Whats been your WORST computer related purchase?

[quickhakker]

This can be anything from an RGB ssd to a case and all the silly little peripherals inbetween (controllers, adapters, docks all count)

[GoldenLag]

both of my powersupplies, or the 10 sata cables i ordered. 

[kelvinhall05]

I rarely buy bad stuff, I just usually waaaaay overpay for it.

 

 

That being said, I paid just over 100 CAD for a 5870 and exactly 300 CAD on an old Dell with an i5-750, 6GB of RAM, and a dying hard drive.

 

 

At least I've moved on from overpaying on hardware. Now I just do it for old-ass keyboards.

[NineEyeRon]

Corsair SP-120

 

Served me well but only for a year or two, it was pretty useless when I tried to use it for a case fan when I built a new PC without an AIO. I didn’t feel I got the full value out of the purchase.

 

It was way too noisy in the new configuration too as it was running full blast, now I have a PWM Noctua 140mm Redux and the noise difference is night and day as the fan speed is greatly reduced as well as moving up to a 140mm.

 

Ive spend £10 a couple of times or so on other cooling ideas but they were just for fun so didn’t mind if they didn’t work, various in case fans and extra exhausts, yeah they don’t work and are too noisy.

[kelvinhall05]

Just now, GoldenLag said:

both of my powersupplies, or the 10 sata cables i ordered. 

Go look through your local uni's ewaste bin(s). In just one bin I found a little over two dozen SATA cables. I've got way too many now lmao

[Uptivuptiz]

In my oppinion it would be the Molex to 6-pin PCIe power adapters. Yes, they are cheap, but they break so easily. And then they're not so cheap when they cost you a GPU because it shorted itself. 
NEVER BUY THESE!!!

[quickhakker]

3 minutes ago, Uptivuptiz said:

In my oppinion it would be the Molex to 6-pin PCIe power adapters. Yes, they are cheap, but they break so easily. And then they're not so cheap when they cost you a GPU because it shorted itself. 
NEVER BUY THESE!!!

I personally make it a rule to never buy adapters full stop, cause thats another point of failier

[GoldenLag]

9 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Go look through your local uni's ewaste bin(s). In just one bin I found a little over two dozen SATA cables. I've got way too many now lmao

you say that, but the issue is that it was Sata on one end. esata on the other. 

[CreativeName642]

The worst thing I've ever bought was the Corsair K55. I thought it was mechanical (although for a membrane keyboard it's pretty nice)

[ObsidianAura]

Made a PC for a friend, and later he wanted to add a sata hard drive.

Couldn't find what i'd done with the bag of modular PSU cables so had to buy a whole new PSU for one SATA connector block.

I did eventually find it and sold the PSU on eBay later. Annoying that there are no easily available replacement cables, but what can you do? 

[mariushm]

I was generally lucky with hardware.

 

I'd say the worst experience was buying a S3 Savage 3D video card. Had it for a around one week playing games like Half-Life and Dune 2000 until the bios got corrupted and then card only did 2D.

Got upgraded for free by the shop owner to a S3 Savage 4 and that also crapped up a couple weeks later... same bios issues.

Owner replaced it at his cost (was the equivalent of around 30$ more these days)  with a nVidia Vanta which was around 10-20% more powerful and more stable.

 

What else failed on me... cheap power supplies that came with the case... but I was well aware I was dealing with a 25-30$ cases with power supply, so obviously not quality psu.

[TetraSky]

Worst of all time, for me, as I've said it a few other times on this forum...

 

Buying the AMD phenom x4 965 CPU and attempting to build a computer around it, because I previously was on AMD and it worked great for me (Athlon XP 3200+).

But, this piece of shit NEVER worked properly. It would always end up crashing one way or another after a while, always with "hyper transport sync floor error".

Changed every God damn parts in that system to troubleshoot/fix it, cost me hundreds of dollars, nope, couldn't fix the error regardless of the motherboard, ram or even new CPU with a different revision/stepping I was using.

After nearly 6 month of pure shit from AMD, I said to myself "fuck it". Sold everything that couldn't be reused (motherboards and CPUs) and went with the Intel Core i7 875k.... Everything worked perfectly from day one in 2010, until I got my new PC last year.

 

So lets just say, I was more than reticent when I decided to give AMD another shot, but so far so good, zero issues yet.

[The King of the Undead]

I bought a hard drive. for my laptop. as my only storage. in 2018.

[X-System]

ATI Radeon X800 VE AIW AGP, I was wrong to buy this graphic card for to play... It was cheap but her performance was worst... Even with 1280x1024 with setting high, the FPS was low... I compared it with my Radeon 9800XT previous (RIP) who was better.

