I agree with ZacD, except fans are generally cheap so I wouldn't bother buying them used either (and I have had fans die on me after a few years of use).
@pkgamedev I agree with ZacD on this one; Given the choice, I'd go with an 8700K. The extra cores aren't as important in this case as the difference in per-thread performance. If you really want to go with an AMD CPU, I'd skip the 1700X and wait for the Zen+ line that'll be coming out in April.
Yep, what ZacD said. For RAM, I'd personally recommend going for 32GB these days, as 16GB is more or less considered the minimum amount for a modern workstation and can definitely bottleneck you depending on the kind of work you want to do. I'd also highly recommend getting an SSD of some sort if you didn't already plan…
@ZacD Thanks, I've swapped out ram sticks and things have been a lot more stable since. Yesterday had up time of 5 hrs, but did eventually crash (when I was afk). I purchased the ram as a set 2 x 32GB. Do I just need to match the frequency, voltage and size if I replace the faulty stick or is it best to use the the same…