Hardware regretted buying

[80-watt Hamster]

I've bought some pretty $#!+ cases in my time, my least favorite being an all-metal affair with automotive paint. The finish wasn't what I'd hoped (bought online), it was too heavy, and didn't fit together all that well. More recently, a Logitech MX Ergo trackball. It's mostly pretty good, but the middle button takes far too much force, and the ball has too much stiction, making precision motion a pain, which isn't great for CAD. Then some minor stuff, like 2.5-3.5 sleds that sucked, floppy bay USB plates that don't actually have floppy-drive-spaced holes (and don't fit the opening correctly to boot), an M.2 PCIe card that didn't do what I wanted it to (but that was a research fail and a limitation of the MB). Gotta say that I've been pretty fortunate overall. A lot of the bad stuff I've gotten has been used, so there's not much regret to be had in consideration of cost and utility gained.

 

[maxfly]

This is tough. I haven't lost many of my own components tbh (knockin on wood).

Zalman 1000w psu, actually traded an Agility 120gb ssd (i think it was 120gb) for it. It just up and quit one day after about 2yrs. No real loss it was in a back up rig. Actually nust tossed it a couple of months ago after forgetting about it for 10 or so years. Andy said he didn't want it, so....haha.

E8500- Bought it as a gift for my best friends one and only bigtime gaming rig. And the pos slowly died a little over a year later, out of warranty (yeah I got a little aggressive with the oc). So feeling guilty as hell, I replaced it with a q6600 that he ran forever. He doesn't even have a pc today... blasphemy I know. I remind him everytime I visit

Enermax 650w something, something. funky dark blue paint job. Died during transit after being sold. Returned dudes cash and RMAed it, then resold it. Paid for triple shipping on that badboy.

X1800xtx died during transit (despite using nearly an entire roll of bubble wrap on the sob). I helped the guy that I sold it to, RMA it to MSI and they sent him a 8800gts (that literally just released)! They didn't have anything comparable to the 1800 hahaha. He was jacked!

That's all I can think of.

 

[donjeuw]

Choosing low end cases to help friends build PCs on a budget and cut my fingers with them.

Buying a NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 in 2002 (supporting only directx7) and then having Prince of Persia Sands of Times bottlenecking it completely because it was running on dx9 I guess, or maybe the bad general performance of the card, I dunno, but felt like a waste of money after one year.

All the crappy SSDs from OCZ, Petrol and Agility brands were really bad, causing black screens in Windows, and not usable as external SSDs either, the copies would stop, I ended up RMAing my Petrol for an Agility, also RMAed the Agility, and then, I left the 2nd Agility in its sealed bag to sell it on second hand market. At the time OCZ only mastered the Vertex SSD brand correctly imo, this one lasted me for years without issues.

 

[eidairaman1]

This is tough. I haven't lost many of my own components tbh (knockin on wood).

Zalman 1000w psu, actually traded an Agility 120gb ssd (i think it was 120gb) for it. It just up and quit one day after about 2yrs. No real loss it was in a back up rig. Actually nust tossed it a couple of months ago after forgetting about it for 10 or so years. Andy said he didn't want it, so....haha.

E8500- Bought it as a gift for my best friends one and only bigtime gaming rig. And the pos slowly died a little over a year later, out of warranty (yeah I got a little aggressive with the oc). So feeling guilty as hell, I replaced it with a q6600 that he ran forever. He doesn't even have a pc today... blasphemy I know. I remind him everytime I visit

Enermax 650w something, something. funky dark blue paint job. Died during transit after being sold. Returned dudes cash and RMAed it, then resold it. Paid for triple shipping on that badboy.

X1800xtx died during transit (despite using nearly an entire roll of bubble wrap on the sob). I helped the guy that I sold it to, RMA it to MSI and they sent him a 8800gts (that literally just released)! They didn't have anything comparable to the 1800 hahaha. He was jacked!

That's all I can think of.

Gotta use ESD bags for any pcb because certain bubble wraps do create static

 

[maxfly]

Gotta use ESD bags for any pcb because certain bubble wraps do create static

Always! The psu getting damaged during shipping made me paranoid. That's why I mentioned the half a roll of bubble wrap. I think our ups guy was playing football with my packages during that timeframe. I was doing a lot of buying and selling then. I don't think he appreciated having to make 3 or 4 trips to get everything in his truck (we weren't normally a high volume stop). So he beat the shit out of our boxes as payback!

 

[Steevo]

why you gotta do me dirty like that

I had one on launch day, 549 bucks for a mediocre card. Shoulda bought a 8800, but their colors and AF was meh, as was their video hardware.

