All Creative hardware that's not a CD-ROM drive.

My 8800GTX card failed the same day and I was going away to some friends for a LAN party. Had to rush to the store and buy a new graphics card. It was overpriced at over 200 dollars and they only had the HD5750 with 512MB of RAM. Damn that card sucked. So little bang for your buck.

badmofo wrote:

I spent ~900 bucks on an ATI HD4870X2, the dual GPU monster that was topping all the benchmarks at the time. It was noisy, temperamental, and ran so hot that gaming during summer turned into an endurance test. What was I thinking? I really hated that got damned thing!

I had no such problems with mine. In fact I'd probably still be using it if the thing didn't just spontaneously die about a year ago.

I wish I didn't buy a bargain 7" tablet just days before the Nexus 7 got announced.

* Creative Graphics Blaster 3D --> "Cirrus Logic Laguna CL-GD5464/Rambus 4MB" ... yeah right. whatever. Probably the name "3D Blaster PCI" was distorted somewhere in the chain of rumors before it could reach my brother's ears
* Celeron 266 --> actually asked for a Pentium MMX
* SiS 6326 --> came with the Celeron 266 above
* An oversized beige AT tower case that came with such an underpowered machine (C-266/SiS 6326 above), man that system sucked 😁

But all that was back when I didn't have access to better information, or wasn't being particularly assertive with what I really wanted.

The last significant component I bought without adequate research beforehand:
* Tagan 430W PSU --> for the price you could get something better

leileilol wrote:

All Creative hardware that's not a CD-ROM drive.

You can't mean that 😀 I heart creative.

An STB 4400/16mb I bought as an 'upgrade' for my 3D-2000Virge/Voodoo 2 setup. It gave me nothing but problems and glitchy performance - it was overpriced and I was bummed out. Not too long after I replaced it with a Voodoo 5500 as soon as that beast came out, and the glow of Glide wonder quickly returned. The STB card was probably the shortest-lived component I ever ran on my principal home/game rig.

Oddly I seem to have acquired several of these STB cards in the old parts bin. Maybe someday day I'll fire one up to just to see if I can make it run nicely.

*thinks really hard about this for a few moments*

...nothing.

I have never bought a piece of hardware I regretted buying. Which is not to say I haven't bought crap before, but every time I have I've been able to get it returned or replaced with something else, so I've never been stuck with something I paid for yet didn't want.

Recently I needed a new mouse but I have very little spare cash on hand that isn't saved up for Christmas gifts, so I had to get something super-cheap, just for the interim until I can afford something better. I first picked up a cheap Logitech mouse that was so incredibly jittery that if you pulled the mouse VERY slowly towards you the cursor would eventually work its way UP the screen through tons of random movement. (My guess is the optical lens was defective.) Either way, I got it returned and replaced with a cheap Microsoft mouse instead and it works well enough. The internal plastic of the buttons can catch on itself sometimes leading to some strange-feeling clicks, but the thing works and it's only meant to last me for two or three months before I get something better. :P

-Sound Blaster CT2230, Sony CDU-33A 2X CD-ROM "value" package.
At the time I didn't find the SB16 was much better than the SB 2.0 I already had, and the spring loading proprietary Sony drive was a slow pile of shit. It was their first attempt at creating an affordable CD-ROM drive for the masses. I should have just gotten a cheap Future Domain SCSI card and a nice NEC drive.

-M-tech "Mustang" R534F motherboard using SiS5571 chipset.
Said to be faster than Intel boards. VRMs interfered with the output on my ATi PCI graphics card. Also had DMA issues.

-AMD K6-200
Early adopter. Said to be faster than Pentium Pro. It seemed like a good buy at the time, but the stupid thing ran too hot and had a shitty slow FPU. Ran at a stupid 2.9V (instead of standard 2.8v). Should have gotten the P166MMX for the same price and overclocked to 200.

-ATi 3D Pro Turbo PC2TV 8mb for PCI.
Extra 4megs did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! ATi never released OpenGL drivers for Windows 9x like they promised they would. Never used the "Rage" 3D core. Probably should have gotten ET6000 or a Virge.

-32MB 12ns Toshiba DIMM. Early adopter.
I Didn't know 12ns DIMMs weren't well supported. Caused system instability since the board couldn't set the timings low enough to support the stupid thing. Got 2x32MB SIMMs instead.

-Panasonic 24X ATAPI CD-ROM Drive
Fast for the time, but CLV was shit...and very very noisy.

-FIC VA-503+
Replacement for R534F. Probably even worse. Really shitty board.

-ATi Rage Pro AGP
Not faster than the 3D Rage Pro turbo (in my opinion at least). Output quality was shite. Switched back to 3D Pro Turbo and gave the Rage Pro away.

