From last Friday to Sunday, PIKOM PC Fair came to town. On Saturday, I decided to check out the wares on sale. It wasn’t a case of casual booth-hopping. I was actually looking for a specific equipment; a fan and heatsink combo for my aging (but still useful) Athlon Thunderbird processor. The processor may be old, but it runs on the still pretty common Socket A architecture.
So there I was, just in time to see the doors open for the 100 or so early birds (not really that early since the fair starts at 11:00 am). Surely I can find the heatsink of my dreams, right?
Well, sadly that was not the case. There were probably over a hundred readily built PCs on sale. There were probably just as many notebook computers as well. However, it was never my intention to buy any of those products.
I then saw booths from a couple of famous PC component vendors and decided to check them out. They have everything from processors, RAM, video cards, casings, portable hard drives and the ever present USB thumb drives. Hell, you can see hundreds of USB thumb drives wherever you’re looking during PC Fair. So prevalent were USB thumb drives, they probably should use it as a mascot!
As I went booth-hopping, it dawned on me that the odds for me to find a vendor who has a heatsink for sale was as much a me being struck by an 8GB USB thumb drive.
I then took a step back and looked around me. I noticed that the prices for hardware that remotely interested me was about the same as retail. I found it hard to find any component that was priced below market rate anyway. Motherboards, RAM modules, VGA cards, hard disks… all sold at retail prices!
So were there no deals at PC Fair? Sure they were; for mice, keyboards, headphones, combo card readers, printers… basically items that techies like me couldn’t give a hoot about. I concluded that PIKOM PC Fairs are not targeted at people like me. These PC fairs are probably used more as a way to offload excess peripherals (especially USB thumb drives).
Perhaps it’s better to rename this event to PIKOM Peripheral Fair… and use a USB thumb drive as the mascot!
As for my heatsink? I got one from Landmark IT Mall just across the road. Bleh!