your worst purchase?

magick

i remember about 3 yrs ago i bought a case that looked good at the time and when i brought it home to my horror the thing was so badly made , the sheet metal on it was super thin cutting my hands ,it was a nightmare to work with so gave up on it, its now in my old room gathering dust

DublinWriter

In 2004 I spend €700 on a 1Tb external LaCie Firewire drive.

It was slow, noisey and ran so hot I could have fried an egg on it.

A year later I replaced it with a 1Tb Buffalo NAS unit costing the same, which had inbuilt ethernet, USB, Firewire interfaces, can chain out to any other USB storage unit, web management capability, Raid 5, FTP server, ran whisper quiet and ultra cool.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Probably an arctic cooler for my gfx card that didn't quite fit into my motherboard... had to file about 5mm of aluminium off the bottom of the cooler. :eek:

DublinWriter

magick wrote:

the sheet metal on it was super thin cutting my hands

I remember one very cheap case I bought.

I was screwing some PCI card down when the screwdriver slipped and I basically caught the skin of the knuckle of index finger on my right hand against a razor sharp edge of the case.

There is nothing worse than seeing one of your own finger-joints exposed. I couldn't believe how very white my own knuckle bone looked.

Thankfully it was nothing a Bandaid and a good lie-down couldn't fix! But I damaged some nerve tissue which made certain parts of my finger totally numb - but it was all right as reign after a year.

A lesson learnt.

L31mr0d

I've got a pretty bad case atm thats a left over from my first build. Its a noisy, thin aluminium case by QTec (who? exactly!) The only positive is that because there is nothing I like about it I can mod the hell out of it and I don't care, it cost me €40 new with a 350w PSU (POS) that I now use as a DC supply when testing breadboard circuits.

My worst buy would be this Saitek Gamers keyboard I got off ebay. Its got an extra "control pad" that i'm probably never going to convince myself to use, its wired (I hadn't realised how many uses i'd found for my previous wireless KB) it is LED backlit which sounded cool but for some reason gives me a headache when all the lights are off as it appears to flicker when i'm not starring directly at it.... and to top it all off... the keys are laid out in german (i bought it from germany) I thought I could live with it as I never really look at the keys when typing but i'd forgotten that I can never remember where some of the symbol keys are and now they are all messed up. The worst part, I probably won't be able to sell it on second hand

Anti

asetek watercooling kit, A condom which was pierced by a porcupine would of been better at holding water then asetek kit

BadCharlie

L31mr0d wrote:

My worst buy would be this Saitek Gamers keyboard I got off ebay.:(

Have that same keyboard and i like mine. The backlight dont give me a pain in the head and the keys are lead out as they should be. But have not found any use for the side board.

What im going to say now people might not like.
I bought a raptor 36gig drive some time ago and i just think its a load of crap. Things do load quicker ever so slightly but not worth the money you pay for it. And to top it all i just think it makes far 2 much noise. Also if you Raid 2 sata drives it will be faster and also hold alot more info then your raptor. I used a benchmark tool to find out which set up was faster and the results showed that the raided drive was better over all.

Antec p180 case i bought. Nice case and nice build but the front door was not fitting properly. Googled and i found lots of other people had the same problem with there P180. Cause of this the p180 is still sitting in my bedroom gathering dust sometime i will get around to puting a computer into it.

gline

hmmm ... probably an asetek waterpump i got from komplett, set it up properly and turned it on and it leaked everywhere, the actual pump was broken inside.... what a piece of junk

TerrorFirmer

Not actually ever really bought anything I wasn't happy with, but I did buy a case once to put a second pc together and had all my parts laid out on the floor. And somehow stood wth my full weight on the motherboard (with cpu attached) when I was shuffling around.

Was a tad angry. Case never got used and was eventually dumped.

DemonOfTheFall

BadCharlie wrote:

What im going to say now people might not like.
I bought a raptor 36gig drive some time ago and i just think its a load of crap. Things do load quicker ever so slightly but not worth the money you pay for it. And to top it all i just think it makes far 2 much noise. Also if you Raid 2 sata drives it will be faster and also hold alot more info then your raptor. I used a benchmark tool to find out which set up was faster and the results showed that the raided drive was better over all.

This isn't much of a surprise since it's been well known for a long time that a decent 7200rpm drive stomps all over the old raptors.

Only the new ADFD raptors compete with a good 7200rpm drive, and they're not even that much better.

