Game Over for 31-year-old South African store

I bought a few things from them back when I lived in Pretoria ... Razer headphones that I still use, and a Ugreen power brick. Farewell Titan Ice, you'll be fondly remembered.
 
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Brawler said:
Very true. Whats a mid range gaming PC cost these days? R50 or 60k?
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The one I had in my Wootware basket was pretty much mid range and was sitting at about R35K with compromises (using my existing nvme etc.)... so yeah R50K if you want a decent monitor and peripherals is achievable.

I'm not f**ing paying that. Will be sticking to cheap 2nd hand enterprise mini-pc's and rather killing my home loan in the next two months.

Sad to see another shop close, we've been taking our options for granted.
 
Small players struggle to compete with the big boys due to bulk discounts. We had a really great online tech store that was based near us in Strydom park a few years back. May have been Sybaritic if I recall. Spoke to the owner shortly before he closed shop when picking up an order and he shared how something like external HDD's was meant to be a big seller in those days but every time Macro had a good special on they could sell their HDD's at a price that was lower than his cost price due to the bulk discounts they qualified for. It is very hard to break into established markets as the little guy, or to keep going as an independent store when competing with big players that can negotiate bigger discounts from suppliers. Its sad as often the smaller companies care more about customer service.
 
I wonder if there are still many gamers (younger generation) that build their own machines or is it mostly us older folk.

Rebeltech also called it quits not so long ago.
 
Sad.

Still using the CPU air cooler and case fans I bought from them a while back. Bought from them regularly.

I liked that you could phone them, have something that is in their warehouse brough to their store for you to pick up later the afternoon.
 
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RIP

stefan9 said:
So sad. My GPU and ssd are still under warranty with them 😐
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Depending on the brand you can take it directly to the distributor where it came from.


on the subject.
Ja saw this my Thermal grizzly supplier told me. Thought wow okay that sucks.
even a client mentioned it and we started naming stores that closed down last few years.

If it doesn't help my PC hardware sales are down in general (Can only imagine what the others are going through) what could cost to build a PC last year vs now is ...insane.
I feel for anyone needing to upgrade anything these days honestly i do even i wouldn't want to spend a car amount on a PC now.
And the games industry rising their prices on games the way its been isn't helping anyone in general.

Console is cheaper sadly which ill still personally never go that route (no offense to console users).

I wish De Klerk all the best maybe a revival in the near future. Its still gonna get worse ish before it gets better lot of things happening in the background latley ive been noticing (think we all are) The direction at which the computer itself is headed is a bit messed up feel like give it a few years and everything is going to be streamed through an app or something. and all this is going to be a thing of the passed.
 

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RaptorSA said:
The one I had in my Wootware basket was pretty much mid range and was sitting at about R35K with compromises (using my existing nvme etc.)... so yeah R50K if you want a decent monitor and peripherals is achievable.

I'm not f**ing paying that. Will be sticking to cheap 2nd hand enterprise mini-pc's and rather killing my home loan in the next two months.

Sad to see another shop close, we've been taking our options for granted.
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Little did I know mere days after this post I'd come across this insane deal at a Cash Converters.
Still can't believe the dude let it go for R8.5K. Not even a spec of dust in or on it.

This "pro" triple displayport version of the Micro range with the full i7-14700 65Watt desktop cpu should be more close to R20K used... the CPU alone goes for over R8K at Wootware currently.

Patience is indeed a virtue it seems.

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Thread where I solved the well known cooling issue with this Pro version of the 1Liter Optiplex here:
RaptorSA

Post in thread 'New The PC Build Thread'

Look what I did with my long weekend :)
Not going to lie, this was a lot of struggling for something I though might take a day or so. (I had no idea that finding a piece of copper plate was harder than locating the "city of gold", El Dorado).

What you're looking at is was a typical Dell Optiplex 7020 Micro Plus (1 Liter) PC....
These things:

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There's one difference though, with the "plus" version, someone at Dell must have swallowed some tainted mushrooms and decided to bake a full desktop 65 watt Intel i7-14700 CPU inside these little things...
  • Like
  • Wow
 
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Tech Guy SA said:
Depending on the brand you can take it directly to the distributor where it came from.
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I am aware of that. But it is a massive pain in the ass if you need to go to joburg for a warranty claim and receive absolute piss poor customer service.
Where previously any issue I could just go to titan ice here in Pretoria. Had service with buys and warranties.
Hopefully neither the gpu or ssd fails so I don't need the route.

I am also now sort of stuck as I relied on them to also install any hardware I bought for me. Now I am struggling to think of any trustworthy pc store in Pretoria I could turn to.
 
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