returns and reputational damage that results in then that is their decision. If the "delivery guys" really are stealing stuff and replacing it with lower-value substitutes then I doubt they are working alone. I suspect it's far more likely they have people on the inside tipping them off to which packages are worth tampering with

[@jordy_3d]

Had a few orders and stuff from CeX myself over the years Only mistake I've had with them ordering online was ordering a Blu-Ray and receiving just the case, which was... almost impressive, really. I have seen things on shelves that absolutely make me go "You don't know what you have, do you?", from parts to rare games

[@captainsemicolon]

I bought a gtx 960 4gb mini from them, came from a Scotland store. Motherboard refused to POST. Took it to my local store and they confirmed it also failed to POST on their test rig. Gave me a full refund. My local CEX is great, but yeah, there are definitely some that do not test or check the things they are selling.

[@jimmyjoejoyce]

Only stupid experience I've had with CEX is I Bought 500gb hard drive and got a 1tb

[@Cenentury0941]

Did you return it?

[@jimmyjoejoyce]

@@Cenentury0941 no I still use it haha

[@caphowdy666]

I think the biggest problem with CEX is that the individual stores are franchised, and when you order from the website it is pot luck which store you will get the item from, even if multiple stores have the same item. I usually order blu ray movies from them on their website (sometimes games), and their system is seriously broken as I can often end up spending as much or more in postage as I do for the items. A few years back it was great as there was a set postage cost no matter how many items you order, but now you pay per item and there is no combined postage cost if the items are coming from the same store. I traded in a bunch of PS4 games in store a couple of years ago and got a credit note as obviously it is a higher value than cash, but the selection of movies and games in my local store was abysmal, with the only blu ray movies or games I wanted actually being the same price as buying a new copy on Amazon. So I ordered so films from the website. As I say, a big chunk of my credit ended up going towards postage and several of the items came from the same store as they came in the same package, meaning I probably paid about four or five times what I should have for postage. The other thing you notice is that the packaging quality sometimes is dependant on which store they come from. Another thing I have noticed with games and with blu rays when they used to come with digital copies, is my local store removes the codes from the packaging but other stores don't. I can only assume this is due to the employees taking them for themselves. DLC in games is usually always claimed, but digital copies of blu rays are quite often not claimed by the original purchaser, so it to me is blatantly obvious that my local store is keeping these codes for themselves in case they have never been claimed. But yeah, rather long winded post, but I fully agree with you that the customer service you get from CEX really depends on which stores you are dealing with as it really depends on who owns the franchise of that store.

[@MrKata55]

I did a similiar thing some 6 years ago... needed the cheapest PCIe card since all the cards I owned then were AGP. I was basically building my first gaming PC with a Core 2 Duo, and the cheapest at that time(in CeX, it costed 15 PLN which is like 3-4 USD) was a 512MB DDR2 ATi Radeon HD2400. Surprisingly enough, it was still considerably better than the Intel GMA X3100 I had in my main laptop. Out of the most impressive games I played on it were: - Metro 2033 (non-redux) - was quite playable on lowest settings, around 15 to 25 FPS on average iirc - 7 Days to Die (the indie zombie sandbox) - Alan Wake, although it needed lowering of the minimum resolution through the config file(ran ok at 640x480) and also was the first game which I tried overclocking with (and the HD2400 did overclock OK although the temperatures were the limiting factor - the stock cooler on this was literally a 1mm painted alluminium sheet with a tiny fan attached) - Far Cry 2 (med settings I think) and a few other ones I can't remember.

[@jfwfreo]

My experience with CEX (the Australian arm of it at least) has been pretty positive. Went in and bought their "value xbox 360 wired controller" which could be an original controller or could be a 3rd party controller (I wanted one for PC for emulation and some other stuff and didn't care if it was original or not). Ended up initially with a genuine MS controller in not-so-good condition which didn't work when I got home and plugged it in. Went back and complained and they had no issues swapping it out (in this case for a PDP Rock Candy 3rd party controller in transparent pink in really good condition) I wouldn't order from them online and I wouldn't buy used PC components like GPUs from them (mostly because I don't trust used PC components in general) but for things like the xbox 360 controller I bought it was worthwhile (and at $22 it was cheaper than anywhere else I could have gotten an xbox 360 controller from at that point in time)

[@CammieRacing]

I think some CEX stores are franchises, and from what I've been told there's a big difference in quality control between corporate stores and some franchise owned ones.