 

[sil3ntearth]

Bought a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU back on 775, I'll always regret that buy. Especially because it was like $1000.

Looking it up, I think it was the 965. The other one I haven't been impressed with is the Logitech G613 keyboard. letters are already wearing off after 2 months.

 

[AlwaysHope]

Socket 1156 system, should have gone with AMD at the time... 8 threads (i7) for gaming back then was useless, 6 cores (Phenom II X6 ) would have been it!

Don't know why the edit button is missing here but... another thing that annoyed me back then with Intel mainstream desktop was no native support for Sata 3 unlike AMD who were in front on that tech. But I was an intel fanboi back then, so....

 

[AMF]

Bulldozer 4130 ..... and all ink jet printers!

 

[caroline!]

I only regret buying a $2.50 noname bluetooth receiver, it lasted for 5 days before dying.

Also a Thermaltake TR2 "600" W, I ended up removing most of the wiring and repurposing it to power my desk lamp and sometimes a soldering iron. It still works so it's a 50% regret feeling for me.

 

[SpittinFax]

The regret to end all regrets.......spending big money on genuine branded printer ink/toner for years and years before realizing that non-genuine replacements that cost one-tenth of the price work perfectly fine.

 

[Fouquin]

A lot of these posts seem more like people revealing their own screw ups and shifting blame to the hardware.

My biggest regret is higher density Corsair LPX DDR4. Been through a few 32GB 3200 CL16 kits on Ryzen, all of them eventually just die. Tons of errors after a year of use at the rated XMP. Meanwhile the "lesser" TeamGroup kit that AMD sent along with the review kit of the original Ryzen 5s is still going strong 5+ years later.

Bought a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPU back on 775, I'll always regret that buy. Especially because it was like $1000.

This is especially brutal because launch day reviews of the PXE were not favourable, and Intel had given everyone a demo of the Core architecture showing it completely brutalizing the Pentium D and an overclocked Athlon 64. So not only did you waste $1K on it, but you did so after Intel themselves had already shown Netburst was on the way out.

 

[sepheronx]

AMD RX 6600. Should have spent the bit more for XT model.

 

[grammar_phreak]

Let me see here....
-Thermaltake 850w TR2 RX (ended up taking out 2 graphics cards and damaged the motherboard.... over a span of 2 weeks.)
-A Cooler Master 500w PSU I bought at Frys
-GTX 670..... I wish I would have bought a 7970 GHZ Edition or vanilla 7970 instead
-Back in 2009, I built my kids a PC around an e8400 and a 790i motherboard about 4 months before the lga1156 platform was released. At least I got a great deal on an i7-920 and an EVGA x58 board not long after the lga1156 platform was released.
- When the pandemic began, I bought a 4770k/z87 board/GTX 1070 Strix combo from a guy. The price was good at least, but the GTX 1070 would crash the system when the clocks went above 1860mhz.
-Not too long ago, I sold off an Asus P6X58D Premium board for a low price because it wouldn't work with any of the 6-core Xeons or the i7-980x. The BIOS was updated to the latest version. However, after I sold it I found out someone else was having the same issue and they solved it by rolling the BIOS back.

 

[Canned Noodles]

IceGiant ProSiphon Elite. Temps are okay, but a 360mm AIO would probably give more thermal headroom, look better, and be cheaper.

 

[AMF]

The regret to end all regrets.......spending big money on genuine branded printer ink/toner for years and years before realizing that non-genuine replacements that cost one-tenth of the price work perfectly fine.

hehe.......

 

[80-watt Hamster]

The regret to end all regrets.......spending big money on genuine branded printer ink/toner for years and years before realizing that non-genuine replacements that cost one-tenth of the price work perfectly fine.

Huh. You've had better luck than I. All my (limited) third party ink experience has been less than ideal.

A lot of these posts seem more like people revealing their own screw ups and shifting blame to the hardware.

Does it really matter why an individual has said regret?

 

[eidairaman1]

A lot of these posts seem more like people revealing their own screw ups and shifting blame to the hardware.

My biggest regret is higher density Corsair LPX DDR4. Been through a few 32GB 3200 CL16 kits on Ryzen, all of them eventually just die. Tons of errors after a year of use at the rated XMP. Meanwhile the "lesser" TeamGroup kit that AMD sent along with the review kit of the original Ryzen 5s is still going strong 5+ years later.



