The Computing Scene in Buenos Aires

SUMMARY:

First of all I want to say thank you Overclockers.com for giving me the “honor” to write this follow up. My name is Mauricio and I´m a 28 years old electronic engineer working for a TV broadcast company in Buenos Aires.

Overclocking in one of the most southern countries in the world is not an easy job. It is hard to find good pieces of hardware in order to “push the pedal to the metal” to them. I have been in Ushuaia also and Joe did a good job explaining what you get there. It´s true there´s no more than cheap and “classic” hardware there.

Fortunately, In Buenos Aires (where I live) things are different. There are resellers of ASUS, SOYO, Abit, QDI, Tyan and others.
At this moment, you can think that things are not really different than the USA, but it is…let´s say we are more than three months behind you. In other words, we have to wait a long time before getting our hands on newer gear. If you want to have the latest hardware available in the planet, you have to pay a high price for it.

After two or three months, the situation changes and you start to see in the street what you saw on the net a couple of months ago.
So, a hardware afficionado like me has to be patient….very patient.

There are more differences, we don´t buy by mail. In fact almost
nobody trusts mail companies. You can send letters and papers, but
boxes – you never know. If you buy in other countries (mostly USA) by internet, things are worse. That´s because there´s a lot of medium/small computer stores in Argentina.

And what about fans, coolers, watercooling, special cases, etc?
In any of those places I mentioned, you cannot find (and buy) Alphas, Artic, GlobalWin and any other brand you think. Only cheap and “default” coolers. Thank god, there are a few guys who import small quantities of good coolers (www.pcreviews.com.ar or wwww.overclockeadores.com.ar). Of course there´s not to much to choose but they import what they think is better..and they are usually right).

Watercooler? As you said Joe, that´s LOCO! I have read in local sites that less-than-few people have tried but I can say that is more than weird here. Keeping all that in mind, you can imagine what is the alternative: We modify and adapt heatsinks, fans and cases and build our own home made cooler systems. The overclockers community is really small – I believe we are less than fifty people in Buenos Aires and I´m tempted to say we know each other in the Net. Really!!!

Internet? It is not so wide spread as is in the USA. Buenos Aires has a big number of users, but the situation changes in the rest of the country. In other cities there´s few providers and few users. I heard only 2% of Argentineans have access to the Internet. We have no satellite access yet (soon they say) but we have broadband access (only in Buenos Aires): Two cable companies and two wireless (microwave) companies. Those companies don´t cover the entire area of Buenos Aires, rich neighborhoods mostly.

For last, we have a nice FPS community here, there are two or three places where you can rent a PC for one hour to play Quake or any other game with your friends. Better than that, some of my friends have founded a place (www.baireslan.com.ar), they organize LANs every two weeks for 50/60 people and they are affiliated to the CPL also.

There´s no big events of FPS here yet, but our community keeps growing and growing every day, and I feel happy to be a “pioneer”.

Best Regards –

Mauricio Franco


Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply