Dad wants £500

[Glassback83]

Ds is 16 this month and we wanted to treat him. We decided to get him a PC and my dad said he could build one (he’s been building them for years), so we agreed. We spent £400 on some hard drives and another £250 on a monitor. Initially, Dad said he had bits lying around he could use but said to give him a couple of hundred pounds for other bits. The PC would be from us and my parents. Got a message from Dad yesterday and he’s asking for £500. He’s explained that he’d added everything up that he’s put in it and divided the cost between us, even though some of the parts were laying around in the back of a cupboard. Says he’s had to buy a couple of things, o e of which I know is less than £10. Too late to change our minds now as it’s already built. AIBU to be really pi**ed off? Feel like I’ve been conned by my own parents.

What are you talking about?

No but you need to learn to read the opening post!

Get a grip!

He used an expensive case, a water cooler and intel processor. If he had used an AMD based system, air cooled with a budget case it would have been half the price.

What? Literally the first 5 words of the OP...

Ds is 16 this month

Is it a gaming PC? It sounds quite high spec

There is a worldwide shortage in graphics cards and the price has skyrocketed

For a gaming PC you need quite high spec processor, motherboard, hard drive and graphics card

DS built his own gaming PC for about £800 2 years ago, due to the increase in price of components it is now worth 1100-1500 (that's what he has been offered), just for reference

It's not cheap. A ready made gaming pc is easily 1500-2000

Just buy a new PC... much cheaper. Your Dad is on the con. Sorry.

My step son wanted to build his own but agreed he probably wouldn't finish it so we bought one between us for about £900 for pc gaming 2 years ago. I hope it is what your son wanted. And you don't have any issues with it.

Bought these, on the advice from dad
Crucial MX500 2 TB CT2000MX500SSD1-Up to 560 MB/s (3D NAND, SATA, 2.5 Inch, Internal SSD)
Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2 TB PCIe NVMe M.2 (2280) Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) (MZ-V7S2T0) , Black

Feel like I’ve been conned by my own parents.

yup, even worse, he's conned his own grandchild.

nice.

Think my mum might be the driving factor behind this.

Has he actually assembled the PC? Could you return some parts?

I used an eBay seller who refurbishes parts when I was building mine. I got a great deal on a Ryzen 5 3600. I paid £249 for the CPU with fan and a Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro motherboard, bearing in mind I built it before lockdown when the prices for components were just silly.

I think it was AWD-IT. I've bought a few things from them, they're always reasonable priced and delivered quickly and well packaged.

Old news - GPUs are back down to normal pricing now.

the base components in this are massively outdated, and likely the ops dad is passing off his old stuff and getting an upgrade himself.

I'd return the Crucial SSD and keep the Samsung EVO. 2TB is enough. You could buy a cheap HDD to add more storage if DS likes to download music and movies but you don't need 2 solid state drives.

TBH it reads like OP's dad has a bunch of old components lying around that he bought by mistake or whatever, and is now trying to get half the money back for them based on what they cost originally and not what they are now worth.

Scam scam scammy scam.

Your dad really doesn’t know what he’s doing. Why did he buy two ssds?!

You only needed one (preferably the Samsung as that’s nvme not data) for the OS and programs/games, and then a large hard disk for storage of other data (docs, videos, etc).

He’ll be 16 and using it for computer science at 6th Form and Uni. What a silly comment.

• not sata (typo for data)

I don’t know about the specifics of computer hardware. But as a regular computer user/ buyer (through need of things dieing not want) I can attest that I have decided that new is not best.

My 2010 MacBook Pro runs well; better than a now dead 2017 MacBook Pro.

So I wouldn’t get upset necessarily about it being ‘years out of date’.

If the components still have good reviews then they have stood the test of time, which many new parts fail to despite the sparkling paper spec.

I would much rather have a slightly slower reliable workhorse than a sports car about to blow up any second.

Either way it’s done, the computers built. Either pay what he’s requests, offer what you can or decline to pay. It’s your dad and I think you are best placed to make that decision.

You absolutely do not need 4gb worth of solid state storage for a normal home PC, thats a huge waste of money.

Get a smaller SSD drive to run windows/apps off and then a normal HDD for file storage.

What an absolute load of rubbish.

this is now a gaming pc built around a 2016 quad core processor. If the budget was £500 total I’d have understood that cpu choice. But it makes absolutely no sense in 2022.

I would just say that you were only expecting to pay £200 as you thought that was what you had agreed and see what he says. It's a tricky situation :-/

I’ve spoken to him now and said that’s it’s a lot more than we expected based on our initial conversation. He’s done a complete U-turn and now wants nothing for it!?

Sounds like he's being a martyr now. Could you talk to your mum and see if she's more reasonable? Say you're happy to pay a couple of hundred as expected and don't want to leave them out of pocket but £500 is quite a lot more than you were expecting.

The good news is that your father has spent money on the exciting stuff, however the bad news is that he has also spent money on the non-exciting stuff.

He's not 'doing' you on anything, but I reckon he has spent in excess on non-essentials. For context, I built a much higher-end stack with my nephew last year for about £800 all in.

I think he's been trying to charge you for things he had laying around at home. If you budget stretches to it I would look at upgrading the CPU and GPU or I would sell the CPU, GPU and one of the SSDs to buy a better refurbed CPU and GPU.