My current seagate 7200.10s peak at nearly 90MB/s read and seem to write at over 70MB/s. And they do that while being so quiet that I can't tell they're doing anything unless they're chugging seeking randomly all over the disk. There really just isn't any reason to be using an old raptor still.

gline

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

There really just isn't any reason to be using an old raptor still.

unless u get them cheap or you are going to raid a few raptors

hopeful

anti wrote:

A condom which was pierced by a porcupine

That gave me a horrible picture in my head...

Oddly...only had good experiences with Asetec gear

Worst buy was Iiyama CRT monitor. Dodgy on delivery. Iiyama eventually collected it for repair....it then vanishes for six months. In the meantime I get a refund from supplier. Monitor returns.

Not buying from Iiyama again.

DemonOfTheFall

gline wrote:

unless u get them cheap or you are going to raid a few raptors

But if they're not as good as a modern 7200rpm drive when they're full price how are they any better when they're cheap ?

No matter how cheap you get a non-ADFD raptor, it's still not going to be worth using.

Why would RAIDing them improve their usefulness either, when you could have just RAIDed 7200rpm drives ?

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd love an 740ADFD, but any older one is just a loud drive which does nothing to your system other than give it an e-peen factor for people who think they're faster than a normal drive.

ScumLord

A Zalman cpu cooler that didn't even fit the board due to it's clamp design. A logitech force feedback stering wheel where the FF just died after a few weeks.

I got a cheep case from Ebuyer that had to be pulled up at a corner to get the side panel on. A cheap power supply that couldn't power the PC (that was my fault though)

A cheep radio transmiter for an MP3 player that had crap sound.

BadCharlie

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

This isn't much of a surprise since it's been well known for a long time that a decent 7200rpm drive stomps all over the old raptors.

Well if i had knowing that 2 years ago when i got my raptor i would not have bought it.

Psycopat

worst buy ever?

An opteron 180 for 600 euro 2 months ago

DemonOfTheFall

BadCharlie wrote:

Well if i had knowing that 2 years ago when i got my raptor i would not have bought it.

Ah, but it wouldn't have been a bad idea back then. The old ones were faster than the 7200rpm drives of the day.

Just meant theres no point in using one these days if you're looking for the best in performance.

DemonOfTheFall

Psycopat wrote:

An opteron 180 for 600 euro 2 months ago

Ouch, I agree.

That one must smart

Drapper

a dell

/end

conzy

74 gig raptor

Noisy, and not a lot faster than my old Samsung spinpoint..

I could have got a 320gig Seagate Barracuda, and now im really low on disk space

I have learned from my mistakes

BadCharlie

conzymaher wrote:

74 gig raptor

Noisy, and not a lot faster than my old Samsung spinpoint..

I could have got a 320gig Seagate Barracuda, and now im really low on disk space

I have learned from my mistakes

I feel your pain!

BlackWizard

Ive a 37 gig raptor.

I didnt know about RAID at the time so it was great then. But now with RAID it
seems pointless.

I love the size. Enough for an OS and few important games. It stops junk from
building up on the machine. Ive another 250gig barra along side it for media
storage. But I try to put everything onto DVDs. 4.7gig seems so little these days.

conzy

So anyone wanna buy a 74gig raptor?

They're great tbh:p

BlackWizard

No No

What you REALLY need is a 37 gig. It will force you into keeping your PC clean
and organised

gline

BlackWizard wrote:

No No

What you REALLY need is a 37 gig. It will force you into keeping your PC clean
and organised

damn right

TonyM.

Aero Cool socket A heatsink massive brass tower with 2x 80mm fans I only used it once and the temp. went way up . cost €70.00

DemonOfTheFall

Speaking of those ridiculous heatsinks I have to say that my worst purchase was an Aerocool Jet 7+. I just couldn't mount it no matter what I did. Gave it back to peats in the end, I was 100% convinced that my motherboard socket would have snapped before the heatsink went into place, it was just not a good fit for the board. Also it shrieked like a friggin bansehee.

Anti

DemonOfTheFall wrote:

Speaking of those ridiculous heatsinks I have to say that my worst purchase was an Aerocool Jet 7+. I just couldn't mount it no matter what I did. Gave it back to peats in the end, I was 100% convinced that my motherboard socket would have snapped before the heatsink went into place, it was just not a good fit for the board. Also it shrieked like a friggin bansehee.

haha yeah, i had one of them too. i thought it was gonna rip my motherboard in half, but after ab0out 2 hours of trying to fit it, i just bent the metal retention bracket with a vice grips and a screw driver, and it fitted on. But oh what a racket it made And it got full of **** very easilly, and was impossible to get out to clean.


