PC related hardware purchase that you regret very quickly after purchase.

[Nater]

Logitech MX Master 3S. Didn't realize it had such a low polling rate. Retired it to work and more than doubled my K/D ratio.

 

[A Computer Guy]

5650G from ebay. It was vendor locked and didn't work in two motherboards I tried. The seller apparently didn't know it was vendor locked either. The only way to know is if the reclaimer binned them by testing them in a consumer motherboard before putting them up for sale so it's a crap shoot if you get a vendor locked one or not. To make matters worse at some point Lenovo started turning vendor lock as a default option I read somewhere. Once the vendor lock fuse is blown that it.

 

[nomdeplume]

Do items you couldn't purchase and regret count.

An unspecified email provider locked my account in lieu of full unrestricted access to my phone. Which prevented two hardware purchases at an unspecified online store. Who then refused to solve issue or create a new account without... ceding equal or greater access to my phone.

8bitdo and Thermaltake apparently seed regrets through exclusively partnering with this site.
The former does have a webstore which forces an unspecified payment service and "recurring charges" on it.

 

[InVasMani]

4K TV years ago when they were relative new grossly overpriced at the time and literally broke after like 3 years.

 

[DrCR]

I get buyers remorse for nearly anything over 10 bucks.

I'll definitely hate myself when I get a 32" 4k oled later this year (whatever model I end up with)

Re oledfyi if germane for you:

Improved subpixel text rendering for OLED (WRGB stripe, RGB triangular) -- Unfixable by ClearType Tuner (Over 100 upvotes in Feedback Hub) · Issue #25595 · microsoft/PowerToys

Description of the new feature / enhancement NOTE: I do paid work with display manufacturers. Repost of incorrectly-closed github item that someone else posted: ClearType alters anti-aliasing assum...

github.com

My biggest regret: putting an objectively small bit of money into then old SCSI: 0$ would have be better. That was back in 1999 or so. The other was a used FX 5600 that I flipped for a slight gain actually: the image quality was great and all, but it’s performance was little beyond the GF4.

 

[mkppo]

I'll go back in time. Way back in 2003, I pre ordered a Nvidia FX 5800, specifically a Abit OTES Nvidia FX 5800. It was supposed to be the competitor to ATI Radeon 9700 Pro which was on the market for 6 months, but it failed spectacularly at that. It also cost me $400 instead of the 9700 Pro which i didn't get, for 6 months, for $300-350.

That was the last time I pre ordered anything and waited for reviews. Also, how times change in 21 years..

 

[DrCR]

Asus P4S8X, some kingston ddr, GF MX4, GF 2 GTS Pro, IBM Deathstar

Because it wasn’t the GF2 GTS Ultra or because the Pro was iirc a bad value proposition vs the non-pro?

My Hercules Prophet 64MB non-pro faithfully ran for iirc ~15 years, died in the saddle in a friend’s parents computer.

 

[KrazyT]

The 34" with 1000R curve.
When I changed my monitor, an old 34" curved (probably 1800 or 1500R), I made the mistake to believe in marketing
The 34" 1500R were cheaper, but hey I want to immerse fully in the game as they said ... so a 1000R was the way to go !
Well, it's not a night and day difference, and I could have shave 200 / 300 € on the price.

 

[eidairaman1]

Because it wasn’t the GF2 GTS Ultra or because the Pro was iirc a bad value proposition vs the non-pro?

My Hercules Prophet 64MB non-pro faithfully ran for iirc ~15 years, died in the saddle in a friend’s parents computer.

2 years same with the mx4.

 

[de.das.dude]

This Circle brand keyboard that had great reviews online. Absolutely barf material. The keys were not smooth and even lubing them didnt help. Threw it away as soon as i could replace it with. Have a logitechG213 now.

 

[OneWithMisery]

HP 14s laptop.
I needed a laptop because I started studying again and this happened to be on a good discount at a good time. Ryzen 5500u if I remember correctly, so it could run some small games and it was not that heavy. But my god the build quality was non-existent. I've been working around business notebooks for a while at this time and I thought this HP consumer craptop will be good enough for random use. All plastic, creaking and bending here and there, touchpad's buttons made a lot of noice, keyboard was horrible and I never got used to that small enter key. I sold it after 2 months I think.
After that I have only used old business laptops. 5th gen X1 Carbon with 7th gen i7 and 8Gb RAM has been more than enough for my use, but I'll probably sell it because I don't need it anymore.

