PC Show come and gone

Yesterday I went to the PC show. It was crowded, but not overly so. Surprisingly, it was walkable and I rarely had to squeeze among the throng of crowds. Held in Expo halls 5 and 6, I was impressed by the M1 booth. It was huge. I cannot remember the last time the M1 was that large.

M1, Singtel, My Republic. Aggressive in their broadband marketing. Cutthroat prices. It was really interesting in grilling the sales people on the bundled broadband packages, any hidden costs, if there are any and the freebies thrown in when you sign up with them. A friend of mine got the M1 1Gbps fibre broadband package at just SGD39.90 a month (on a 24-month contract). She topped up another SGD120 for  a better Asus router. In return, the activation and home line port to M1 was free and part of the package. All being equal, the monthly subscription rates were the lowest among the other telcos. I signed up for MyRepublic, which doesn’t really make much of a difference. I have yet to see how MyRepublic fibre broadband connections perform in real world settings. This is my first time signing up with them for my internet broadband needs.

Another friend of mine bought a new computer. The Acer Predator computer. Costing nearly SGD2000, featuring an SSD and HDD, 24Gb Ram (additional 8GB after much haggling, since it was the last day of the show) one year Microsoft office bundled, GTX 970 4GB graphics good. Not too shabby. We went after a distributor that sold the same computer model for more than SGD200 less than was advertised in the brochures. And for SGD200 less, we get additional RAM and a free 1-year Microsoft office. Not bad when it comes to pushing more freebies.

As for me? I didn’t get anything for myself. I really wanted to given the choice. Especially the NAS from Synology and QNAP. Maybe the Samsung T3 Portable SSD. But these are just wants, and not needs. I can still live without. I did get to admire Aftershock Ultracore line of PCs. Equipped with custom liquid cooling with the liquid colour of your choice, throwing  some really high end parts, and the entire set up was quite a sight to behold. They even showcased the new Nvidia GTX 1080 and paired with The Witcher as a demo for smooth 4K gameplay on an Acer Predator curved monitor. Sweet.