Birmingham Computer Fair

geoffwbaOC said:
I went to a computer fair in Coventry yesterday and wished I hadn't bothered. Just a few traders who were selling mainly complete PCs, home security systems, TVs , PC cables and printer stuff. I went hoping to pick up a PC case fan and get some general advice on case fans. With the exception of one trader who was selling the cables, none were helpful or even knowledgeable about PCs and PC components apart from the make they specialised in. Certainly not worth the £5 admission charge and I will not be going to another one. Thoroughly disappointing.
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Thoroughly dissapointing thread bump
 
I went to one that cost a fiver each for 2 of us to get into. It was like a car boot sale with different traders with items on long fold out tables , rather than manufacturers "booths" which is what I imagined. There were stacks and stacks of flashy but underpowered "gaming computers", lots of graphics cards, lots of misinformation, everything was over priced. I only had a quick wonder around and didn't buy anything at all (I was after a case).

Won't be going to one again
 
MagicBoy said:
I've not been to one in this millenium. I can't comprehend the prices (and support) being a patch on OcUK. Other e-tailers are also available.
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This (almost). My last one was the CTS (Computer Trade Show) at the Birmingham NEC in 2003. This was back in the days when Microsoft was like the biggest company in the world and they had a fat-ass big stand at the front of the showroom.
 
Built my first pc from a London Computer fair on Tottenham court road.

Amd k6-2 350mhz, voodoo banshee, i wanna say 128mb of ram but i cant even remember tbh. Motherboard...Something with an Nvidia chipset? Is that even possible... 8gb HDD... lol
walking around thge fair with a wad of £400 quid i remember thinking how cool i was....
Oh god the case.... a pressed aluminium, razor blade edged, POS.
 
I went to one last summer in Liverpool and echo all the above responses about them being not worth it. I wanted some case fans and sadly there weren't any at all that I saw, let alone the size and colour I wanted. Paid £3 and ended up vaping in the car park longer than I was actually in the thing.
 
Havnt been a computer fair for at least 15 years.

As most have mentioned the traders use hardware which is 18+ months old.

In fact my dad went to a computer fair recently, he ended up buying a prebuilt system for £150 (Tower only).

It had the oldest i5 i5-520E on board graphics and 8gb ram, 250gb hard drive with Windows 10 installed. My dad only wanted it to run some music recording software on, he has a laptop for day to day use. Anyway we got it back started it up and it took an age to load up, I initially though the hard drive was failing so I installed a ssd in it (purchased from ocuk) and it was still fairly slow, literally took about 5 minutes to load into windows 10 desktop. So I investigated further did a user benchmark to see which components were not performing as expected, turned out the ram wasn't in dual channel. So I opened it up and put one of the ramp sticks in another channel and hey presto booted up in under a minute and works flawlessly. We honestly at first though that we had been scammed.

The guy who sold it gets the old/no longer needed computers from the council, he must pay a small fee for them and sells them on the computer fair to make a quick buck.
 
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Used to be very popular up here, like donkeys years ago. I think it used to be at Nissan. A lot of my friends used to go, one time, a bloke got mega animated trying to return a dodgy cpu, and the seller wasn't having any of it. So he went RRRAAAARRRRGGG!, and flipped his table ower, sending stuff flying.
 
I went to one of the London ones years ago back when there were real high tech shops on Tottenham Court Road and it was 95% obsolete kit and/or junk. The few useful bits (cables, mounting brackets, fans etc) I saw could be purchased for much less within 200 yards of the fair’s doors.
 
I used to go to the computer fair just off the M42, they used the motorcycle museum and it was great when I first started going.

I went the last year they hosted it there and it was so bad, no hardware apart from pre built computers, second hand laptops and the usual junk like cd cases, ink and cables.
 
Computer fairs used to be useful for me before the internet existed.

Used to buy hardware and games at reasonable prices from them.

Haven't been in years and it looks like from some of the posts here that they have changed considerably.

Would never consider using them now.
 
Clov!s said:
I used to go to the computer fair just off the M42, they used the motorcycle museum and it was great when I first started going.

I went the last year they hosted it there and it was so bad, no hardware apart from pre built computers, second hand laptops and the usual junk like cd cases, ink and cables.
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I think you've hit the nail on the head there. It just seemed to be full of junk basically and unhelpful traders. I shall stick with buying stuff from the likes of Overclockers. Although you can still buy locally from places such as PC World, they tend to be a bit pricey and their range of hardware is limited. Maplins were very good, if a bit pricey on many items, before they went bust.
 
Went to a couple of years ago in Stratford and one in London Tottenham court road, both were overpriced 2nd hand crap and a lot of dodgy stalls. Never again and that was at least a decade ago.
 
Pookzz said:
So not even worth going then? I was hoping they'd have some sales on or some good prices for a new GPU or PSU :(
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The last time I went to a computer fair was 18 years ago. Go on Ebay and look at some of the sold 1080 prices and this will give an idea of what the going rate is then when your at the fair you can easily spot the difference between the bargains and the chancers.
 
Pookzz said:
So not even worth going then? I was hoping they'd have some sales on or some good prices for a new GPU or PSU :(
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I think that's the universal expectation when people went to these things. But everything is overpriced and probably dodgy as buying as seen without testing
 
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