This is especially brutal because launch day reviews of the PXE were not favourable, and Intel had given everyone a demo of the Core architecture showing it completely brutalizing the Pentium D and an overclocked Athlon 64. So not only did you waste $1K on it, but you did so after Intel themselves had already shown Netburst was on the way out.

Trust me the P4S8X was a pita to get stable, I walked away from asus until 2014. I switched to a NF2 Delta L then a LP NF2 Ultra B and never had a problem with my agp gpu.

My 80GB IBM Deskstar became a DeathStar (Click of death)

The 2 Logitech Mice were abysmal quality, I switched to Roccat. The Sony CDRW Drive's IDE was faulty

The Rambus P4 mobo was hard to obtain ram for it.

 

[sil3ntearth]

Oh, I forgot to add the Epson ET-2850. I had it for 3 months, printed 36 pages, and now it prints pink and blue lines across every image. I've done 3 power cleans and 6 normal cleans and it still looks like crap. That thing was $300! It forced me to go out and buy a brother color laser, which is what I wanted to begin with. I now only use it to print stuff for my starfinder (ttrpg) games.

Huh. You've had better luck than I. All my (limited) third party ink experience has been less than ideal.


Does it really matter why an individual has said regret?

It's weird, some models are cool with it and some aren't.

We had an epson workforce printer that had absolutely no issues with third party ink. Likewise, I've worked on plenty of laser printers that used third party toner that were totally fine with it and others that it destroyed.

 

[ONEoo7]

ASRock H170M Pro4 -> intel integrated network controller started acting odd. Remote sessions were randomly disconnecting. Replaced with a cheap tp-link pciex1 adapter, haven't had a problem since.
Logitech G Pro Mechanical keyboard -> few keys have no blue light anymore, cheap junk imo
Sennheiser GSP600 -> sound is great, fit is great, pads just rip apart without even using them. Expensive to replace with originals.
Lenovo Y720 -> gaming laptop with decent performance, The display has a lot of backlight bleeding and it's only 60hz, I also get some random stutters when gaming on an external monitor. Many issues with drivers combo intel+nvidia+windows10. Goes below advertised 2.8ghz stock speed, to 2.7ghz. I need to use a weird tool(throttlestop) to disable automatic downclock due to thermals and lower cpu voltage so that it can run at 3.4ghz on all cores. Should have sent it back but I was too lazy.
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2080 Windforce OC 8GB -> should have bought a bigger cooler, after some time it started to go way above 80c in full load. and when it reached ~85 the cooler speed would go insane. Replaced the cooler with a alphacool eiswolf 2 AIO, which made it into a good purchase after all.
ASUS RT-AC66U -> The famous but shitty router imo, crappy cpu/ram combo made it impossible to reach good speeds on either cable/wifi.
HTC Vive Pro -> luckily I returned this one. A pixel died after 2 days and the pixel density/resolution was not very good. Quest2 is way better.

Probably many others. Just shared the most annoying.
Happy interneting.

 

[P4-630]

i5 6500 in 2016, should have bought the i7 6700K right away.

 

[80251]

IceGiant ProSiphon Elite. Temps are okay, but a 360mm AIO would probably give more thermal headroom, look better, and be cheaper.

I'm sorry to hear that, I hope it doesn't mean the end of the company because at least they were trying something different with air cooling.

 

[GerKNG]

FX 6350 (Arma 3... FPS)
Astro A50 (awful battery life, bad sound and dropouts within 3 meters around the station)
iPhone 7 (first and last... you can't even loop a video without paid 3rd Party Apps )
PS4 Pro (upgrading obsolete hardware with more obsolete hardware)
Glorious Model O (dirt cheap ali express trash for 10x the price)
QLC SSDs (2x 4TB 870 QVO)
i3 12100 (locked vccsa, could not even post with 2x8gb 3600 cl18 single rank dimms)

 

[xtreemchaos]

this P5 im using now i should of gone with the one with the glass front but being a tight git i went with acrylic and in a month it had so many scratches ive chucked the front and went full open but i learnt me lesson and got a glass p3 for my other rigg.

 

[t0t0]

Samsung 980 (1TB non-pro, paid it way too much at the time for what it is)
The very first version of the Cooler Master 212 (terrible design: you had to unmount it in order to change the fan since the brackets was screwed on and under the rad)
Samsung SyncMaster 931BW monitor (bad/failing capacitors - still alive, used with a secondary rig, I replaced them)
Asus M4A87TD/USB3 motherboard (failing audio and USB)
My old platform in S775 (even if my Q6600 lasts me 11 years, limited to 6GB of DDR2 - can't get it to work with 4 dimms, I had some terrible moments at the end - swap/OOM)