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

[deejayburnout]

Certainly my OCZ Vertex 2. What a crock - mine failed so whilst waiting for RMA borrowed one from work. Which failed.
Will be sold as soon as it arrives so I can get a Sammy 830. It was a cracking buy at the time, don't get me wrong, the performance over HDD was amazing. But it's no good when it's bricked.

Thats worrying as this is my system drive.

My worst buy was this waterproof keyboard as my old flatmate had a bad habit of spilling booze on them. You needed to thump each key with a hammer to make it work. Terrible for gaming. Lasted about a week.

[cjs150]

Most of the hardware has been fine, software on the other hand has been dismal.

Hardware: watercooled the hard drives! Made no difference, apart from trashing the water flow.

Software: Vista - enough said (although McAfee comes close).

I like my TV tuner card!

Best hardware: Broadcom 8 port raid card. Cannot remember model number but still running perfectly 8 years later

[dangel]

OCZ Agility 3. Two dead out of three thus far so no more OCZ for me henceforth.

There have been times when my X-FI has come close but at least it still works. Sort of. Well, it's OK in 7 but it drops dead in 8 because of driver blah blah etc etc

[deejayburnout]

Infact I can add the cheapo £20 PSU that blew up a few months ago to my list as well.

lesson learnt there.

Brap Brap

[RichardRage99]

AMD 8120. Great CPU while it worked. then i took it out to clean the motherboard and slotted in back in and i just did not work. Sent for a replacement and that was even worse. Screen had terrible tearing issues and gaming was powered more by my desperate pleas than any PC part.

Sent the second 8120 away and got a 8150 and everything worked perfectly and without a problem.

[jim]

There have been times when my X-FI has come close but at least it still works. Sort of. Well, it's OK in 7 but it drops dead in 8 because of driver blah blah etc etc

Have you never been tempted to just dump it?

I had one for a few years, but switched to onboard recently after enough was enough, and I really can't say I notice the difference.

What I do notice is the time I've saved not fiddling around with A) their stupid drivers and B) that stupid control panel

[dangel]

Have you never been tempted to just dump it?

I had one for a few years, but switched to onboard recently after enough was enough, and I really can't say I notice the difference.

What I do notice is the time I've saved not fiddling around with A) their stupid drivers and B) that stupid control panel

I've got some Z5500 speakers and the difference is night and day between it and onboard sound for quality and I do like some of the enhancements they provide too. I came close to dumping it but then it started being rock solid on Win 7 and so I didn't. And so now i've got an 8 partition I seem to be back to square one (card disappears on reboot). When I get some time i'm going to fiddle around a bit and see what my options are (the Z5500's have a digital in for instance) but yes I wouldn't recommend a creative card to anybody..

[Fraz]

Lian Li PC7B Case. No matter what I do, it rattles all the time!

Common problem with aluminium cases, sadly. I had an aluminium case made by Gigabyte, and I had to go to all kinds of lengths to stop the hard-disk vibration from setting up a resonance with some part of the case or other.

[Bluewizzy]

I used to have an Asus graphic card. Can't exactly remember what model it was and when I plugged it in my pcie slot, my computer just refused to boot up. But when I swapped that Asus graphic card with another graphic card, the computer just boot up fine. It scared the hell out of me back then because I thought the motherboard went bad so I would need to replace it.

[=assassin=]

I had an MSI motherboard fail after 6 months on my old AMD machine; never had a motherboard go like that before. Worst though was a Leadtek 7900GS which was on the same PC, it died within a week. Kind of partly why I decided on AMD/ATi when I upgraded again. I've also had some Corsair memory that arrived faulty on my current PC, as it wouldn't show the full amount of RAM on a cold boot for some weird reason, yet fine after restart.

[nat327]

LOL at

it crashed non stop

Clearly it stopped when it crashed?

[MonkeyL]

Antec Fusion Max case. With a display so bright and dis-coloured it was essentially unfit for purpose out of the box.

[mikemikemi]

A stupid low profile dual fan hdd cooler, which I used on a 10k scsi drive years back, it didn't take long to short and kill my scsi drive. Luckily that was the only thing to die and the RMA was smooth, although waiting ages and having to send it to the Netherlands was not cool.

Cheapo floppy drive which started smoking.........

[hiyayhi]

Either the gts 450 that I bought about 6 months ago thinking that it was good because it had 1 GB OF GDDR3!!! I have now replaced that with a hd 6990.

My seagate 1TB hard drive is also horrible, it has broken and I'm gunna replace it tommorow but I also have a 750gb seagate that I had lying around that said after being in my computer for a week, WINDOWS DETECTED A F*&^I*&G HARD DRIVE PROBLEM. I will see if I can get a western digital instead.

[Kentar0]

6600 gt graphics card... Always used to crash on games, overheat, Meh !

[xdevildogs]

Oh no! Wow, I've heard some horror stories about different routers, but I'd think I'd be glad it was "just" a burnt mark & not an all out fire!