[@dazisback2]

Great content have been watching you tinker with old stuff for years, keep up the good work mate.

[@thecatherd]

I love CeX as someone dirt poor because they're the only way I can actually afford a smartphone. But yeah, their quality really does vary wildly with PC parts. At least they have a good return policy and stick to it for the most part.

[@scellyyt]

Only thing I like about GTS 250 gpus is XFX variants have a fancy looking shroud, but damn that's bad on CEX's part lmao

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

As someone who owns and has used both a 8800 GT and HD 4870, describing this card as a disappointment doesn't even do it justice. It is a display adapter. The 210 was one when it released 13 years ago and the 8400 GS was one when it released 14 and 12 years ago (because they released more than one model) In fact the 8400 and 8400 GS are so bad, they were called bad back in 2007

[@n0rsca392]

Wait folks. It gets worse. This is in fact not an 8400GS from 2008. It's a 2008GS from the year 8400. This isn't a gaming graphics card at all. It's a quantum entanglement device.

[@ToniaGlitched]

I don't know if I feel bad for you or relieved that my Intel HD 4400 isn't that bad, the more I watch this channel, the more I feel privileged to have my good and old i3 at the same time as it makes me wanna get more laptops, as we have 5 people here at my house and only 2 working computers so far

[@asanulsterman1025]

My local CEX shop does not check HDD's before selling and plays silly games when you try to get your money back. I bought 3 HDD's last week, 2 x 1TB disks were faulty. When I went to get my money back the next day they said they would have to check the disks before refunding and I would have to wait at least 2 hours. I explained I was on my way to hospital (my 94yo Dad was not expected to survive) and could not wait, I showed the pictures of the fails from diskinfo on my phone, the jobs worth manager said it was company policy and there was nothing he could do then just walked away. I lost my temper, took the 2 disks and flung them against a wall, gave job's worth a few recommendations and left. I will never set foot CEX again and neither should you.

[@MartinWolves]

I've bought plenty of stuff from CEX and it has been ok. Only issue I've had is an SSD which died after a week. CEX refunded me. Try doing that with an eBay purchace

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

It wouldn't be a problem with an eBay purchase. They always come down on the side of the buyer anyway. If something arrives that you are not satisfied with, you just open a return, print a label and send it back. eBay refunds you the moment they see that the label has been scanned at the Post Office (at least in my experience anyway). Unfortunately, as someone who sometimes sells on eBay this has worked against me a couple of times where items have been sent back to me as "faulty" but there's nothing wrong with them.

[@wyterabitt2149]

@@terrydaktyllus1320 Only sold a few things over the years, had two returned and won both cases by having good documentation before and after. But even so, there is a time limit on opening a faulty case on ebay so even if this was the case, it's still not a benefit you get at ebay compared to CEX who have a 24 month warranty.

[@rustywarrior5288]

Ahhhh CEX. I love 'em as a way of disposing of kit I no longer need and managed to pick up a few bargains as well. The only time I seem to have issues is when I get something for my missus. I only ever purchase "A" grade items for her as these _should_ be perfect in every way. However, the Kindle Paperwhite I got for her wouldn't register as it had been reported stolen - which had to have been done after the testing (assuming the testing had been done) and the Oculus Quest 2 I ordered for her and they sent me a PlayStation classic (no controllers or cables though) and a game! However on both occasions when I've taken them back to my local store they've refunded immediately.