Anyway my worst purchace was a 5800U when it first came out, i think i pad about 600 punts for it, a whole weeks wages at the time, And oh my god, did it suck balls. I saw about 10% increase from a ti4600.

3 months later and i bought a 9800pro which was on b grade on komplett because the box was damaged( about 190 punts ). Had that card almost a year.


Next worst thing was the coolermaster aquagate watercooling kit, Which i got for 45€ from pc world ( xmas time = everything in stock goes really cheap, And may too, thats the end of the finincial year )

It cooled the cpu by about 1C more with the fan at its highest speed. and made a ****ign racket while doing it. Oh and i wont go into the fitting, or leak testing the bloody thing. Never again would i buy pre assembled watercooling.

</rant>

DonkeyStyle \o/

Having spent most of the morning researching my upgrade options, I'd have to say my worst purchase was my previous 'upgrade' from an AlthlonXP 2600 to an AMD64 3000... God what was I thinking?! I hardly noticed a difference at all.
All the hype about 64bit and I'm still running a 32bit OS and 32bit apps.
I'll certainly have replaced this cpu before I'm making use of a 64bit.
The worst part was the motherboard I bought with the new CPU was socket 939 and AGP, both upgrade dead-ends as far as I'm concerned.
The only saving grace was that it's a good overclocker.

DemonOfTheFall

I'd beg to differ, I found a big CPU performance increase going from an AXP 3000+ to an A64 3000+. 64bit wasn't the only change between them at all.

Try checking counterstrike framerates with the athlon xp versus the athlon 64, should get destroyed.

Cuddlesworth

x850xt, lost so much cash on that overpriced piece of crap.

Ruu_Old

I got this PSU about 4 years ago. A nice, shiney gold coloured one, I think it was a 500w Q-tec and it sounded very much like an Airbus. Actually I think I flogged it to someone off boards after about a few days of buying it.

conzy

Ruu wrote:

I got this PSU about 4 years ago. A nice, shiney gold coloured one, I think it was a 500w Q-tec and it sounded very much like an Airbus. Actually I think I flogged it to someone off boards after about a few days of buying it.

How could you!!! The unfortunate buyer of that PSU problem lost his arm and several hundred euro worth of equipment in an explosion!

Damn Q-Tec PSUs....

P.s Why isnt there a best purchases thread ? I sold my 7800gt for €250 and bought a X1800XT 512mb for the same price

limey_tank

ASUS K8N-DRE

One of the worst motherboards I've ever worked with. Brackets for the stock AMD sinks & fans weren't supplied and there wasn't enough room on this huge board for the 2 Zalman coolers I bought.

The graphics card had to be a single width card because of a badly placed SO-DIMM socket.

A total nightmare for numerous other picky reasons, the trouble I had even getting it to POST. Very picky as far is RAM is concerned!?!

It was replaced with a Tyan K8WE. Everything was transplanted and worked first time and it's clear the designers put a lot of thought into it.

BigEejit

I got an Abit IC7-G and the fricking thing did my head in .. I could not get Xp to format the Hd, or install xp .... turns out nothing will install or work properly without increasing the ram voltage to 2.8volts ... which of course invalidated my ram warranty :mad: ... and then when I had managed to get xp installed the sound from the onboard chip was all crackly and I had to get a seperate sound card After 2 months the bearing on the northbridge hsf went and it started screeching ... had to pay for postage for a new one, and while installing it the horrible little hoops for holding hown the northbridge HSF came out and I had to make some new ones from paperclips .... finally the plastic clip for holding on the cpu HS broke and I had to get a new one of those ....



Only good thing was that it overclocked like a demon

SeanW

I've made a string of bad buys.

1st: A Dell in 2002
2nd: A bunch of cheapo optical mice that coudln't be relied on at all. Also a Microsoft keyboard that couldn't handle more than 2 concurrent keypresses (makes gaming impossible)
3rd: €245 on a AMD A64 3700+ just before the Core2Duos came out and AMD mega-slashed their prices The same processor sold for €105 a month later.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

SeanW wrote:

I've made a string of bad buys.
2nd: A bunch of cheapo optical mice that coudln't be relied on at all. Also a Microsoft keyboard that couldn't handle more than 2 concurrent keypresses (makes gaming impossible)

lol, what happened when you needed to Ctrl-Alt-Del?

Microsoft of all companies should have known better

Cuddlesworth

sean_keevey wrote:

lol, what happened when you needed to Ctrl-Alt-Del?

Microsoft of all companies should have known better

Sticky Keys.

Anti

i thought i was unlucky with some of my purchases, But after reading your stories i feel much better