We all have some hardware regrets

BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of PropagandaOKC Icrontian
edited November 2008 in Hardware
I was reading this blog post on TechReport about it got me to thinking about mistakes we've all made over the years. I think mine was either the screamer heatsink I got back when I built my first computer or the bright blue VU meter/fan controller I have on my old system that's bright enough to light a room. What are your biggest regrets?
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Comments

  • MiracleManSMiracleManS Chambersburg, PA Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    A butterfly PSU on my first (and only to this point) personal build...god ugly rainbow.
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    That 50mm Delta fan that cooled like crap and sounded like a tornado. Oh, and buying a Gateway. And a Voodoo II.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Getting a 486 SX. Shoulda choked up the extra $200 for the DX2!
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    My first computer, 1995, Packard Hell. Oh, I meant Packard Bell.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I think it was a Vantec CCK6035D that made our dorm sound like a hairdryer.
  • SPIKE09SPIKE09 Scatland
    edited November 2008
    Asrock 4 core dual vsta times two, they can't run the Q6600 at full speed due to some VRM problems, and they can't run 8800GT's all in all a great purchase for folding :buck::buck:
  • edcentricedcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I have wasted money over the years, but no real disasters.
    Thanks to this group of guys.
    I had a Micron 486. Not a bad machine.
    I decided to build my own replacement and found this forum.
    That would have been in about 2000~2001.
    That first build was a KT7 and I haven't looked back.
  • BlackHawkBlackHawk Bible music connoisseur There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    SuperOrb.
  • BuddyJBuddyJ Dept. of Propaganda OKC Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Oh yeah! Orbs ahahahhahhaa. I've got a couple Crystal Orb VGA/Northbridge coolers still sitting in their boxes from back when they were the OMGWTFBESTCOOLEREVER. I might even have the one that killed my Radeon VE (Third fastest in the world Icrontic 3D Mark Team baby!)
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    The biggest hardware regret I ever had was buying a 486 DX2 instead of a Pentium 133 for my first PC. I saved $80. Didn't matter.

    Of course, I was like 16 or something. $80 was a significant amount of money.
  • KwitkoKwitko Sheriff of Banning (Retired) By the thing near the stuff Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    $80 still is significant.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited November 2008
    I guess my greatest regret was trying to de-lid an E4400 and scraping the pcb of the proc so bad I killed a perfectly good processor for no good reason.
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    The one time I accidentally pulled out the IDE cable from a hard drive while it was installing the OS - that was a def a "OOPS MY BAD" moment :D. Luckily it was my own computer and not a clients.

    Then there was the time I didn't ground myself and zapped a PCI modem ....

    The most memorable was probably OC'in my old XP 1600 to the point that I killed it :D. It was a fast son-ofa-bitch while it lasted though :cheers2:
  • lemonlimelemonlime Canada Member
    edited November 2008
    I still regret the $600 I dropped on an X850XT when they were first released. It was the most I ever spent on a graphics card. Within a matter of weeks, it went from the fastest card to about the 12th fastest :)

    Thankfully, $600 isn't necessary any more for a great card.
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I still regret the $600 I dropped on an X850XT
    ohhhh, that's pretty bad. Not as bad though, as my $1350 (today's money $2000) Packard Bell Pentium 100MHz. 18 months later and the only original parts that had not failed were cables, CD-ROM, and floppy! At least your video card worked as advertised. :)

    Well, ok, the 15" CRT and cheapo keyboard were still good, too.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited November 2008
    Oh, that hurts, Leo. My first x86 computer was a Packard Bell 486 DX2-66 and it actually was a half decent computer and lasted long after I was finished with it. Of course it also is the computer that got me really tinkering with the insides of a computers, with all the upgrades I put on it. I ended up fully populating the L2 cache and the vid memory with the max amount you could add for both. Back in those days you added the individual chips into little sockets on the mobo. I also upgraded the hard drive and ram on that 486 and upgraded it to Win95 too. There wasn't too much of the original left of it when I finally sold it off, but it was damn fast for a 486.
  • KometeKomete Member
    edited November 2008
    My first pc was a packard bell 486, a gift from my stepfather to try and find me a decent hobby. Suckers probably still running somewhere. My regret was buying a $1200.00, ABS, P2 400 that came with a crappy 5200 rpm, slow @$$ hard drive. The whole system was screwed because of that bigfoot hardrive. I bought it on credit too. It was probably closer to 2000 by the time I paid it off.

    Pinicle tv card. Got it right before xp was released, they never put out xp drivers for it.

    View sonic, gaming brite monitor. Sucker started having sync problems right after the year warranty. Never will buy another viewsonic because of it.

