I recently purchased an off lease Dell Precision T1650 from a vendor on ebay for $200…
A lot of restoration was expected but strangely none was required… I blew out the dust bunnies who are now living happily elsewhere. It came with a Xeon e3 1225 v2 (Quad but just barely not not multi threaded so it doesn’t pretend to have 8 cores.) 16Gb Ram and a surprisingly good Nvidia Quaddro which I immediately replaced with an Nvidia Gtx 750 ti due to the 75 watt limitation on my current power supply/motherboard. Aside from that and some wireless connectivity considerations I haven’t had to spend a dime to get this machine playing contemporary titles with no issues.
As a review item: Buying an off lease PC or Laptop is not quite as big a gamble as it once was. Manufacturer refurbished machines are generally more than adequate so I can say that this being anything less would have been a shock. I did not really know just how awesome this computer would be however until I was playing GTA 5 in full graphics with no hiccups or slowdown and just gorgeous graphics.
On a scale of awful to awesome this breaks down as awesome in all areas with: *perhaps a fair warning to users with low bandwidth issues. It turns out even a lousy PC benefits extraordinarily from higher internet speeds so before you trash a laptop – make sure you are getting adequate bandwidth.
On our old scale 5 in all areas – new scale “Awesome”