 

[DaemonForce]

Probably the first and worst of them all was the Pentium 4 Prescott back in 2004. It was very new and a workhorse but the amount of power that it sucked down even when stock clocked made cooling a completely ineffective screeching nightmare with every 80mm fan going at 100%.
90nm, 89W, 1c/2t, 32-bit narrow-sighted engineering just half a year into the obvious start of a very new and powerful AMD64 era.
Clockspeed didn't matter. Hyperthreading was a 50% power lock that I blame for lunching more than 70% of my power supplies over the years just trying to run that system.
Not worth it.
OEM $210 product.
No cooler. Realized the trouble of cooling an 89W CPU of this design from the very start.
Instantly opted for a big $250+ water cooled chassis experiment that still sits next to me today.
Still not worth it.

Now hyperthreading is kind of finished thanks to this new P-core/E-core diametric.
This is probably the main argument for why I steer away from Intel products entirely.
I don't even like having their network chips in any of my stuff.

 

[A Computer Guy]

This little guy right here is big trouble if you plug in the connector for power delivery. It turns out it back feeds the power though the USB header.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AJTOLRY
AVOID this product.

 

[PLAfiller]

Uffff buyer's remorse....oh man I can fill in a few pages here alone. Let me think for a sec. OK starting:

1.) NZXT Internal USB 2.0 hub (GEN 2). Bought when I got my first AIO as I didn't have a dedicated PUMP header. Used it very shortly and went back to air cooling. Still sitting spanking new in the box. Can't think of any use for it at the moment.
2.) Logitech P710E - bought it as a deal @€75 few years back. Still sitting in the box.
3.) My very first dial up modem - few months later, cable was supplied to the neighborhood.
4.) chipset coolers....still have two almost unused
5.) various small parts for AIO cooling
6.) Arctic RC memory coolers....laying around

I can go on on....

 

[Dorek]

8tb seagate drive that keeps on clicking and getting more bad sectors.

 

[Vincero]

I think there are 2 tiers of remorse...:
1) Things which worked out OK for the time but bite you much much later on
2) Things you should have definitely not done and bite you almost immediately

I've done a few in both categories, although sometimes they were calculated risks.

Type 1 regrets:
Buying X58 platform... still expensive back in 2010 as X58 boards were never cheap and (not necessary) triple channel RAM added to cost - only really did it as I was getting the CPU for free (long story). It's served well for many years, but waiting a year and getting a Sandy Bridge i7 would have been worth it.

Type 2 regret:
Worst I think is probably buying an S3 Savage 2000 graphics card (although this was somewhat a calculated risk) - back in the day S3 had probably among the best VGA quality output (and I had a big at the time 20+ inch monitor) and working MPEG2 offloading - great for watching DVDs as the hardware decode also offered better video image than software in most cases whereas the TNT2 I had previously had neither good VGA IQ or hardware offload... the calculated risk was S3's reputation for driver bugs (although eventually they usually fixed most things and the Savage4 got (some) redemption over time.) What wasn't expected was the fact that there were some unfixable issues (i.e. bugs in hardware T&L) and the performance never hit the level it should have.

 

[wNotyarD]

1) Things which worked out OK for the time but bite you much much later on
2) Things you should have definitely not done and bite you almost immediately

I don't say I truly regret it, but man, was my Dell Vostro 5470 a royal pain in the ass and a great example to a mix of your reasons.
i5-4200U, 8GB DDR3, GT740M, good battery life, a free half-size mSATA slot, aluminum lid and palm rest, light and portable while still 14". Sounds like a winner in early 2014, right?

Well, here we go.
First: faulty screen backlight. AS SOON AS IT ARRIVED. The backlight would only work when it wanted. So I activated the warranty, Dell sent a technician (support at home? NICE), swapped the screen. Was it fixed? Not quite. It became a little better but was still intermitent. Later I found many comments online about it being a faulty project, welp.
Second: WiFi. Not only was it reception weak as hell, it almost never came back online after waking from sleep. Restarts were frequently required. Practically solved with Windows 10 (used 8.1 when I got it) and I don't know why.
Third: Build quality. Did I mention the aluminum rest? Yes, it quite frequently would give me some slight shocks when the AC adapter was plugged. Not to mention that when it was plugged in the trackpad would glitch as well. The trackpad? Not flush, but other than that and the energized glitches it worked just fine. The bottom lid was a plastic joke, fragile to the point of breaking under the screws (especially the corners) or losing them screws without reason.

