Features - QOTW: What's the worst PC component you ever bought?

[Jimbo75]

I bought a PC off ebay once before I had any real clue about what I was buying - a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 that had an intel motherboard (can't even be overclocked ). To complete the "bad luck comes in 3's", I went and bought an Nvidia 440 MX for it as well.

[crossy]

Tough one. Bought lots of mediocre kit but I guess a second Nvidia 7800GT for SLI. It only cost £40 as it was quiet out of date by then and made so little difference to the games I was playing (I hoped it would save upgrading for a bit).

+1 for this (but I paid a good deal more than £40) - I still can't see the point of SLi to this day. Failing that, one of my collection of TV Tuner dongles.

Can I request an extension for Hexus' "(Server) Room 101" for peripherals that need to burn in hell? If so, then I'm going to nominate: the VirginMedia "SuperHub", the Cisco E4200 router that I bought when the Stupid, sorry Super, Hub became too much to bear, and finally the LG W2361 monitor I'm using.

[BiblicalShower]

Absolute worst thing, though not really a component but a peripheral, was a "4 Ports USB Hug" as it was so well labelled on the packaging, from a 99p shop when I was at uni and needed one in a hurry.

Current worst thing, my first and still currently in use PC case, some awful, flimsy 'value range' thing with a horrid side window that I now hate with a passion, I just can't justify splurging out on a fractal case or something though.

[pctech2012]

A really cheap PC from a well known electrical retailer (no not that one), all sorts of hardware issues with it.

[ed^chigliak]

The worst PC component I bought was a case. I'm not even thinking of one in particular. I'm just of the opinion that every case is the worst. I didn't always think like this but upon reflection it's an obvious truth.

[zaph0d]

Not really a hardware component but still it's gotta be my copy of Windows Me >.< nuff said really.

[Biscuit]

Creative XFI Xtreme Music... what a bag of balls that was!

Feels wrong not mentioning my Macbook Pro though. I had to get the screen, logicboard, keyboard, trackpad replaced once, i had to get the dvd drive replace 5 times and changed the power cable more times than i can even think of!

Edit: Oh yeah and the hard drive gave in before i sold it!

[Agent]

Everything I've had that's been branded XFX, (or had to deal with from friends). Every single one of them has died in under a year. They have shocking support too.

OCZ Vertex 3 - utter crap. Had BSODs all the time, firmware upgrades that didn't address the issue. Still had problems even when it was "fixed". A 'head in the sand' approach from OCZ who then went and deleted threads on issues, locked threads and banned perfectly polite users when they questioned them / brought up issues. I won't buy OCZ again unless it's required.

I couldn't pick between the two.

[Mattus]

A Q-Tec PSU. Ah, I was naive back then.

[csgohan4]

Geforce 256 , didn't work at all

[Percy1983]

Probably a second X1950pro for crossfire, crossfire didn't work all that well at the time for most games.

With that I managed to sell them both on ebay and get a 3870 while breaking even which was nice.

[MrNeil]

Buying a celeron 633 e-machine from D*$%£*s only to find i could not upgrade and put a GeForce2 MX420 card in later

[jim]

Hiper 580W Type-R iirc
Blew up after a couple of years and destroyed mobo, ram, CPU.

[Bluecube]

I once bought a PC from Blue Ridge (I think they were called - note the 'were'. That's for good reason) which came complete with an unstable PC Chips mobo. After repeated returns which included them sending me back the wrong PC, I gave in and bought a proper Supermicro motherboard and was delighted to find that the Pentium 2-300 could be overclocked to 450. Those were the days... However that delight was much deserved considering the hassle I had with the plonkers at Blue Ridge!

[fail_quail]

On a reliability basis: Seagate hard drives
My first pc had a 4gb drive which i then added a 13GB drive to
the 4gb drive died twice (failed, then warranty replacement drive also failed) the 13GB failed and got warranty replaced too.

skip forwards a few years: Had been reading consistently good reviews of seagate drives so thought i'd give them a second chance. Brought a raid card and 3x 500gb seagate drives. Drives were the loudest i'd heard in years, 2 of the 3 drives failed within a year.

skip forwards again to recently: gave them another go for a hybrid SSD drive, drive failed after a year and a half

In the same timeframe, i've only had one hdd from another manufacturer have any problems (maxtor drive that whilst had some bad sectors, still worked fine for many years)

On a performance/driver basis: my first ever PC's motherboard + a creative 3d card
The board was terrrible, but the onboard graphics on the motherboard stood out for amazing crapness... Software rendering was many times faster than hardware-accelerated mode for quake2 on the SIS chipset for example
As the motherboard had only PCI slots, i upgraded to a PCI creative S3 savage4 card... which is where i learnt of creative's reputation for terrible driver support

Combined the two were a complete nightmare, but did teach me a lot about PC troubleshooting. This helped me get an IT helpdesk job later on so it's not all bad

[RIX]

Aureal 3D sound card, was the best at the time but kept causing the pc to crash during gaming so put a creative soundblaster in. Problem solved.