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

[Iota]

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.

Still have a Sapphire X1950XTX that still works...

[3dcandy]

Pretty much any soundblaster card...

I've never really had issues with Soundblaster cards

[MaddAussie]

An ATI Rage Fury Maxx, what a turkey that was, you had to install different driver versions for different games. I've been green team ever since

[DanceswithUnix]

Worst component was a Seagate 30MB (yes megabyte) SCSI hard disk. It was in a big pizza box case with an Atari interface card and plugged into my Atari ST.

Hard disks fail, always have and always will so I can accept the odd drive death. That thing never worked right though. After a couple of months the heads would stick to the platters, so it wouldn't spin up unless you picked the drive up and kind of gave it a wrist flick. When it got bad I would have to carefully open the drive up and turn the spindle by hand hoping the heads didn't fall off, do a full backup then the drive would go back under warranty for the n'th time (yeah I lost count). I think in the end it just went in the bin and I switched to Quantum hard drives which I think are still in a drawer somewhere and I suspect decades on would still just work if I applied power.

An ATI Rage Fury Maxx, what a turkey that was, you had to install different driver versions for different games. I've been green team ever since

My wife won't touch Nvidia after having similar problems with their drivers. Thankfully AMD and Nvidia both improved.

[Monteiro]

A FX 5700LE just because it was outdated and with the price as brand new.

[lyesbkz]

That would be a SanDisk Ultra II SSD, which failed within a year of light use. No other SSD I've ever bought has failed (yet!) and I've had problems with SanDisk SD cards in the past as well...

I've given up on buying their products now and will be sticking with Samsung.

[MLyons]

Zalman z11 case

[DevDrake]

Scam cheep tf card on ebay. Not really because i was scammed, but because i lost many unrecoverable photos because of that.

Seagate Central 3TB - the drive still works but it's loud, the rom is bad and almost no support.

[jnutt]

XFX graphics card. It went up in smoke. Made the bigger mistake of replacing it with another XFX card. Same result. Never touched them again.

[markzero]

Oh! Hadn't even thought about SD cards. I've had two Samsung micro-SD cards fail on me, a 64 in the first month I had it and I think a 32, a couple months after I got it. Both bought from legit dealers (Micro Center and Amazon) and they each failed in different devices, so I stopped buying Samsung cards.

[deadstoned]

An ASUS ATI 4870 graphics card with one of the worst fans I've ever seen plonked onto a GPU. It didn't work and I was very relieved as the thing looked poorly made. Sent it back and got a sapphire 4870.

[darcotech]

an Seagate hard disk - the famous series that needed hacking to make it work again

[neonplanet40]

Few things:

ATI 1800XT (came bundled with Half-Life 2).

Excellent card, but I'm annoyed that I was silly enough to pay so much for the 'XT' version.

Most annoying purchase that was really a waste of money?

Sound Blaster Z.

Creative are at the top of my 'Worst companies to buy from' list. They don't support their products with proper drivers and their Customer service is useless. I won't get anything from them again.

[s1lv3r]

Nostromo n52, cheap build quality.
Felt so bad I didn't even attempt to configure it.

[SciFi]

ATI Rage2, went to a Riva TNT and never looked back.. Been Green Team ever since
Power VR Card
PhysX Card
Nvidia 3D glasses
Corsair Wireless Headphones
Leap Motion

The list is probably endless after 30+ years of computing / Gaming addiction

[fail_quail]

Worst component was a Seagate 30MB (yes megabyte) SCSI hard disk.

That reminds me of the 40GB Seagate HDD i added to my first PC. I think by the time i stopped using it, i was on something like the replacement for the replacement for the replacement for the replacement of the original drive, RMA'd so many times.
I seem to be very unlucky with seagate HDDs actually, had more of that brand fail than all other brands combined. (though when i did buy seagate drives they always had great reviews at the time, very odd)

My wife won't touch Nvidia after having similar problems with their drivers. Thankfully AMD and Nvidia both improved.

Likewise, i think it was a GF4 Ti 4400 i had that finally made me switch. Having a folder on my desktop containing 4 different driver versons for four different games was a bit silly. Had next to no driver problems with ATI/AMD since...