[@luckyowl10]

This is what I call a double bamboozle, not only you didn't get the GT 210 from the tag, that can still play some browser games from Facebook, you got an even more ancient card

[@zebrasprite]

I've always had great experiences with CeX. My 5500xt I received from them is an excellent card, especially with its 8GB of VRAM. An RX 580-level card with only 100 or so watts average power draw? Yes please! Another great video, Mr Budget Builds. :)

[@RJRC_105]

CEX can get in the sea. They offer you a pittance for your stuff compared to, say, if you slapped it on Greedbay, loads of allegedly independent stores peg the prices they offer to CEX, and their stores smell of armpits. In 2012 I tried to sell them my Radeon HD 6870. They offered me forty five quid for it or sixty quid "store credit." They were knocking out similar cards in obviously worse condition (as in, coolers visibly clogged up with dust) for twice that. Never sell them anything to them and never buy anything from them.

[@tourmaline07]

The prices they offer to buy items is often so low that I cannot imagine any legitimate owners selling through them, especially with things like GPUs ;)

[@alexatkin]

@@tourmaline07 It kinda works itself out when you consider eBay fees and the potential for dealing with being scammed with a return, at least so long as you trade for store credit and have something in mind for what you'll buy with that.

[@tourmaline07]

​@@alexatkin Fair point - I was scammed earlier this year with an Ebay buyer selling a Vega 64 who decided just after 30 days that he didn't want the card claiming it ran too hot (he clearly didn't do any research into vegas) - had to lose the sale and resell at a lower value to someone else. I'd probably use private marketplaces now above CEX still tbh. Agree that tradein isn't quite so bad - I did think about doing that with my 8700k to get a 9900k but I'd still be paying a premium of £150 or so , which is still a bit much for two extra cores on an older platform IMO.

[@matthewday7565]

I got a very good substitution, ordered a GTX 750 Ti 1GB and got a 2GB ... err, did they MAKE the Ti in 1GB? - yes they did.

[@terrydaktyllus1320]

I do a bit of PC recycling for myself (for building Linux machines) and for charity. Recently I went through a phase of upgrading a number of Socket 775 PC motherboards from dual core to quad core CPUs and upping the memory on them as much as possible - usually to a maximum of 8GB with boards having four RAM slots. There was nowhere cheaper than CEX to get Q6600 quad core CPUs and 2GB sticks of DDR2 desktop RAM. The CPUs were mostly fine (I think I ordered about 6 of them in total and one was faulty, for which I got a refund) but the RAM was an absolute NIGHTMARE! They kept sending me PC2-5300F or PC-2 6400F RAM which is server RAM and does not work in normal desktop motherboards. I think I must have ordered probably around 20 sticks of it over the space of a month and more than half of it was server RAM. It got to the point where I was going back into my local CEX shop so often to return it that they almost accused me of dumping my server RAM on them! In the end, it just wasn't worth my time and fuel constantly going back and forth to the CEX store - I ended up paying about twice the price for it on eBay where at least you get to see a photo of what you're buying so you can check it is the right RAM first.

[@archerbob6847]

I've had a similar experience with GameDude Computers where they sent me not what I ordered but the "equivalent" item that only worked just enough to post and nothing else, so if you send it back at cost to yourself, you then have to pay a *cough *cough working item re-stocking fee. In the finish what they count on is people not doing this as it costs more than items worth or was originally paid for to try and sort things out. Businesses like these are dead to me...

[@VengeanceLN]

Awhile back I bought my girlfriend who currently resides in the UK a GTX 1060 3gb for roughly $78 USD (idk what that is in GBP) for her PC build and instead she received a GTX 1070 so I won there.

[@catbugtf]

i purchased an i5 9400 and 2x8gb sticks of 2666mhz ram, and its been ok the cpu works fine, 1 of the ram sticks were faulty (getting constant bsods) and i'm currently waiting for a replacement from them, i'm also waiting on an rx 460 i recently bought for them, hopefully i dont get shafted like you have

[@blunderingfool]

Ooof, I remember having one of those little bastards, not a lot of fun! Upgrading to a HD7750 half-height low profile changed my gaming world at the time!

[@konradkierzkowski1339]

I have recently bought used 8400GS and despite the fact that it only has a DMS output (which usually brings the price down) it costed equivalent of 25$! But still.... it was the cheapest card with PCIEx1 connector at this time on my local market.

[@Cartoonman154]

I remember when I ordered a Fawlty Towers DVD from the online CEX, and they sent me the wrong version with no DVDs in the case. When I gave negative feedback, they flagged the comment as inappropriate.

