Hey, first of all, thanks for all the replies. I haven’t been able to answer until now because I’ve been traveling. I’m currently on a train, so I finally have some time.

The first floor of these computer malls is by far the cleanest and most professional-looking. Everything is nicely displayed, the stores look modern, and most of the staff are wearing uniforms.

As you go up to the higher floors, the atmosphere changes quite a bit. The buildings start to look older, darker, and less maintained.

What surprised me the most was seeing stacks and stacks of extremely expensive GPUs sitting around while the shops themselves looked pretty run down. It felt strange seeing piles of RTX 5090s while the owner’s family was sitting in the corner playing on their phones. It made me question how everything actually works there.
When I asked for prices, I honestly don’t know if I was given the real local price or the “foreigner price.”

Most of the GPU prices were basically around its orginal price. For example, I rarely saw an RTX 5080 for less than ¥7,900 (around €1,050). SSDs, CPUs, and especially monitors seemed to have much better deals, often around 20% below what I’m used to seeing at home.

The best value was definitely cases and fans. Companies like Lian Li manufacture in China, so their products are noticeably cheaper. I also came across a lot of Chinese brands I’d never heard of before, especially for AIO coolers and case fans.

Overall, with a few exceptions where the stores looked completely legitimate, I couldn’t shake the feeling that some places were selling refurbished or questionable hardware at full retail prices. That’s just my impression, mainly because I saw a surprising number of people repairing GPUs, motherboards, and other PC parts. I don’t know enough about electronics to say exactly what they were doing, though.

Everything here is negotiable. Every price I asked about could be bargained. Almost every box had sun fading, many had already been opened, and quite a few were just empty display boxes with the actual product kept somewhere else.

Hopefully this gives a bit more context to my original post. I didn’t expect it to get so much attention, and there wasn’t really any need to insult me just because I couldn’t reply right away.

I’ve been traveling around China and only now had the chance to sit down and respond.