    There's some more but then I found Icrontic and saw the light. I'll never forget my KT7A-raid, duron 650 (oc'd to 950ish) cpu, and dual 20gb IBM desktars in raid 0. Sometimes I still think that thing booted faster than anything I've built since.
  • KometeKomete Member
    edited November 2008
    muddocktor wrote:
    I guess my greatest regret was trying to de-lid an E4400 and scraping the pcb of the proc so bad I killed a perfectly good processor for no good reason.

    I chipped the edge of an Athlon 1400 mounting a HSF once. You could see the edge was jagged but the thing still ran fine and I could have sworn overclocked better afterward.
  • GnomeWizarddGnomeWizardd Member 4 Life Akron, PA Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Id say buying a 4850 kept giving me errors in games i like, so i went back to the solid Nvidia camp, OR buying a razer tarantula keyboard OR ocing my 1700+ on my abit NF7S to the limiit fried OR cracking a die on the socket A series of chips ( what was AMD thinking? )

    but the most, BUYING Vista
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I regret seeing people use Quantum Fireball hard drives - because let's face it - those suckers went down in flames all the time.

    Personally I didn't do much better. While I never had the pleasure of owning a Quantum drive, I remember one year I went through 4 IBM "deathstar" hard drives - worst hard drive (besides the Fireball) I've ever seen. Thank God for warranty.

    :jared:
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Oh oh oh... okay yeah

    I went on a buying spree of IBM Deathstars for clients. Raid 5 arrays in servers, etc. At the time, Deathstars were the cheapest biggest drives you could get.

    FML those ****ing things made my company look like assholes....
  • jaredjared College Station, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    LOL, glad to here I wasn't the only one who got the shaft over those hard drives. :D

    I bet that fail rate was damn near 50%!
  • WinfreyWinfrey waddafuh Missouri Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Buying an ASUS M2N32-SLI deluxe for my first board. Had all kinds of bells and whistles but also successfully caused me to have random crashes and BSOD's for as long as I owned it. Oh ya and it was expensive! What a waste :(

    Then again it was a thread here about that board that got me more interested about Icrontic...
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I still have that very board. After 11,885,237 BIOS revisions, it works great.
  • WinfreyWinfrey waddafuh Missouri Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    I gave up after 11,885,236 and am happy.
  • bullzisniprbullzisnipr Topeka, KS
    edited November 2008
    My whole first system, all bad. Started out with a used Abit 478 motherboard since I had a P4 sitting around and purchased a used 300gb HD from ebay (bad, now that I have the right tools to test it) and a $20 PSU off ebay. I was young and naive (like I'm still not, ha) didn't know what I was looking for. Anyway, went through 2 psu's, a motherboard, 2 harddrives and 1 gpu before I got to the following system.. it was a great machine and if I wouldn't have sold it, would still be chugging today without a doubt.

    Abit 754 Board
    Athlon 3200
    1.5GB PC3200
    160GB
    7800GS OC (I was beside myself when I got this card, the fact I could max out BF2 was amazing to me.)

    Anyway, it was a major crap shoot, it sucked, and contained many very long nights trying to get the system up and running. That was 3 years ago when all I knew how to do was put one together and didn't realize what it took when selecting parts, things have changed and I've learned a lot since then. :)
  • LeonardoLeonardo Wake up and smell the glaciers Eagle River, Alaska Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    This thread is tops! I'm loving it. Deathstars, Packard Bells, a blow drier Orb coolers.....

    Lions, tigers, and bears, oh my! :hair::hair:

    Prime, so far, you are in first place, with:
    I went on a buying spree of IBM Deathstars for clients.
    Oh, dear God! Several of you are in second place, with:
    Buying an ASUS M2N32-SLI deluxe for my first board.
    ;DIf Packard Bell were still assembling computers for the North American market with returned parts (yes, it really happened), they would probably seek out RMAed Asus M2N32-SLI boards. :eek:
  • TurboPenguinTurboPenguin Orangevale, CA
    edited November 2008
    Worst ever... Buying a watercooling kit, and after noticing a small crack in the block not sending it back and getting a good one... and frying my whole computer... DAMN YOU THERMALTAKE!
  • TiberiusLazarusTiberiusLazarus Icrontian
    edited November 2008
    Worst thing I've ever done was when I broke a pin off of my brand new Opteron 165. The chip went for 250ish when i bought it and it was for my first build. I so very nearly cried. Thankfully AMD replaced the chip for me. Partially one of the reasons I loved AMD for so long.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited November 2008
    Yeah, those Deathstars really sucked. I went through several myself, between my machines and machines I built for my brother and a friend. The only IBM/Hitachi drives I've bought since then were a couple of notebook drives.
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