[@FuzzWoof]

I've had a generally pretty good experience ordering from CeX, but I ordered a Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS setup a few years ago and received a random cheapo no name USB joystick. I was not amused. :p

[@adamz1988]

This reminds me of my old pc with a 8600gt. It was one of my best purchases at that time as I could play mw4 on max detail.

[@windowsxpnt2347]

Remember once seeing a fake 1050 in one of their stores. I pointed it out to them that a 1050 shouldn’t have analog video out, they just said “that’s because it’s a special variant”

[@codyweaver5721]

Aside from the whole situation of note being a GT 250 in the first place, I think I could have forgiven them marking a GeForce 210 as an 8400 if it were an 8400 revision 3, as they were the same GPU. But according to your GPU-Z output this is a Revision 2 on an older process. So even if performance was in the same ballpark, there was no reason to mark a notably older 8400 GS Rev. 2 as a GeForce 210.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

Interestingly the Rev 1 version of the 8400 GS is the fastest of them. It might be on the older G86 chip, but comes with 16 shaders and 128 bit memory. Raw performance is about 28% over the rev 2 and 45% above the rev 3 and is brings double the memory bandwith. The 210 is actually faster than all of them. Yes it has the same GT218 as the 8400 GS rev 3, but with about double the shader performance and a bunch more memory bandwidth. It sits closer to a 8600 GS or 9400 GT in terms of performance.

[@warrax111]

Yes, Cody Weaver, HappyBeezeStudios is right. 8400GS rev 2 and rev3 had 8 shaders. While Geforce 210 has 16. It is more powerful. The one in video is rev 2 (65nm). They revisited it, so it is even cheaper to produce, and burn less power. Also bring new funtionality (rev 3 is based on Geforce 200 series, so has finaly 2d/3d switching. So it underclocks on idle, bring power consumption to minimum). They never was intended for gaming and power. So they basicaly was even stripping down performance with newer revisions, because noone used it for gaming. It was used at 99% in office PC, with only 2D funtionality, HTTPs, playing videos, etc... The first one was most powerful, because in times, when it was new, 8000 series was so huge step from 7000, that they make it as lowest card with some gaming abilities. But after year or so, the other generation cards was for that (9400GT, and GT220). So any 3D performance on 8400GS didnt have meaning, that's why they saved even more power, and underclock it even more. The cores able to put all 16 shaders to work, they was dispatching through Geforce 210. But some of them was not able to run 16 shaders, such chips tried to be cut down to 8, and tested. So they left 8400GS rev 3. ,so they can sell damaged chips, that could not go to Geforce 210 , and return some money. Otherwise, they would need to throw them out, if geforce 8400GS rev 3 would not exists.

[@UKVampy]

Fortunately my dealings with CEX have been OK as I live in a large town, ie it has a large CEX, PC parts in there are quite abundant, esp cpu's Ram and Storage. GPU's are a bit hit and miss but they had a GTX1050ti in last Friday for £95.

[@sabianwarner5316]

I recently ordered and received a normal gtx 1050 and have had no issues with it. The only issues I've had with cex is when I was originally going to get a gtx 750 ti but support would not tell me if the card I wanted to order was able to be powered without external power. I was told they all required external power which was wrong. So cex is good but not always lol

[@DarkJedireaper]

I ordered an RTX 3090 from CeX and it worked for a while but then died... however, they honoured the Warrenty they offer, and I got a full refund 8 months after I bought it. Which allowed to me to get another RTX 3090, a Steam Deck, and an i9 11900k all with the nearly £2000 refund.