 

And I still have my X800 VE AIW AGP, she's on my shelf with my other old items

Edited February 25, 2020 by X-System

[tophercrunch]

1 hour ago, ObsidianAura said:

Made a PC for a friend, and later he wanted to add a sata hard drive.

Couldn't find what i'd done with the bag of modular PSU cables so had to buy a whole new PSU for one SATA connector block.

I did eventually find it and sold the PSU on eBay later. Annoying that there are no easily available replacement cables, but what can you do? 

they sell spliter and extention sata cables. I had to buy one last week

 

[ObsidianAura]

Just now, tophercrunch said:

they sell spliter and extention sata cables. I had to buy one last week

 

 

The trouble was, the PC I built only had an m.2 drive. So there wasn't even a single SATA cable to extend off of or split sadly. It was literally the mobo cables and gpu in there (nice and tidy though!)

[tophercrunch]

12 minutes ago, ObsidianAura said:

 

The trouble was, the PC I built only had an m.2 drive. So there wasn't even a single SATA cable to extend off of or split sadly. It was literally the mobo cables and gpu in there (nice and tidy though!)

oh, ok. That sucks ! 

[jones177]

In recent times a 32" 1440p 144hz G-sync monitor, 32gb 3200 ram and a WD 5tb HDD.

 

I bought the 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600 3200MHz ram because it was cheap and I wanted to see if any of my games used it. Non did. The upside was that I used the old 8gb stick on a new build.

 

I got the monitor on a Black Friday sale in 2018.  I put it beside my 32" 4k monitor and it did not look good. The text looked bad compared to the 4k monitor. In testing my games I realized non really benefited from high refresh rate over high resolution.  Within about a week I gave it to my Son how loved it.

 

In 2016 my 1tb WD Raptor(10,000 rpm HDD) was dieing and I needed a replacement. I read that the new large WD Black drives were fast so I bought one(5tb). Even though my vanilla games ran fine my modded games stuttered like crazy. The same day I ordered a 1tb SSD and everything ran smooth on it. My Son got the 5tb Black for his school work.   

[ObsidianAura]

7 minutes ago, jones177 said:

In recent times a 32" 1440p 144hz G-sync monitor, 32gb 3200 ram and a WD 5tb HDD.

 

I bought the 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600 3200MHz ram because it was cheap and I wanted to see if any of my games used it. Non did. The upside was that I used the old 8gb stick on a new build.

 

I got the monitor on a Black Friday sale in 2018.  I put it beside my 32" 4k monitor and it did not look good. The text looked bad compared to the 4k monitor. In testing my games I realized non really benefited from high refresh rate over high resolution.  Within about a week I gave it to my Son how loved it.

 

In 2016 my 1tb WD Raptor(10,000 rpm HDD) was dieing and I needed a replacement. I read that the new large WD Black drives were fast so I bought one(5tb). Even though my vanilla games ran fine my modded games stuttered like crazy. The same day I ordered a 1tb SSD and everything ran smooth on it. My Son got the 5tb Black for his school work.   

Sounds like your Son is happy with your purchases

 

I have a nice 32 inch Agon monitor and Lightsync logitech speakers and G502 mouse + charging mousepad and all kinds of goodies. All of which sit unused since my daughter was born. I only really get to play when she's asleep at 19:00 so i'm downstairs on the laptop, otherwise it'd make too much noise and wake her up. One day last year I got to play whilst my other half took my daughter with her when she went out and I set up in my office. It was glorious, but really, for the amount i get to use it, its a waste of money   

[DivusJulius]

A cheap gaming headset for 50 €. At that time I had no clue how to spot quality in that category. It had a microphone which broke of. It was uncomfortable and then it broke in such a way so that I could no longer adjust its position properly which made it even more uncomfortable.

Yeah.

[BlackBadPenguin]

So i bought a used PSU off from ebay for like 12€ or so... it seemed like a pretty good deal, but when it arrived i saw that some of the cables were cut off the connectors. (This was never mentioned on ebay)

[Mooshi]

The various Corsair SP fans ugh so noisy. Any keyboard that doesn't have mechanical blue/green switches. There's the Crucial Ballistix ram meant for the Ryzen desktop that it didn't like -- though that went to use in my GFs rig so I guess that one gets a soft pass.

[Touch My Hamm]

Back with one of my older builds I purchased the CoolerMaster V10, then within a month went to full loop watercooling with an external radiator that connected via the back of the case lol.

[Pixel5]

my HTC vive arrived dead, took HTC over 40 days to do anything about it.

they send me everything back and broke my controllers, another 20 days to resolve.

 

when everything was finally back here i had no more intention to play anymore, i spend more hours troubleshooting this thing than playing.

[Devin92]

i paid full price of a office 2010 for a mac air, which i end up not liking the OS so stopped using it and I have a pc at home. money so wasted.