I'm thinking about selling my desktop computer in order to pay for a new laptop for myself (I'll probably get the Dell XPS 13 just like the one I got for my wife). The problem is, I'm not sure how to price it.

It's certainly not a new computer, but it's a good one, and has some nice components in it. Here's a brief summary:

Core i7 920 - 2.67GHz
MSI X58 Platinum motherboard
GeForce GTX 260 video card
250GB Crucial SSD
1TB WD hard drive
300GB WD Raptor hard drive
24GB DDR3 RAM
Lian Li full tower aluminum case (love this case, but it's huge)
Noctua [giant] CPU fan
520 Watt power supply
USB 3 PCIe card
Windows 7
Office 2010

I've included some photos. Any ideas where I should price this thing?

If it were me, I'd just total up the prices of the components, and then knock ~30% off the total. But I don't know what the used market is like where you are. Are there similar system on Craigslist that would serve as a guideline?

I looked around and there wasn't much that was similar. I found systems listed with the same CPU, for example, but most were off the shelf Dells.

In my area I'd probably only GET 30% of the total

Yeah, I don't think you'll get more than $300-$500 for hardly any desktop system on the used market. They just aren't selling that well these days.

Many people who buy used don't place monetary value on the details either, they're just looking for a good deal.

Honestly, that's about what I'm looking for. If I could get $500 I'd be thrilled, but I probably won't. The newest part is the ~8 month old SSD, followed by the 2 year old RAM. Everything else is going on 4 years old at this point or older. That said, it runs pretty impressively considering how old it is.

My advice: don't sell it. You'll never get the price you know it's worth in your head. Unless maybe if you're willing to pull it apart entirely and sell every item separately, but that's a lot more work and even then you won't be sure the effort will be worth it in the end.

I doubt you'll be able to sell it for more than $200-$300 as it is now, and I'm pretty sure it's worth more to you than that. So don't sell it. Give it a second life as a server or an Unraid /FreeNAS box or something. You'll get much more value from it that way.

The problem is that I don't need that. I have a Synology NAS with 8TB of space already. As you can see in the photos, this thing is enormous, and it's not very power efficient.

The only reason I could imagine keeping this box is for Plex transcoding or running pyTivo to get content back onto my Tivo box. The Synology is too underpowered and difficult to configure (respectively) for those activities. But it seems like overkill for that.

Then, of course, there's the fact that I just don't have the cash for the new laptop. I might be able to find it by selling some other stuff I have, but this would help.

I don't know, I'll have to think about it a bit...

Perhaps you could recover a portion of the value by extracting the SSD, the 1TB drive and the video card. Sell those individually via ebay or locally. Each piece is small enough to be shipped inexpensively.

Install a basic inexpensive video card and configure it to boot and run using the remaining Raptor drive. I am assuming in the age of SSD that the Raptor drive may not have the value it once did but I have not checked. If the Raptor still has resale value then remove and sell it too, install something basic in its place.

The computer would still be usable in this diminished configuration and some other buyer would see the 'potential' once he added his preferred video card and SSD.

The aggregate money from this 'sell the good bits' approach may exceed the dollars possible by selling it as a single thing.

I would expect Raptor drives to be worth about $0 to most people. Small capacity, incredibly slow, noisy, and hot.

Yeah, I'm just using it as a temp drive for downloads or other files that will be moved somewhere else.