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

[HEXUS]

Go on, do your worst.

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[abaxas]

Netgear 834 router - committed suicide after 2 months leaving a brown burnt mark on the carpet.

[Steve]

A Jetway motherboard for the Socket A 1GHz Athlon system I was building. Flaming thing never worked properly.

[scaryjim]

Probably, a passive GeForce FX5200. It wasn't that it wasn't a decent graphics card - it really wasn't that bad. But put it under any kind of 3D load at all and it froze instantly. It did this until the day I bought one of those PCI slot exhaust fans and put it immediately beneath it - then it ran fine until the day I upgraded (and what an upgrade!) to a Radeon 9800 Pro. So for its utterly inadequate cooling solution, I think that has to be the worst

[alsenior]

XFX Revo. Supposed to be a fast raid 3 but sucked harder than ATA133. Damned thing couldnt put more than 33MB/s though

[Ferral]

Sapphire Radeon X1950 Pro. It was one of the first models released and it had known problems with the voltage regulators so whenever under heavy load it crashed non stop due to the card cutting out when the regulators got a bit warm. At the time there was a thread on the Sapphire forums that was over 100 pages long with users having the exact same issue. The regulators wernt properly situated under the heatsink which is what was causing the problem. They did sort the issue out by replacing the cooler setup on the later cards but the owners of the original cards were ignored most of the time when asking for replacements.

[drew2794]

Not exactly a component, but my iBuyPower laptop was a real POS and the guys in their RMA department were complete baboons.

[shaithis]

An Epox motherboard that fused itself to the ATX power cable.....can't even remember what socket it was but had to be ~6-7 years ago.

[Medallish]

nVidia vanta graphics card, in my first PC I paid for myself, the PC was great for it's time with Slot A Athlon 650MHz, and had it upgraded with 256MB ram, but that video card, when I replaced it with a Geforce 2, the upgrade felt intense like hell!

[Noxvayl]

I don't think it is fair to blame the technology for bad experience. I prefer to think of the decisions made as regrettable and therefore have a few scenarios I wish I didn't put myself through.

Dumbest buy:
PCI Network Interface Card, currently collecting dust in the loft. At the time I honestly thought a separate card would be better than an onboard one, proved myself wrong

Biggest inconvenience:
AMD Athlon X2 5000 system, CPU worked fine but the motherboard I ordered was dead on arrival twice; was without a computer for a month until I got my Intel Core2Duo E6550 setup which was awesome.

Most regretted upgrade:
Water cooling for my northbridge. Was an old kit my cousin no longer needed so I got to work modifying my motherboard and case to fit it in. I spent a week installing it and it lowered temps dramatically but it didn't increase FSB headroom and was eventually thrown away.

Regrettable decisions but I learnt a lot from them.

[jnutt]

XFX Graphics card. Stupidly bought 2. Thought that the first one going up in smoke was a fluke. Sadly not the case. I only buy MSI now. they may not be the fastest out there but so far so good. and my SLi'd 460's are still fast enough

[blueball]

Edimax print server. Worked once than never worked again!

[BobF64]

Probably, a passive GeForce FX5200. It wasn't that it wasn't a decent graphics card - it really wasn't that bad. But put it under any kind of 3D load at all and it froze instantly. It did this until the day I bought one of those PCI slot exhaust fans and put it immediately beneath it - then it ran fine until the day I upgraded (and what an upgrade!) to a Radeon 9800 Pro. So for its utterly inadequate cooling solution, I think that has to be the worst

I had something similar, a "Value card" that was a Inno3d FX5200.

I bought it whilst waiting for the Radeon 9800XT to be released so I could use my new PC, damned thing died on me after a few months of mild use and a month or so before the XT came out.

[sykobee]

I bought an S3 Savage 2000 graphics card once. Total piece of crap. Repeated years later when I bought a GeForce 8600GT.

[.havoc]

TV tuner card. 'Nuff said.

[Iain162]

One of the old ageia physx card's, the most useless thing i ever bought i quickly sold it on ebay just before the features were rolled into nvidia drivers for 8000 series cards..