Where do you live? Look into your local electronics recycler to see what sorts of things they may have available if you're looking for a cheap PC to be part of a render farm. Granted there's no assurances that what they have will meet your needs because inventory is wholly based on what individuals and corporations are tossing at any given time but with luck you could find something decent that will work as part of your render farm.

For example, if you live in the Seattle area there's a local recycler called RE-PC that has several stores where they sell old but not utterly junk tech. I frequent them when I need some old pice of technology like a zip drive or something to read old media, but often you can find base PCs and there are usually bins of spare parts for things like video cards and other parts.

The website if you're curious is:
http://www.repc.com

I'm not sure, but do share if you find anything. I'll be in the market for the same pretty soon.

For me I usually try the local version of E-bay but from my experience there's not so much whole computers for sale as there are parts here and there you can get cheap then you gotta' put it all together yourself.

I thought this said gameing pictures of you want gameing pictures look at my page

Fluid sims?!?!

I think i like the direction this is going.

Also, try university surplus, sometimes they have decent computers for ~50 dollars. Toss in a gpu (assuming its gpu accelerated) and you should be golden.

It depends where you are looking, if in the US there are quite a few places since I moved here but unfortunately in Australia, there isn't much imo.

Ever since PC fairs stopped being a thing that pretty much stopped any sort of second hand market in Australia in my opinion. Unless you use Gumtree or eBay your only other choice would be a forum like Overclockers or Whirlpool maybe

For desktop gaming PCs that's an incredibly thin market. Most gamers will upgrade their PC piecemeal several times before replacing it.

The Dell Outlet sells Alienware gaming Laptops and PCs, though it can be a bit hard to find: http://dell.to/2e45oOv Here's a Dell shortlink.

My suggestion is to actually go with some second hand servers. There are decent ones as low as $150 and bawling ones as high as $10,000; and plenty of options in the middle, depending on the core count you desire. For me, Dell was a no brainer as they make VERY quiet 2U cases with expandable PCI ports on the back if you decided to go for GPU processing. You can quite easily install some last gen blower-style GPU's on the cheap.

There are also alot of power benefits to going this way as well. The two R710's I have run at around 150W at medium loads; they're set to go up to 400W at full tilt on paper but I have yet to see anything nearly as close on the power supply readouts.

There is also the advantage of space saving. They are built to stack afterall! I suggest a lack rack for a final get-it-outta-the-way finish; but they can just as easily go on a desk as is as well. They are pretty long... and heavy, so that one thing to be aware of.

But yea! That is my strong suggestion! Enterprise-grade stuff on the cheap is something that will keep on rewarding you!

Oh wow I hadn't considered that...

As someone who has limited IT skill and no server experiance, would it be problematic to try setting up a server, or does it function much like a PC?

It really does set up just like a PC. I mean... there are a couple of BIOS tweaks (easily YouTube-able) that you might need to work on to get the RAID set up and whatnot, but otherwise yes, it is a 2-CPU PC essentially.

There is another cool feature of the Dell versions as well, which is the iDRAC system. It is basically a remote management system that allows you to type in a LAN IP address (192.168.x.x) and manage the computers without needing to attach screens, keyboards, etc. Basically, you can set things up once and view your computers remotely on your main rig with little issue.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE.....YAAOSwo4pYZBKa

That is something I found in about 10 seconds of searching "Dell R710". For about $400 you would get dual 8-core processors (total of 32 threads) and some 48GB of RAM (try maxing that vram out! :P); as well as 1.2TB of fast 15K hard disk space.

Word of warning, if you do go this route, plan on setting them up far away from anywhere you actually do stuff in. Servers, especially ones meant to be rack-mounted, are *loud*.

As I said above, unless you're running them full tilt 24/7 (something I don't think CSG is going to be doing more than a couple times I would imagine) the Dell servers are incredibly quiet. Even when running at full power, they are still pretty quiet for servers. The 2U option is what I went with as the fans aren't nearly as small as 1U; they're almost as large as regular case fans! Dell has put alot of effort into keeping their noise ratios down (as they found that quieter fans also equate to more efficient fans).

That being said, I do agree a bit that it would be better to set them up somewhere less traffic-ed. They do get a bit hot under load, so a well ventilated secondary room would be optimal. Unless you're like me and actually like to hear powerful computers at work, that is. :P

Yes but odds are that if you want top dollar for your computer, you'll have to part it out. I use https://www.reddit.com/r/hardwareswap/ regularly to sell old parts that i have laying about with good success. :)

Edit- I totally thought you meant to sell! xD You can use the same place to buy used hardware and put together a good computer. Though, if you wand something good for video editing/rendering, you're gonna want a good i7, lots of ram and either Nvidia Quadras/AMD Fire Pros or maybe a Nvidia Titan or two could work too.

Try Newegg or something.

Whats your budget tho. If you want a good one that will last ya gotta throw down the dough but it will be worth it. ~$1000 is that area imo. I got mine from cyberpowerpc.com
Just make sure you got a good bit of gpu ram. Like if you get a 1060 in it, go for the 6gb instead of the 3gb of vram.

My budget for this is fairly low, a few hungee at most lol. I'll be spending a lot on my main machine; I'm just considering cheap machines to add as render nodes ^^

eBay. Sell it there, or in your local Craigslist or newspaper. People sell and buy old computers all the time. People in my area sell Windows XP machines and they go for $80+. I personally have several laptops for gaming, one with Windows 95, one with Windows 98, one with Xp, one with Vista, and my desktop is on 7.

Try free add posting forums/websites, though it would really depend on what people in your area use. Kijiji is popular for my area, and craigslist was already mentioned.