[@MichelleTamezPerez]

I found this video so funny. Back in the day i had an Athlon 5200+ with a biostar nforce Am2+ motherboard that had a "Geforce 8100" igpu that i paired in hibryd sli with the first gpu i bought with my own earned money...a 8400GS that was also from Biostar but it was the ddr2 512mb + the turbo cache tech that used your system memory as a gpu memory (+ the 32-512mb buffer for the gpu) so in theory in total i had over 1gb of vram (512+256 cached vram + 512mb buffer) on my 3gb ddr2 1066 setup running windows xp sp3. And yes, Crysis was an amazing surprise when runing on mids to highs on a 1270x760 i belive 17" CRT. Good times i even remember the last 2 games i played with that setup runing for my parents: CoD MW 2 or 3 and Battlefield 3

[@ArmadaOne]

The GTS 250 is actually a rebranded 9800 GTX (8800 GT has 112 cores, 9800 GTX has 128 cores) so the comparative performance is even worse than what you thought or show here. The 8400 GS is the slowest card in the 8000 series and was purely meant to be used in office computers, it's completely unsuitable for gaming. Even a 8500 GT would have outperformed this card by miles and that was NVidia's slowest "gaming" card in the 8000 series. Even my old dual core media laptop has a 8600 GT so that was considered the minimum for an HTPC at the time that's not build for gaming, just to put it in perspective how bad the 8400 GS really is.

[@HappyBeezerStudios]

To make it worse, the 8400 GS has 3 models with different chips, but all of them are horrible. The 9800 GTX+/GTS 250 is about 20% or so faster than the 8800 GT/9800 GT

[@bob23301]

Never....and i mean NEVER buy online from CEX when it comes to tech, only buy from in-store were you can inspect the item before you buy it.

[@SummerDawn1245]

I actually lucked out with CEX recently. I picked up a 4TB SSD practically new for £200 and I've been using it for a few months now. Definitely beats my 7 year old HDD's.

[@alexatkin]

Done the same, some people when getting a new PC seem to reuse their old parts and trade the new ones to CEX so if you're lucky you can get brand-new parts. Of course, sometimes CEX overprice them so they are barely cheaper than new, it varies.

[@Bright_Jockhu]

My local cex even has fake gpu's on display but they don't seem to see a problem in selling those either

[@HikingFeral]

I once tried to sell my Fitbit at CEX, they told me it would be 2 hours and went on to tell me the same lies they always tell me "our internet is so slow" instead of just being honest and saying they are very busy and understaffed.couldn't

[@SteamFireGamer]

My partner bought a GTX 1080 from CEX once but upon inspection when he got it home it was a GTX 1060 ... close but not what he bought, luckily he took it back the next morning and they replaced it but the person in the store checked the cards and somehow the barcode on the 1060 was showing as a 1080 on their system so sometimes I wonder if its somehow the barcode database being incorrect or people scamming CEX successfully.

[@zeppelinshy]

Yeah I never order anything from CEX other than old disk games. One time I ordered something and got the complete wrong thing sent. I went through their customer service, sent back the old one to get a replacement, and they legit sent the exact same item out again (same S/N and everything). Done that 2 times till I just returned it. That was my most recent but every time I have purchased electronic hw from them its always ended the same. Some things they even sell second hand at a higher price than if you was to buy it new and is widely available.

[@LucaRuggier]

btw nvidia removed voltage control from older cards via a driver update, if you installed an older driver your would maybe get voltage control back

[@commiellama]

I bought some RAM from CEX once and the two sticks came loose in a brown paper bag. I was less than impressed

[@Puremindgames]

I've only ever bought like 2 things from CeX, both online, my MegaCD and Legend of Legaia which turned out to be Ex-Rental but was never stated as such, I get that they just pick a random store to send you a product, but still.

[@Lif7ed]

Great example of CeX service, I don't tend to buy goods from there shops but I always find with my local CeX they can make errors pricing things. I picked up a ROG Strix RX480 8GB about 3 years ago for £70 and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it and I believe this was selling for £250 second hand on the net at the time.

[@warrengouldthorpe5091]

This happened to me recently where I ordered a gt 1030 gddr5 from cex but they sent me a gt 1030 ddr4 instead as I noticed by checking the label on the graphics card, but luckily they gave me a refund

[@colossus27m]

I’ve only had about a 50% success rate with CEX, wrong parts sent or not working plus the local store give me a lot of grief when retuning items so I stopped using them unfortunately

[@gandi69]

Tried to sell a reference blower style gtx 1070 in to cex the other day and got a phone call two days later “it won’t fit in our test rig as it’s not big enough, can you come pick the card up and take it to another store and rebook it in again to sell. Ps the price we buy these for has now gone down by £20 so we won’t be honouring your price from previously”. Brilliant. Sorry but if you buy in gpus, why haven’t you got an open mining frame or large atx case? What happens if someone has a triple fan gpu or similar? Never mind anyway, I sold the 1070 on eBay for more money. My wife (who used to work for them a while back) says they simply don’t test bought in CPU’s or memory, it’s simply too difficult with all the variants available - so naturally it’s the place for people to go to sell in their broken stuff which happens frequently!

