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

[Aleks]

some old asus mobo with athlon2 3.0 got fused with cables on power supply, and asrock z77 pro3-> RAM doesnt want to work in dual chanell(chanell A1 and A2 broken i guess, B1, B2 working fine. Still waiting for new 1!!).

[Bambooz]

Avoid pc chips if they still exist.

They do. They just call themselves ECS Elitegroup now. Same company, and also the same guys that brought you the infamous fake cache 486 boards

However, the 512 MB of memory just isnt enough to be able to play much of anything decently. Should have paid the extra, litterally like, 4 bucks for the 1 GB version....

The amount of memory a video card has says absolutely nothing about how fast it is. That's like judging how good a car is just by the amount of gas/petrol that fits into the tank. Says absolutely nothing whatsoever about the "rest" of the car.
Besides.. you won't get anything to play games on in halfway decent settings with 2-digit money.. just saying

I did spend an extra tenner or so on an LS-120 floppy drive for a build many moons ago, and to this day I've never owned (or even seen) an LS-120 diskette.

http://91.121.194.115:81/panasonic-ls120_2pack.jpg
http://91.121.194.115:81/panasonic-ls120_contents.jpg

Both still work just fine, and you can actually still use them on modern PCs with a IDE->USB adapter. Works just like regular cheapo USB Floppies, just A LOT faster..

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

6600's always ran ridiculously hot. Had one myself back in the day.. Blame the manufacturers with their tiny coolers and fans back then lol

@Topic: Definitely OCZ SSDs. The Vertex 2 120GB I bought for my main sys was DoA, the replacement lasted just over 5 days and the replacement of that lasted 3 hours (died right after I was done installing and configuring everything). Got my money back and stopped giving a eff about SSDs for quite some time..

Decided to give them another go much later with a totally different series/controller for my netbook because the HDD in there had tons of bad sectors. I wasn't even interested in the speed aspect at all. Just the fact that there are no moving parts to go wrong (and 2.5" HDDs being ridiculously expensive at the time).
Bought a Petrol 64GB. First one died after waking up from standby just a couple hours after I bought it (not recognised anymore). Replacement worked for 3 weeks. It magically turned read-only (followed by a BSOD). The replacement of that read-only semi-dead SSD was DoA (not detected at all). Totally fed up with their POS SSDs. For me it's now Crucial M4, Samsung 830 or no SSD at all.

[tre_peter]

D-Link AirPlus G DWL-G510 Wireless PCI Adapter(rev.C).

Could have done with a few more revisions as it was one of those cards that didn't work for a whole load of people. Complete waste of money. Here's hoping that the Wifi-GO! on my new Asus mobo does the trick...

[1pnoe]

A second HD 6950 that does not work in crossfire with my current card (exact same model) Scan are refusing to refund it even after they themselves tested it as faulty. I may soon take them to court as this is taking months.

[EmeraldClaws]

Hm, I can't think of anything as terrible as some of the things in this thread. I'm in the process of ordering parts for my first homebuilt computer, so I'll let you know in a couple of weeks.

I can say without a doubt that the worst computer I've ever been a part of purchasing was a replacement for my brothers old machine. When it arrived, the whole case was buckled. I managed to straighten some of it out, but it's still visible. I guess that's what 'refurbished' means.