Build Advice Your Manufacturer Blacklist

What hardware manufacturers do you avoid at all costs due to one or more horrible experiences with purchasing their product(s)? Remember that you should always keep an open mind, even if your luck has been bad in the past. But we're all human, so we all have our little list, so I thought it'd be fun to share.

I'll start.

SEAGATE

Every Seagate drive I have ever used has crapped out prematurely.

 

Maxtor, as at my last job I saw hundreds of these go bad between 6 months to a year!!! Interestingly enough, Seagate now owns Maxtor...

 

These threads seem to crop up just to bash Seagate. I can't really comment though I havent had a Seagate since the 1gb version in a 486 DX4.

I'll say: Tagan. Naff PSUs I just cannot bring myself to trust.

also: HIS. They did a custom 3870 back in the day, thought about getting it so checked out newegg and read the user reviews. Trying not to exagerate but 70% bad/very bad. No other brand of 3870 had anything like that on it.

 

I've had my 480W Tagan since the Pentium 4 days and now it's happily powering my i7 rig.

Gold plated connectors, man.

 

The only drive ive ever had fail was a seagate, but thats not to say there bad just i got unlucky

The only other i can think of is TRUST peripherals what an ironic name!

 

well it used to be dell laptops a few years ago they where so bad it was increadable but now they have improved there laptops dramaticly

and i would totaly avoid HP laptops they are the worst laptops you can buy, they look so desirable but are so ****

 

I've got three manufacturers on my blacklist, Maxtor hdd's cause the ones i had back in the day all died way to soon.

Hiper psu's went through 3 of these on RMA & will never touch another one.

Last is Thermaltake, tried a psu which was woefully over rated & gpu cooler (on a 6600gt so a few years ago) p.i.t.a to fit & as effective as a chocolate firegaurd

 

Dell (for computers).

I bought one of their high end gaming systems a while ago, before I really got into the hardware side of things. Now I know I was completely and utterly ripped off. Shame it cost me an arm and a leg to find out.

Mind you, their monitors are awesome.

 

Maxtor and Hitachi HDDs. They were garbage, not that they failed, just that they were the GTX480s on passive coolings without the performance on HDDs.

Outside of that, probably ECS on their midrange motherboards. Their low end and high end aren't bad, but for some reason their mid-range ones are crap.

 

Isn't really the drive's fault if you don't have backups. Hard drives fail, live with it, prepare for it. And a drive dying in just a couple of weeks just means you had bad luck with the particular drive.

And I don't have any black lists. I do prefer some manufacturers over others, but why bother blacklisting? The major problems are usually on particular series/products, along the years on HDD-markets there have been the Deathstars, Maxtor Diamondmax 9 (and maybe some other series), seagate had one series that got bricked with a certain firmware, etc. Motherboard manufacturers have used rubbish capacitors on certain models, which eventually always blew up and caused people to dislike the whole brand.

What's the point? With bad luck you are going to buy one of these products that will later become known for always breaking down. With good luck you'll buy a product that doesn't belong in these categories, but it may still break down without any obvious reason. You don't know when buying, so what's the point even trying to be a prophet.

my 2 cents.

 

This thread isn't about being a prophet, it's just to share our experiences for fun, that's all. I know that there are plenty of Seagate drives out there that work just fine, and I fully acknowledge that my bad luck is very often the reason why I've had the problems I've had.

 

Yea that was a bit too OT even for me.

Anyway given the choice I probably wouldn't buy Maxtor or Club3D. And that has nothing to do with anything except just some random image I happen to have.

EDIT: oh, not my personal experience, but I'd never buy a HP laptop. You just know there's something wrong when your friend has his various HP's in warranty for the first 8 months of the year he's owned it. Also it's a good clue to AVOID when there's a website dedicated for the few models: http://deadhp.org/

 

Powercolor I'm a bit wary of, Maxtor, it's not that they had a single line of bad drives, all of them were marginally better than nearly working. Same goes for Hitachi. Although I will admit, if you turned off your computer, those Maxtors and Hitachis lasted quite a while.

Still nothing on Quantum Drives...I missed those.

 

DFI

Have had more problems with their Motherboards than I can recall. Started with onboard LAN going, then the sound, then the fans, then the entire board. So I get a new board and right outside of the warranty period, SATA ports die, USB dies, and it cascades again.

 

Same, only I was too poor to even get anything decent.

Related company I hate is Infotech. Not a manufacturer, but they give out the whole "We're savvy and helpful people trying to bring good computers to people who don't want to get ripped off!" vibe but then don't actually follow up. Yeah, it's nice that you let people buy individual parts and will assemble it all for them, but you're no better than Dell or HP when you let a customer buy a pretty decent gaming rig and send it out with an unbranded 300W PSU. A friend of mine swears by them and did exactly that. Guess who's PSU died 8 months later?

 

Really? The few DFI boards I had were champions.

 

I had similar experiences with my lanparty board back when i had an AMD 2500+, it seemed everytime i switched it on there was a new and different problem from the previous boot!

Still missed it when it finally died though, no other board i had could clock like that thing did

 

I've never had any hardware fail but I still stay away from certain companies



I would be easy if I made a white list

 

I'll agree with you on Thermaltake PSUs. But Thermaltake cases are pretty good. I mean, you could drop my Armor out of a third storie window and it'd do more damage to whatever it landed on than to the case, definatly made to last. Excellent cooling too, and quiet.


I think I'll have to say Maxtor and Seagate too, . My first HDD was a seagate, and it clicked away all the time. At one point it seemed to die, and was replaced, but, it has been running ever since then perfectly fine, and to be honest, my samsung drives aren't that much quieter.


Thats pretty much it though, apart from the usual el'Generico PSU manufacturers.

 

Nvidia:

Fermi

PhysX shut out (unofficially supended with Beta 257.15 I know but it is unofficial)