Hardware to avoid

OK, dont know if this will work:

Heres a thread to list stuff you have bought, only to find its performance is severly lacklustre, help others avoid this crap:

I will start - Logic 3 soundstation 5.1 (and Logic 3 speakers in general)

AWEFUL SOUND QUALITY, retro (horrid) looks, dont even think about buying this unless you get it in Poundland

SLI, just get one card....do you REALLY need those 200 fps, I doubt you can tell the difference between 90 fps and 200, because I cant.. Unless you do some CRAZY stuff, it's not worth it.

if you run things at the right res and settings you shouldn't get 200FPS.

on topic: can't think of something i bought but you should avoid. i do know you should avoid physx cards though and pentium 4's. lol, i'm sure there are shops which will probably say they are both the best available lol.

You may not be able to tell the difference between 90fps and 200fps,but it sure is nice knowing your machine can run that many fps.also sli does help improve 3dmark scores.I'm not complaing I can assure you.Goodluck.

Dahak

AMD X2-4400+@2.4 S-939
EVGA NF4 SLI MB
2X7800GT IN SLI
2X1GIG DDR IN DC MODE
WD300GIG HD
EXTREME 19IN.MONITOR 1280X1024
ACE 520WATT PSU

BFG GeForce fx5200- fan broke, barely ran games
Thermaltake Bigwater -Fried my asus 9800xt after two weeks or use.
White cold cathodes- Take forever to warm up and one of them is brighter than the other.
Cheap PSU- my friends pc shot sparks, it was sick!
Cheap cases- my friends cheap case is covered in dents from just bumbing into it while walking through his door.

oh and all thompson/alcatel speedtouch routers suck bigtime, bad software, bad hardware, they make crap cell phones as well!

I know this does not need mentioning but someone has to do it. VIA 8O there, I said it.

Steer clear away from HP Pavilion laptops - USB ports not following specs, fried DVD burner and real dustbusters (P4 based).

On the other hand, I'm most impressed with a very old piece of hardware:
Asus V3400TNT-TV 16 M (a Nvidia RivaTNT 1 rev 4 -based video card), which still actually works, served me well until the DX8 era (it could run GTA3, can you believe that!), and can actually run a 3d desktop - for those not afraid to wait...

nec monitors... well at least my FE991SB horrid piece of 19" CRT CRAP.


first off text was always blurry at 85 refresh rate had to set it to 75 or not be able to read text.

2nd after 2yrs DEAD....yes dead.... sitting in the garage as 65~lbs of rubbish... too lazy to goto the recycling place with it.



ummm... kinda moot at this point but 75GXP drives (IBM DEATHSTARS) I got burned by them... as did 4 of my good friends.... terrible hd's


in general as a lot of computer stuff has dropped to commodity pricing (Home netowrking class ROUTERS...i'm looking your direction) they have become very low quality.... and sadly now many of them don't seem to work right at all.

also DVDRW drives... it is great that we can get them for ~$40 off of newegg now...but many of them (Liteon) have just the most flimsy bs excuse for trays / eject motors..

I just replaced a dead tray mechanism Liteon DVDRW w/ a NEC 3550A (crappy CRTs decent optical drives ) it is much sturdy in the tray area.

I had problems w/ kingston hyperX ram... but i'm not sure if it was abits or kingstons fault.... generic ram should be avoided... as flakey ram does not a happy computer exerience make.


I got a bad stick of mushkin DDR in my dual channel kit.... mushkin was most helpful on the phone and got me replacement ram very quickly... sadly the replacement ram had purple heatspreaders rather than black like the defective kit had.

but oh well....


heatsinks with poor instructions and or convoluted mounting procedures can f_ck right off.

cases with windows.....

THEY SEEM LIKE SUCH A GOOD IDEA.... then you realize howmuch dust the get on them...finger prints... plus everyone can see how messy your case wiring job actually is.... bah


spending too much time zip tying every wire in the case just so....... cause you realize the next thing that will happen is you'll get something new or a case fan will die... and you'll have to spend a bunch of time trying to get the wires undone.

case without window...reasonable attempts to keep airflow good then F_ck it...that is the way to go.

