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

[HEXUS]

Is there one in particular that still leaves a sour taste?

Read more.

[Friesiansam]

An ATI/AMD Radeon X800GTO, simply because it expired within just a few days.

[jamz4]

An 8600GT. Got it in build from Computer Planet when I was a teenager. Felt so ripped off after saving for about 10 months. It overheated so much that it caused huge stutters and freezes in games (it was passively cooled). Eventually strapped a fan onto it and it was OK, but that card had no reason to exist inside a gaming PC and I'll never trust a company to build my PC again.

[will19565]

AMD FX 8350. Used so much power it put my electricity bill up and heated my room up significantly.

[LSG501]

Logitech NuLOOQ - not because it was bad but because it was actually good (MS have brought out something similar for the surface ironically) but Logitech stopped supporting it...Actually 'discontinuing support' is the main reason for most of 'my worst pc components' in all honesty, I normally do a little research first before buying so usually pretty good on what I buy.

Other than that it's probably AIO coolers in general, currently been after a replacement and the amount of faulty ones I've had is really high, they're not even from 'no name' brands either. While I can't fault the company I'm buying from the QC on AIO's seems to have gone down the pan since the last one I bought.

[Fogoldgaming]

Rock gaming laptop. Put me off gaming laptops forever. Ran hot, weighed a ton, packed up a couple of times and the hinges broke twice. Power suply socket broke. Heat killed the graphics card eventually. Seriously, who needs a gaming laptop.

[Will136]

AMD FX 8350. Used so much power it put my electricity bill up and heated my room up significantly.

I had the same, was good for winter though!

[Corky34]

A slot 1 Pentium 2, performed better than the 486 system it replaced but putting a CPU in a cartridge was just dumb.

[big_hairy_rob]

Matrox Power VR graphics card, around the time that 3dfx voodoo 2 was released...

[Myss_tree]

Three Nvidia graphics cards one of which was a passively cooled 8600GT.
Only ever bought AMD graphics since and usually Sapphire, all have been rock solid.

[Korrorra]

Well I have had 2 bad motherboards from Asus for the Intel cpu. Either flawed bios or cpu pins were to long. Didn't notice till it was too late and months later. A P8Z68 and a Maximus Hero VI. The current AMD Asus board I'm using has been great. Was starting to get nervous/paranoid about buying another motherboard. Will it be fine or more issues. Turned out well this time. Next time might be another bad one. Also p4 pentiums can go right to hell. Also had a Creative X-Fi Fata1ty audio card years ago. Now that was a pain in the ass soundcard. You had to place it just right for it to work. Just because the lights on the card were on was no indication the audio worked. That and the super bad drivers and driver support, made we loathe Creative in general. I will stick with onboard audio from now on, or something better rises up to rival them all.

[ETR316]

an external usb 3.0 enclosure, the controller inside is so damn slow, it so annoying. cheap ass Chinese made controller

[dfour]

A PPU expansion card designed by Ageia for physx. What a waste of space and money. Everything ran so slow it wasnt worth the circuit board it was printed on.

[Vidati]

Nvidia FX 5200 - this card was a piece of rubbish. after that i learned.

[rabidmunkee]

razer lycosa keyboard, the 'touch' media controls believed I had an extra hand that was always touching it.

luckly the troublesome media board could be removed without too much hastle.

and the rubberised keys made it difficult to move fingers quickly as the buttons held on just enough to be noticed.

[fail_quail]

I think i'll go for the motherboard in my first ever PC. (At the time having zero knowledge of computers)

A PC Chips M590 for AMD K6-2
http://th2chips.freeservers.com/m590/

No AGP, plus had the hilarious status of having an onboard SIS iGPU so terrble games ran significantly faster in software mode than in GPU accelerated mode...