[@aNiTF3]

bought "as new" phone from cex, 2 weeks later the phone had no connection, turns out it was banned by all uk carriers as stolen/not paid for by original owner, had to change to used phone as they had no more grade a phones

[@registeredblindgamer4350]

No wonder it suckied at 1080p on the desktop, Windows 10 uses at least 300mb of vram idle at the desktop and can be as high as 700mb. This GPU never had a chance.

[@ToTheGAMES]

I would love to know how this was resolved.

[@K9arcade]

Sucked that this happened to you. I've had a good run thus far with CeX (knock on wood). Crazy that you got a card that's worse than any of my retro PCs

[@mruczyslaw50]

GTS250 should actually perform better than 8800GT as it is a rebrand of 9800GTX+

[@trashtronics1700]

Oh didn't know that one good to know

[@prjndigo]

Yeah, it's CEX's fault. Somebody sent in a junk card cleaned up as a return for the card they were sent for refund and whoever was at CEX was too stoned to notice, so it's ALL on CEX for committing a crime.

[@MitosALT]

Great video, thanks for the benchmark, I always like seeing what the cheapest of the cheapest tech can do, surprised you chose warband seeing as now its way less popular of a game!

[@builder396]

This made me nostalgic for the 8500 GT I once had in a "Media PC" and it struggled with Battlefield 2 just as much as HL2 in this video. Technically playable on low/medium settings at 1280x1024, but artillery strikes just turned the game into a stuttering mess. And I was lucky getting the 512MB variant at least, so it had at least something under the hood, but ultimately I was lucky that I was still stuck with a lot of old CD games that didnt really have complaints about the card.

[@BReal-10EC]

Note the GTS 250 has higher clock speeds so it's actually slightly better than the 8800 GT. The 8400 GS was.... £21 when released. So you didn't get much of a discount for it being 13-15 years old. I remember seeing those in boxes with GAMER graphics as Best Buy way back when. What a turd. That card isn't much better than the old ATI iGPUs put on the motherboards. I think my Phenom Dell with ATI HD 4200 was able to run HL2 at a horribly low resolution and framerate. Lol.

[@oldphoneradio2412]

i paid £7 for a gts 250 oc on ebay about a year ago to put in a system for a family member and it could run most games well , it has just been replaced by a r7 250x and now sits on my shelf

[@NatInTheHat49]

I worked at cex for a short period of time I think I was the only person who knew anything about pc parts . We were told to try and low-ball the heck out of people and force them to do store credit . I personally never bought anything bad but I saw first hand some horror story's of parts such as obvious broken stuff listed as good to be resold blown capacitors on gpus obvious damaged ports all listed as good to be resold when it comes to warranty it's the biggest hit or miss around. If you got a store that has employees who know about tech it's fine but if you get a store with people who are just doing this as a job you can get some real terrible stuff

[@Defiant031636]

Not surprised CNC Generals ran on the Geforce 8400, I used to play it on a Geforce 7600 GT!

[@lumine7653]

Oh God. The 8400gs was my very first actual card that enabled me to sorta play games. I also rembered that it maxed the slider in Msi afterburner and still performed poorly but again, enabled me to play actual games. (Coming from intel onboard g33 graphics)

[@DTronicsUK]

this is just CEX being CEX, There items are never packaged correctly, bought a GTX970 a few years ago so i could SLI them but the one they sent me was dead on arrival, how the card even passed there "checks" is puzzling. In fact my local store doesnt even know how to test cards correctly. tried to sell a perfectly working card but they said the card didnt work. turns out they didnt even connect the 6-pin pcie power to the card, as soon as they did, it worked first time. Buy your movies and games from there but stay well clear of there hardware, your taking a huge risk buying hardware from there and most of the time they will refuse to give you a refund and claim you damaged the item

[@ohcanada6565]

Oh man this brought back memories I had an GTX 8800 768mb at almost release date (lotto win) it banged on for so long, one of my best VGA purchases.