Even with all these defects, it chugged along until 2018 when it finally gave up the ghost after a big LCD backlight failure. It wouldn't turn the screen on anymore (the laptop did), and after a while not even the Vostro turned on anymore. Looks like the screen connector shorted out taking the motherboard with it, and no local technician had the ability to fix it (and I wouldn't really want to spend more money on it).

 

[Outback Bronze]

All of them.

Because now I'm addicted..

 

[AusWolf]

20 years ago, I swapped my fast cool and absolutely awesome ATi x800 XT for a slow, hot and loud GeForce 7800 GS only because it had shader model 3.0. It didn't only overheat, but it had a beeper on board that made the loudest scream ever when it did. My worst PC purchase ever.

 

[Vincero]

20 years ago, I swapped my fast cool and absolutely awesome ATi x800 XT for a slow, hot and loud GeForce 7800 GS only because it had shader model 3.0. It didn't only overheat, but it had a beeper on board that made the loudest scream ever when it did. My worst PC purchase ever.

Heh, strange considering how good the 7600GT was in terms of value/performance and quite reasonable heat output... it was so good I got 2 of them for SLI... which reminds me of another bit of tier 1 buyers remorse:

Buying 2 GPUs for SLI.... the performance gains were real in some cases but not really worth it - found out soon enough to get some decent resale value on one of them.

 

[AusWolf]

Heh, strange considering how good the 7600GT was in terms of value/performance and quite reasonable heat output... it was so good I got 2 of them for SLI... which reminds me of another bit of tier 1 buyers remorse:

Buying 2 GPUs for SLI.... the performance gains were real in some cases but not really worth it - found out soon enough to get some decent resale value on one of them.

That's why I bought it, because I read lots of positive reviews of the 7600 GT. What I didn't consider is that the 7800 GS was built around a cut-down version of a larger chip (the same as the 7800 GT/X was built around), but with a small, incapable cooler that you couldn't even change because of the unique mounting hole pattern. It also had a PCI-e to AGP converter chip that added quite a bit of heat.

My other regret is one many of you won't agree with: the Ryzen 5 3600. Not because it was bad, but because I wanted to use it in a low profile PC, and I couldn't find any cooler for it to keep it from throttling in such a tiny case with limited airflow.

 

[Vincero]

That's why I bought it, because I read lots of positive reviews of the 7600 GT. What I didn't consider is that the 7800 GS was built around a cut-down version of a larger chip (the same as the 7800 GT/X was built around), but with a small, incapable cooler that you couldn't even change because of the unique mounting hole pattern. It also had a PCI-e to AGP converter chip that added quite a bit of heat.

My other regret is one many of you won't agree with: the Ryzen 5 3600. Not because it was bad, but because I wanted to use it in a low profile PC, and I couldn't find any cooler for it to keep it from throttling in such a tiny case with
limited airflow.

Case mods?
Need to add them speed holes...

 

[GerKNG]

Every Logitech Product from the last 3-4 years (the quality has reached a point where you can't say if it's from temu or real.)
every QLC SSD.
And the 7900XTX. 100W at idle with two high refreshrate monitors, driver issues, monitor issues, crashes. It's just an awful architecture and product.

 

[#22]

Luckily not much, especially if we talk things regretted quickly after purchase, but that mostly it:

2016 and me buying 1TB WD Blue to support then quite pricey 240GB SSD. Then I came from my 2009 rig and discovered daily awesomeness of SSDs which made me not ever install single game, so mostly anything on WD drive. It was like Witcher 3, GTA 5, Windows and you squeezed in a stinky russian car.

Logitech G502 X Lightspeed. Trial of moving forward from my beloved G403 Prodigy Wireless now going 7th year of flawless service. Awful to keep after twenty minutes - being flat to tire my hand and small to anger me with fingers touching mousepad. Just not my type. Not even mentioning pathetic gaming aesthetic obviously making it PITA to clean. But it's a good mouse, so I gave it to my mother to replace her not that awesome Dell. She has small hands and immediately liked it plus I also programmed her additional buttons to be helpful with her job, accounting software.


In general, what should be regretted and avoided is going things compromised, not satisfying to the point of later replacing them with better ones. Likely to cost in total more and sometimes even give worse effect than buying awesome first and be happy with it all of this time.

 

[neatfeatguy]

Touch screen fan controller. Damn screen died after about 9 months. I just threw the thing out after that and decided against using a fan controller since.

This was the one from NZXT: