I've a dead DVD burner for some conspicuous reasons after playing StarForce games...

songo wrote on Yesterday, 09:12:

Bid For Power, a Dragon Ball total conversion for Quake 3 Arena burnt my Voodoo 2 during early 2002.

Can't imagine anything heavy in that mod killing a V2. Q3 does have internal limits to how many polygons and temporary entities it can have and BFP's only really pushing it with bubbles spawning from underwater attacks. so i'm leaning towards a 3rd party driver as they started to pop up around this time, marketing themselves as "fast" while doing unsolicited overclocking...

I mean I've worn out a lot of mice, keyboards, joysticks and gamepads through the years, but the title comes across like "which spoon made you fat?" to me.

Meaning it was an action or inaction on the users part that did the thing, not the other thing that did the thing.

I've got no recollection of game-induced hardware death. Pretty sure I've installed things that ultimately borked Windows, usually hardware/drivers.

I had a V2 start to die at one point, I happened to be using FastVoodoo drivers, on a Slot A. Had been fine for years in a K6/3 system. Could have been be a number of things, including being moved between systems.

And I recall a family member going through 4 or 5 cards: a 6600, a couple of 7950GX2's and one or two others over the period of a year or so. Think they were gaming 24/7 for months on end though. No idea what they were playing, they just hammered their system.

ratfink wrote on Yesterday, 14:01:

I've got no recollection of game-induced hardware death. Pretty sure I've installed things that ultimately borked Windows, usually hardware/drivers.

I had a V2 start to die at one point, I happened to be using FastVoodoo drivers, on a Slot A. Had been fine for years in a K6/3 system. Could have been be a number of things, including being moved between systems.

And I recall a family member going through 4 or 5 cards: a 6600, a couple of 7950GX2's and one or two others over the period of a year or so. Think they were gaming 24/7 for months on end though. No idea what they were playing, they just hammered their system.

That was the tail end of the capacitor plague era and going into when lead free solder was swapped in. It's possible they were doing some major overclocking. But hardware reliability was at an all time low around that period.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto. I guess that the game is not the culprit, but year ago I bought a new, unused, cheap Geforce Ti4200. It costed me about 30€, about the same time my girlfriend (now wife) bought a Geforce 5200 that costed about 150€. Not too much later my computer locked while running Giants. I restarted it, spent some time checking disks and stuff and days later locked again while playing the same game. The fan was defective, and I toasted the GPU running that game. I got re-imbursed (they had run-out of those cards).

GTA 3 "killed" my Voodoo 3 2000. Not strictly true, but it felt as it did. I was happy with that card, until I got GTA 3. Sometime the game didn't run, others lacked textures and effects. I fiddled with different driver and DirectX versions and even got to play with everything fine... with slow framerates. Then, I changed something and again got an unusable GTA3 and never got to run it again. So I replaced it with another card, and that was the end of my story with 3Dfx cards.