[@OfWodensFolk]

I've only ever had one GPU arrive knackered from CEX in 10 years+ using them.

[@Johny40Se7en]

5:47 DirectX 7 LOL! That's probably as old as I am 😅🤭😂🤣 It's absolutely criminal what they sent you. People have taken companies to court for a lot less. And I mean, it could have been a gift for someone couldn't it. That would have been worse...🥴

[@quenguin2178]

that is fairly normal for CEX online. I ordered a n AMD A8 5600k and 2x4GB DDR3 RAM and the ram came in a jiffy bag and the cpu was wrapped in bubbkewrap but arrived with 2 bent pins. Neither of the CPU or RAM worked and I had to pay to send them back

[@Fearagen]

I would just use this for a media PC. Super underpowered but you do not need a powerful gpu to watch movies. About the ONLY use it will get from me.

[@itsyaboiiizxc]

i ordered a 2080ti from CeX like 2 years ago and they didnt wrap in static proof bagging. they said it was new but it didnt work. i took it back and they didnt believe me until they hooked it up. later that year i bought 3 2tb hdds and they all died within a month. i wasnt happy and lets just say im not allowed back again. dont order from CeX unless you have no other option.

[@lrochfort]

I've only had excellent experience with CeX fortunately. I find the stores are better than the online service in general, but would still recommend them

[@Mehrunes86]

My first computer had a Nvidia 6600gt, if i remember correctly, later upgraded to a Gtx 260.

[@heclanet]

Have you ever tried Nvidia Tesla cards? I bought an M40 and modified the Cooler, as an experiment it was a lot of fun.

[@wertywerrtyson5529]

A few months ago I bought a complete in box 8400 GS for €5. Not that I’ve had any use for it yet.

[@Kim-fm2vo]

Great video! Sucks that it got mixed up. Something i wanted to bring up that i've noticed in my many years of watching your channel: whatever method your video editor uses for scaling (zooming in on images or video clips) is pretty odd and causes a weird shimmering effect. I'm not sure if you were aware of this or not

[@Stratos1988]

Ah yes, the good old England I used to live in. Mindless things happening all over the place. I much like you were satisfied with my local CEX located in Metrocentre, but the single one GPU i ordered via internet came in bubble envelope, covered in brown dust with bent backplate, and by brown dust i do mean smokers home BROWN dust.

[@wyterabitt2149]

Much like every county on the planet at worse, with well over half being horrifically worse in every imaginable way.

[@FerralVideo]

.... an 8400. Wow. That is worse than the GPU I bought new for my mid-range PC I built back in 2008, with a 9600GT. My stepdad has been gaming on a 9800GT for years until I finally gave him my GTX470 when his 9800 died. We don't have CEX over here in the states, though I did buy an Optiplex 755 with an LGA755 that had a GT710 at a yard sale for $5. This is from the era where even the GT710 was an upgrade over the chipset IGP, though it looks like the user bought it out of necessity, as the IGP has some artifacting.

[@ethanpod8139]

I got so pissed off with my experience with CeX. I bought a gtx 660, works but no output. Took it back AND THEY TRIED TO GIVE ME HALF OF MY MONEY BACK CAUSE I DIDNT HAND IT IN BEFORE THE MONTHLY PRICE CHANGE. Another experience not too bad was the fact they said they’ll take my iPhone 5s for 50. They offered me 20 dollars for the phone the next day. I didn’t accept it then came back another day without the screen protector on the phone and they didn’t accept it cause of the smallest chip I have ever seen on a phone.

[@endorfun22]

Completely get it, I like the way the price went from £8, to £10 and back to £8 again.

[@darkride196]

GTS 250 was a rebrand of the 9800 GTX/9800gtx+, and it was possible to SLI them with modified Vbios.