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

[udisy]

Asus GeForce 8600 GTS - hot and very unstable (easily going over 60°C, glitching when over 62)..

[Terbinator]

In hindsight, either a GTX 680 or Titan OG.

[Wolfclaw]

Intel 486DX-100 Overdrive CPU, couldn't find a single motherboard amongst all my friends, were it worked, so glad I got a refund.

[Seeven]

i don;t erally have a works part, but i hate that HDD when i have a 512 gb ssd

[nar53]

I once bought a quality branded PC case that was a total piece of crap. Maybe it was a fake.

[Rad77]

A long time ago I splashed out on a top of the range Soundblaster Live Platinum card, because it had all the connections in a custom front-panel bay. Within just a few months they dropped driver support, so that when I upgraded my OS to Windows XP it only supported the bog-standard card and the front bay was useless.
Never bought another Soundblaster product.

[Andi-C]

Razer Mamba (V1).
Promise to be zero lag & different than any other wireless mouse. Turns out it was worse ! It was laggy like Vsync X4.

[Solex]

Has to be the NZXT 24-Pin ATX Extension Cable, it killed my 750w corsair PSU due a short in the 3.3v rail. I did not know it was the culprit at the time but it nearly done in my NVME too when i plug it in the new PSU.

[3dcandy]

Some no name psu that I was desperate to get some data off a pc....got the data off just as the psu frazzled the lot

[=assassin=]

I had an MSI Socket AM2 motherboard die after about 6 months in 2007. Having to replace the motherboard was far more annoying than anything else I've had fail, simply because by default it means virtually a complete rebuild. I haven't touched a single MSI product since. The only other complete failure I had was a Leadtek 7900GS in 2006 that died within a couple of weeks; the replacement lasted another 5 years before failing, which I put down to simple wear and tear. I had another Leadtek product, a 6600GT, fail after a similer time, but in both cases, they were in lightly used secondary PC's at the time of failure, and so had much less of an impact on me than the motherboard failure.

[deejayburnout]

One of those cheap PSU that cost £15 pound for 600w.

Installed in pc when I got a HD 6850 and after about 3 hours it blew and took out my GPU.

[Ferral]

Sapphire X1950 pro (around 2007)

I remember an issue where the voltage regulators (think it was these) weren't covered by the heatsink so most cards overheated and had the issue where you would get display driver not responding after a few minutes playing something.

Sapphire never aknowledged the problem even though it was known a short while after the card came out and was allover the net at the time. Instead they just changed the heatsink design. Shame really as when it worked as it should it was a great card.

So problematic yeah, worst possibly or maybe it's just me being bitter after getting basically ripped off

As for worst maybe the early Duron CPU's back in the day or the cheap S3 Virge 3D cards which were ok with OpenGL stuff but a bit naff at Direct3D

[philehidiot]

Just out of interest, in the old days cheap RAM used to be bad RAM and would lead to crashes, etc. These days there is the "corsair value select" stuff which I'd trust but there's also some other names I've seen on Amazon which are a bit cheaper and have good specs. Has anyone tried this stuff? is it true you can't buy bad RAM these days?

[LeSWiS]

Probably an asus sonar soundcard. That thing died quick and had driver problems for me on windows 7. Maybe others things but I can't remember everything I bought honestly even though I don't buy that much stuff at all.

[mrmr123]

Probably an asus sonar soundcard. That thing died quick and had driver problems for me on windows 7. Maybe others things but I can't remember everything I bought honestly even though I don't buy that much stuff at all.

Same here, I had driver problems too and had BSODs when trying to uninstall the damn thing. Ended up using third party drivers before retiring it.

[markzero]

Does a USB-powered "lava lamp" that leaked goo everywhere count?