I also agree to the cheapo DVD problem.

Got a liteon (actually two with the same problem) which actually never really could write DVDs. Sometimes it reads them at least.

Dell manufacturing overall: Cooling is completely awful. Did you know that in the Dimension line from Dell, there is only 1 fan in the entire case? And thats the 86mm outtake fan for the CPU. Theres not even one behind the harddrive.

Someone said ultra ram, and i will agree its terrible.

No one mentioned those Dell laptop batteries.

Saitek Keyboards: Paint rubs off the keys very easily, and a friend of mine bought one, and the spacebar fell off right out of the box. And he bought it in store too.

Dell cheapo All-in-one printers: No wonder why they give them out for free.

And yes, the dreadful 6800xt.

Who cares?

that has to be a joke right. floppies have been the mainstay of pc's since forever (at least to me). if one thing ain't going to break down in a pc i would have said the floppy as i have neever had one break doown on me or any other comp i have known. guess i am just lucky.

Saitek keyboards, returned it twice to replace all the letters and spacebar locking up.

x600 vid card, Horrible performance for the money. x300 was weak, but you knew it. Naming a card the 600 made you think you were getting twice the performance of the 300, but it was about 15% better.

WD 250 Sata 2, 16mb cache, had to RMA brand new one after 2 days, and had to RMA the returned unit which was DOA! Third one is going ok, but not using it as a primary drive. I had GREAT service from their 80 gig Sata units, 3 yrs on 2 units.

ohhh yeah Saitek wireless controlers too....while they got awards up the ying yang....i find the batteries die too fast...the connections gets lost now and then....and well...back to wired for that....

Hey, I love my FX5200, kept my work bench level for what, 2 years now?

Panasonic Tuff books. No support, propritary parts.
Got Mtech's, love them for field work.

DC

What case?
Sonata is good
but if it like those "turbo gamer/aspire/ultra" and others...you know the 500 watt PSU that has as much heatsink as a 250....yeah...those suck.....

1. Belkin routers. Any I've bought or exchanged (2-3) died after working for 1-4 weeks.

2. The Abit KN8 Ultra mobos I am using. Oh, they work well enough, and have given no grief, but my research failed to note that they require a -5V rail. This is so rare these days, that it really limits my PSU choice.

3. Cheap Lexmark printers, unless you like paying an arm and a leg for ink.

4. As was mentioned, VIA chipsets; I'll add SiS to that. Their dismal performance back in the days of the K6/K6-2 chips has turned me off to them.

FX Series nvidia cards
Shitty 40-60$ cases and psu from newegg

The bottom of the barrel 6 and 7 series kind of suck.

Epson printers – had a belt fall off, turns out so did many others with a few Epson models.

Linksys wireless routers – nothing but trouble for me.

£100 fx5200 last year. 64 bit = crap.

You must add - Sony Optical Drives, both me and my mate have had a couple of lasers go!

I second the TT watercooling!

Acer 22" WS Budget LCD - discovered too late that it doesnt come with DVI, but perhaps you can class that as my fault!

Also SOYO motherboards are the worst boards ive ever touched there pure crap.

And i will never buy another board with a SIS or VIA chipset they suck also imho.

I had an Abit mobo that worked like a charm. It was the AN7 (had basically everything, UGURU - OC on the fly, NForce 2chipset,etc). It died because of me (swapped some cables around with the front USB in my new case).

Got a cheap asus board with a via chipset just to let my system run again (had lotsa projects and couldn't wait for other stock to arrive). The first one died after a month. The second one had SATA support for the first month and USB for the first 3. Got another that actually went down the drain just last night claiming my Video card. At least I'm upgrading in December - I hope.

Except that I had all those things fail on me, my rig just doesn't run the same as in the days that I had an Abit.

PNY GeForce Ti 4400 - Died after 5 month. PNY requires copy of orginal reciept before providing tech support. That's even after registering the GPU. I avoid PNY products like the plague.

Maxtor Hard Drives - Nothing but problems. 3 drives failed. Lost lots of data. On permanent banned list, just like PNY products.