A former mayor in the Philippines may have got a majorly bad deal on computing tech, reportedly paying $175,000 for 16 Intel 11th Gen machines

2025-09-02 05:11:00
www.pcgamer.com

Sometimes, we pay a little more for a full-on rig, rather than paying for parts separately, but I’ve never heard of paying a ten times markup. A former mayor of a city in the Philippines has been accused of doing such a thing, putting down nearly $175,000 for 16 PCs (with mice and keyboards) plus a server.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware, on August 27th, Ukc Ibrahim shared a post to their Facebook page saying that the previous mayor, Darwin Bajada, paid 10 million Philippine pesos (equivalent to $174,932 at the time of writing) for a computer server, and shared an image of a computer.

This was attached to a quote from current mayor Sally A. Lopez, which says (machine translated) “The price is too high and has not been tested whether it works or not, former Mayor Bajada paid immediately.” This post was then reshared by the official Sally A. Lopez Facebook account.

Soon after, this information was corrected by Lopez herself, who clarified that the lump sum was in fact given for ’16 generic computer’, alongside ’16 generic keyboard and monitor’, plus ‘1 system’. The keyboard and mouse (a Jedel G17 combo) are currently on sale for 290 Philippine pesos (around $5), so that’s around $70 total so far ($90 full price).

The imagery is somewhat hard to make out, but the monitors appear to be from Fonudar. As of the time of writing, Fonudar monitors range from $17 to $78. This means 16 of them, taking the middle price, would cost around $650-800. We don’t know the specific monitor in question, so naturally, take this figure with a grain of salt.

A picture taken from Sally A. Lopez, recording a set of PCs, monitors, and a server purchased for around $175,000

Two of the documents shared by Lopez (Image credit: Mayor Sally A. Lopez on Facebook)

According to Tom’s Hardware’s approximation, the PCs (with a $60 UPS charge) would cost you $670 if you picked all the parts on Newegg. So far, the cost of everything here roughly accounts for around $12,000. Admittedly, this is rough maths, and it’s worth noting this sale was from a year ago, so part prices are likely to have changed since then, but the discrepancy between the price and the value of these rigs is being questioned in Lopez’s post and comment.

Finally, Lopez notes a server with an Intel i9 14th Gen CPU, 32 GB of RAM, 512 GB SSD, and 10 TB HDD. Though we don’t have a price on this, if this server doesn’t cost $150,000, then the former mayor perhaps paid a tad (or a lot) more than the computers are worth.

Something good does seem to have come from this discrepancy, though. Carlo Ople, the CEO of Philippines-based tech shop Unbox, has announced that he will be providing a tech care package and has urged others in the area to contribute to it. I doubt enough will be made to account for the difference, but a little more tech is certainly not a bad thing.

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