Build Advice Your Manufacturer Blacklist

I've had a few Seagate HDDs fail, one of which was a barely used external. Had an 80GB Maxtor in the family's old computer that clicked itself to death, but we managed to salvage lots of data before it went kaput.

I would like to say that Winpower PSUs are terrible, but I just can't. That thing powered the old PC and this one for 5 years, though upgrades and so on. That little 440W beast let me run DiRT 2 @ 1680x1050 maxed out in DX9 for hours.

Then it died, because of a shoddy motherboard. I was sorry to see it go, because that cheap, 10 pound fifty piece of garbage didn't give up until it was callously executed by an evil Biostar motherboard.

I'm being harsh on the Biostar. That was a decent mobo for cheap. Shame it couldn't overclock worth a damn. Vcore adjustments of +3.3%, +6.6% and +10% only? Urgh.

 

Never had a Maxtor hd fail and I own 2 or 3. One (160GB) is still in use for storage but I will probably retire it before the year is out. I'll just keep it as a spare like the others. They are all a bit small for my needs these days.

Only thing I've ever had to RMA was a Gigabyte motherboard. So I now steer well clear of them. Maybe I was just unlucky. But it was the first time I'd bought one from them, and it was enough to put me off.

 

Back in the day i had a striker extreme motherboard which was a beautiful board, i got OCZ SLI ram... 2 weeks one stick broke... 4 days after that the next stick goes... after e-mailing the supplier i got a e-mail back "You don't happen to have a striker extreme motherboard do you?", Strange.. got 2 more OCZ SLI Sticks which did the same within 3 weeks... Never bought memory from OCZ agian

 

HP.
Screwed me on a faulty 2x CD Writer. Spent all my Birthday money on it as well :'(

Will never spend any of my own money on their gear. We use them a lot at work and they provide decent support and warranty. Still on my blacklist though.

 

I'd also never buy an eMachines computer after attempting to fix my girlfriend's. They really do put the cheapest, crappiest parts inside their machines.

But that's a 'duh' since it's eMachines.

 

Black List:
- Maxtor
- Seagate
- ASUS motherboards
- Antec PSU low and high-end
- Acer
- HP
- Apple products
- Creative Labs


GoogByte's approval:
- Dell Small Business systems (with their excellent Next business day On Site service, and local (same country) tech support)
- Dell Monitors
- Logitech
- Antec Computer cases
- Corsair
- Nintendo
- BFG
- Western Digital
- Gigabyte

All the above mentions companies are those who I genuinely got full long term experience with the product and got also to experience their after sale service.
They are brands I have, and enjoy that are not listed. These are yet to be in either list (they are on my white list for now), as I did not get a full term experience with them.

 

I second ASUS Motherboards.

I was pretty annoyed when my A8NSLI-Deluxes chipset fan became noisy then suddenly died. A common fault they couldn't be bothered to fix, so I can't be bothered to buy from them in the future.

 

You know I have stuck with ASUS through thick and thin. Defended them loads of times but what has annoyed me is that with their new X58 boards and I have had two namely the P6TD Deluxe and the Gene II, they won't on a consistent basis read all my memory unless you play around with the voltages of which I think they should have got right from the beginning. My next board will be something different and will try Gigabyte I think as loads of you guys have been rating them highly.

I have been using ASUS since my first one which was a P4P800e deluxe which is quite long back. So I hate to agree with you on this one but I do.

 

Intel - for motherboards. I had a top of the range X48 board that I just couldn't get to work, and those b****s had me buying new CPUs, RAM, borrowing friends CPUs and RAM, listing every make and model of every attached component. And every time I'd come back having jumped through another hoop they'd respond with something like; "well, that stepping of the Q6600 is supported, but probably not on the version of the BIOS that was shipped with the board given the manufacture date - see if you can get a CPU from this approved list of compatible processors and let me know how you get on". Eventually I just started lying - saying I'd borrowed a certain CPU or type of RAM - even so it was around 2 1/2 months before I got an RMA number out of them. By that time I'd bought a Foxconn board and vowed never to touch another Intel product... in retrospect that might be a bit hard to live up to, but I'll try.

 

Still have the same board. I replaced the chipset fan myself with a passive heatsink. It was a popular mod back in the day and then the "Premium" version of the board was upgraded. My Dad still runs the Premium and both work perfectly. So I like them.

I'm gonna have to go with Seagate as well. Aside from that, nobody to single out really.

 

Was waiting for this lol.

 

Cant understand this Asus hate, well actually i can but the point still stands my p5b deluxe has never failed to impress. 4 years old in november, weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

 

Well at every iPod I got, that broke under warranty, they said it's not covered... apparently a white screen on a perfect, scratch-less iPod is my fault.
Where I work, we got 24 iMac (last gen)... 9 of them were faulty. We receive 60 Lenovo's PC, and 90 Dell, and only 3 where faulty (bad RAM) COMBINED.

It was a hard battle to get Apple to replace the iMac's (and we had to pay shipping), while Lenovo and Dell where please to come and fix it the business next day.

It's because you got a manufacture error, it's not designed to last that long! j/k.

 

Packard Bell, eMachines, Hewlett Packard/Compaq. The first two are bad, very bad. HP aren't so bad but have their faults, i.e. very noisy, very hot laptops.

 

To be fair to OCZ, around that time some Asus boards did have problems with certain memory configurations. It went so far as Asus publishing a list of supported memory modules.

I don't keep a list of good and bad manufacturers. Most of them are pretty good nowadays, though I stay away from XFX custom PCBs if I possibly can, even if they do have an awesome warranty.

 

They fixed it and gave it a new name. AWESOME. Pretty sure they still continued to sell the board knowing it had a fault.

To be fair I modded mine too, but the point still stand that they overlooked a fundamental problem on a board that wasn't exactly cheap.

Still think it was a bit lame imo.

While we are on the subject though I will express my full fan boy colours - CORSAIR!

 

Black list:
Creative Labs(except earbuds)
Maxtor
HP's laptops
Acer Screens
Phillips
FSP

White list:
Denon low end stuff
Belkin
Asus laptops
Microsoft hardware
Samsung
Saitek
Corsair

 

"Aopen" if they even still exist, and of course Dell.

 

That's because some G.Skill memory has issues in Asus boards - the tRD (or something) is set too fast in the G.Skill SPD. Try cleaning the memory contacts too - sometimes they get dirty and a stick of memory doesn't get read. If that doesn't work and it's one particular DIMM then the SPD chip is corrupt and you'll need to RMA it. Again, another G.Skill issue I ran into recently on a Gigabyte board.

Unfortunately there's lots of threads about random cold boot issues with Ripjaws and Asus boards - you seem unlucky with trident which are usually better.

Goodbytes - the latest Antec PSUs should be awesome. Antec now employs a proper engineer who is working with Delta and Seasonic as OEM.

Bindi's Bad List
Maxtor hard drives. ****ing useless.
Apple software - you never do what I want you to. It's always some ******** restriction making me rage quit and smack my keyboard. **** you and your rules and your ****ing DRMing things THAT DON'T NEED IT.

I'm not allowed a good or bad list beyond that. Have to keep an open mind

 

powercolor gpu's xfx motherboards and bfg gpu's