-Quantum Fireball KA-9100 9.1GB 7200RPM ATA HDD
First 7200RPM ATA drive on the market. Ran too hot and cooked itself to death. Every Quantum drive before this one was awesome. I just have the touch of death. This drive pretty much put Quantum out of business (bought by Maxtor)

-Creative Nshittia Gayforce2 32MB.
I got this because my roommate was a 3dfx hating goon and brainwashed me into thinking My V3 3000 AGP was poop. Only slightly faster and 32-bit openGL rendering still looked worse than glide (in my opinion).

-IBM 75GXP "deathstar" 45GB ATA HDD
First drive to use glass platters. The coating used on the platters peeled off causing the drive to fail. This drive effectively killed IBMs HDD division. Once again, the touch of death.

-Pentium II 400 OEM using new OLGA found in the PIII chips.
Didn't overclock at all. Mysteriously died one day running at stock speed.

-MacBook Pro 1.83GHz First gen x86
Ran hot as hell and burnt my nuts. Matsushita optical drive was garbage.

I've been running trailing edge hardware since I sold the crapbook pro and haven't had any problems. The wallet is happier too.

Still cannot decide whether Matrox Mystique counts.

Compaq laptop and anything made by PC Chips...

K7S5A
Read the reviews... half the people thought it was great,half thouht it was shit.... thought I'd give it a go, turns out it was shit.
Died within 6 months, bought an Asus A7v333 to replace it.
Garbage.

Chaintech 6LTM2 - Was a good solid board, only regret was if I waited a couple of months and got a BX chipset board instead I could have upgraded to a >1ghz P3 easily.

Razer copperhead stupid piece of shit died within a year.
used a cheap ass Logitech before getting my Logitech G5 (second version) still works without a problem.

Had a Creative GeForce2 GTS my self too, it served me nicely and was a nice upgrade from my v2 sli setup... mostly because at the time many games did not really want to use the 2nd D3D device that was the v2 sli setup...
The GTS was far from shite IMHO

What the hell, the GeForce 2 GTS was fantastic. Slightly faster than the Voodoo 3? What system were you using it on?

Xabre 400
Was supposedly competitive with Geforce 3 but only managed that by making all textures from about 10 feet in front of you into a blurry mess.
There were several driver revisions required before the pixel/vertex shaders worked in Morrowind and when you enabled them your framerate tanked.
There was a couple of other games that never worked with the shaders at all but I can't remember what they were.

All of my Neo Flash flash cart gear. I bought a genesis flash cart, an N64 flash cart, and a PCE flash cart, before there were other options available. I should have known better than to send away to China for custom hardware that reads propriatary flash modules, but I had money at the time and they were the only option. Had I known the Everdrive family of flash carts were on the horizon I'd have waited.

For the record, my Neo Flash PCE is dead. The SD adaptor for the Myth MD(which I had to buy seperately for ~$70) won't hold saved games anymore. And one of the two 512mb modules for my Myth N64 has bad blocks. If I get even one bad block on the other, that's no more Resident Evil or Conkers.

If the stuff had just worked, I would have been OK paying what I did and dealing with proprietary software. But the stuff is crap.

Oh yes, and everything related to Zip drives. Boy did they suck.

Frugality has kept me safe from too much regret over hardware purchases, but there are a few very lame pieces of kit that I've suffered the displeasure of owning throughout the years:

Kenwood 52x True-X CD-ROM: Back during the CD-speed arms race of the late 90's, Kenwood unleashed this monster, which was supposed to achieve unheard-of transfer rates by splitting the laser beam into seven parts. Unfortunately this design rendered the drive about seven times more likely to fail, which it did within a few months of purchase.

3Dlabs Wildcat 4 7110: An unhealthy lust for high-end 3D accelerators led me to purchase this baby for my P4 rig a few years back (used, of course, as the card cost several thousand new). Unfortunately by the early 2000's 3Dlabs was resting on their laurels and riding on reputation alone, because the card wasn't any faster than a contemporary GeForce/Quadro, it didn't support recent versions of DirectX, and it wasn't particularly fast at 2D, so it was little good outside of Maya and 3dsmax. It burned out after about a year and I unceremoniously chucked it into my spare parts bin.

I also haven't been crazy about any of the P4 systems I've ever owned - too hot, too power-hungry, and too inefficient. It was a crap chip design and I don't care to have one in my collection.

I almost forgot about Zip drives. I bought one of those piles of garbage too. I bought a "Zip Plus" which was a hybrid parallel port / SCSI drive and it was actually much less reliable than the regular models.

I'm glad I didn't get a Kenwood 52X drive. I was really interested in those for a time.

What the hell, the GeForce 2 GTS was fantastic. Slightly faster than the Voodoo 3? What system were you using it on?

I was using this card on a 440BX board with 700MHz PIII and 2X AGP. I paid over $300 for this card, and all it did was make my glide games look terrible. The only positive I can add is that it made counterstrike run slightly faster. The 2D section of my card was also all washed out and blurry. In fact, I believe many Nvidia cards suffered from this problem until DVI use became common.