Possibly a 2x512MB pair of OCZ PC3700EB memory, which I recall was £360 (when a "normal" 1GB set was around 1/3 the cost). That said, it was cracking memory, so probably not the worst, but maybe the least cost effective. I've not bought properly mental memory since then, I've got 16GB now, but it's Corsair value. I've got a rather illustrious history of poor value purchases come to think of it, various SCSI drives (back when SCSI was indeed the dog's), a £500 RAID card, a £400 Geforce3 (it came with 3D specs though, in 2000, before it's time much?) The true worst is probably a 2x256MB pair of Corsair PC4000. The price was extortionate, they didn't overclock for toffee (replaced with a cheapo set of A-Data PC4000 that overclocked to 320MHz for a fraction the price), and I should have bought a gig anyway! EDIT: I just recalled a better winner - A PowerVR 3Dx card, when I already had an nVidia Riva128. Parents bought a PC with the nVidia card in it, though nVidia had naff all publicity at that time, and all the cool kids had 3Dfx or PowerVR cards. Little did I know that the Riva128 blew all of them completely out of the water, and I wasted £180 (when I was 13, £180 being a gargantuan amount of money). I was able to play a few extra games because of the PowerVR card (ones which use PVR specific engines and didn't use D3D), sure, but for anything that could use Direct3D, the gap between them was hilarious.
Budget end Asus mobo (umm MN8-H/HDMI i think). Ugly, slow, preposterous positioning of connectors.......When i look back i'm glad i killed the damn thing by accident.
X800 instead of an 6800GT. I then got both my flat mates to buy X800s too thinking they were top quality and that DX9 would never take off.....whoops.
Bought a 7900gt. Not a bad card. Bought a second one. Kept getting clock timing errors when trying to use in sli, great fps though when it did work, sold off the one. Still have the other one boxed lying around. Upgraded to a 7950 GX2. Bought it just before the 8 series was released. Luckily it was EVGA so just used their stepup program to upgrade to an 8800gtx which i still have. A viewsonic 24" monitor (god damn it was crap) before I realised the error of my ways and returned it and got an NEC 20WGX2 S-IPS 20" screen. £150 more than the price of the bigger screen but hey (paid £400. Crazy money but it's one sweet monitor). No comparison. An amd single core s939 processor and a week later there were price drops on the x2 s939 cpu's, so bought a dual core x2 s939, and then just kept the single core collecting dust. Sold it on ebay later for next to nothing.
Wow, well you guys have certainly got me beat. I think I have to add my HAF932, for $30 more I could gotten the relatively cheap Aluminum beatuy that is the ATCS840, which has FAN FILTERS. Hmm another terrible purchase(although not one I made) is my dad's Macbook air he bought recently. 1300 bones and using a C2D still..
aye something to be said for that. Mind this sabertooth x58 board has been a pain, the sata 6g/s ports wont let me set my 6gb/s ssd to boot!
Am I the only person who was perfectly happy with this board? I've read so many stories about how bad they are, but mines been running the exact same processor, overclocked to 3 GHz solidly for about 3 1/2 years now, without any issues whatsoever... Worst hardware purchase tho... gotta be spending £25 on cheap power supplies and wondering why they kept blowing out after 3 months!
A laptop from pcspecialist.co.uk. 3 mobo failures in the past 6 months after 2 and a half years of use. I'm using it atm, and it works fine when it decides to behave, but I'm looking at a Sandy rig purchase once it goes. BTW, I know a desktop is more reliable, but the portability was needed at the time. It isn't now.
Buying a laptop I was a uni student then, so I didn't really have a choice though. Still ruing how I thought an 8600M GT would be fine for gaming (ok, to be fair, it mostly is - if I drop the res to 1280x800)
Buying a laptop here aswell probs actually. Am at uni and so though presumed I'd need one, but only used it a couple of times, once just cos of a powercut
Asus Striker Extreme 2, had the EVGA 680i which was flawless, when everyone else's died constantly, sold it for the Striker 2. Biggest mistake. Went through 3 of them in a month, first was DOA, second was returned to Asus, and was sent back faulty from Asus, which became the 3rd. And it was all because i couldn't Raid my 2 WD Raptors, which worked perfectly in a £60 Asus board. Sam
Not my personal purchase, but back in 96/97 or something, while we had a P133, my father got a Matrox 3D add-in card (like the old voodoo ones that used the regular 2D cards for the output itself) when I pestered him for something capable of running new games... it wasn't. No idea what it was called, but it was utter rubbish... I can't think of any other hardware purchase that I regret. Maybe a Kingston USB key which was tiny and the plastic casing fell apart
Back in the early 90's I bought a 486 DX2/50 which had EISA architecture and a SCSI drive. Cost me an arm and a leg, but I thought I was king because the drive transfer rates were so high. Erm...yes... It was a tiny Quantum drive and I ran out of space pretty quickly, and SCSI drives were a fortune. Worse still PC gaming (of which I was already a fan) really started taking off around that time and of course there were no graphics card that supported the EISA architecture (and there's only so far you could take 16 bit ISA ) It was only a matter of months before I ditched it, pulled the chip and dropped it into one of the "fancy new" VESA Local Bus motherboards with appropriate card (Tseng ET4000 probably, I don't remember) and overclocked the nuts off it. That ran Doom like a Mofo...
I too had no less than two faulty Striker Extreme boards (third time lucky - still going strong after over 3 years, with the 2 Raptors in RAID0) On both RMS'd boards it was the BIOS chip that was at fault. My worst purchase must be the AMD 4800, cost a fortune, and then the C2D CPU's arrived, which were cheaper and much much better in every way.
Easy for me, most disappointing upgrade was replacing my absolutely outstanding Ati 9800Pro 256 with a 5800FX, I'd saved up all my pennies for that card, at the time I had a poorly paid job and got it on day one, I guess I was swayed by Nvidias marketing at the time, and demo videos, to find it by and large, loud, annoying, power hungry and honestly, not a big step up from my 9800 (which in my memory at least) seemed to rule the roost for a very long time. I swore off Nvidia hardware for a long time after that, having felt utterly stung.
