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Is there a program or some way to see if a new computer's parts are new or used?
I remember a program that shows how many hours I've been using each hard drive.
Does anyone know this program and something similar for the other computer parts?

Disk drives keep track of their runtime hours. Other components don't, as far as I know.

meerkt wrote:

Disk drives keep track of their runtime hours. Other components don't, as far as I know.

And even then, used components can have a large difference in wear-and-tear depending on how they were used.

The only thing that guarantees new equipment is to buy from reputable sellers and make sure the manufacturer warranty is in effect, in case of DoA or hidden wear-and-tear from a previous customer return and restock. For used equipment, use good judgment. A GPU that was recently pulled from a cryptocurrency mining cluster is worth a lot less than a GPU from an occasional gamer's desktop PC, for example.

Crystal Disk Info can tell you for hard drives. But for most components your only guarantee is to carefully check box/packaging seals for items new in box. If any PC equipement was taken out of its original box but claimed as new I would still consider it "used" with the usual associated risks.

Most parts don't have any sort of non-volatile storage on-board, so there's nowhere to record that information. The obvious exception is, of course, parts that are non-volatile storage. HDs have already been mentioned, but wear on SSDs is a real concern also. Some of the general-purpose disk utilities may give you some of that information but you may have to use manufacturer-specific software (if it's available). Samsung's "Magician" for example would give you power-on hours and wear data, and that persisted across reformats and secure-erases, IIRC.

I haven't had a chance to play with Optane memory yet so I don't know if Intel's utilities give you similar information for it.

Beyond that (and perhaps some sleuthing of BIOS versions in the case of motherboards, though that can change over a production run), yeah, you're looking at the packaging to tell you a story. That, and the evergreen adage "If a deal seems too good to be true..."

UberGerbil wrote:

Most parts don't have any sort of non-volatile storage on-board

It's cheap enough, so conceivably components could store time counters. Motherboards already have flash storage, as do graphics cards. TVs track runtime hours, so maybe also computer monitors. Even RAM includes a bit of NV storage.

Yeah, as others have noted, HDDs and SSDs will generally track how many hours they have been powered on. They may also track the amount of data written/read.

For WD HDDs you also want to look at the "Load Cycle Count", as there are some models which have problematic power management behavior which can result in really high (hundreds of thousands or even millions) of load cycles, which is bad because each load/unload causes a tiny bit of wear on the head ramp load mechanism.

Aside from the above, components generally don't track the amount of time they've been powered up or how much they've been used. For non-storage devices you'll generally need to resort to physical evidence (broken package seals, visible wear and tear, dust accumulation, thermal paste residue, missing accessories, etc.) to guess whether a component is new or used.

meerkt wrote:

It's cheap enough, so conceivably components could store time counters. Motherboards already have flash storage, as do graphics cards. TVs track runtime hours, so maybe also computer monitors. Even RAM includes a bit of NV storage.

While many components theoretically could track usage, few (aside from the above mentioned storage devices) do.