wiretap wrote on 2021-09-10, 20:48:
I remember PC Chips back in the day. Not many people here in the US bought them. It was mostly used by mom & pop computer shops to make super cheap pre-builts in lower income areas. Then the high failure rates caused them to abandon using that brand. I specifically remember the stigma of that brand and avoided it like the plague. I believe the next step up from bottom of the barrel would have been ECS at that time. I remember buying an Athlon / ECS combo off Pricewatch because I needed a cheap file server.
When the public found out that PC Chips was crap, they started selling their shit under other names by avoiding using the PC Chips name. I also saw many ECS products that were very similar to pc chips products, I always suspected it was the same manufacturer. I once had an ECS laptop, which was very nice, the LCD lid had a metallic purple finish like a car paint, but that thing was hot like hell, you could easily fry an egg, in that case, my eggs . It was impossible to wear it on your lap. On a hot day, it got so hot that it stopped working. I used a hair dryer on the chipset, and it started working again, so I plugged the fan into a usb port so it would be running all the time, but the noise it made was really annoying. I ended up selling it with little use time