X1650Pro, from x800GTO, not upgrade at all. actually, i'd say my worst purchase is buying x800GTO over 6800GT, could have saved me the x1650pro purchase. then my 2nd worst purchase was 5870, because i didn't need to upgrade from my gtx260. performance was similar as far as i can tell, only reason bought it was due to Dx11, which 5870 sucks at. CPU history: 486, AthlonXP, [didn't upgrade for a while] Core2Quad, i7. nothing disappointing. GPU history: can't remember before this, Geforce 2 Mx, Geforce 4 Ti, x800GTO, x1650pro [no upgrade for a bit] 8800GTX (22"), gtx260 (24"), 5870 (24") and gtx580 (27"). so, looking back, it's ATI cards what were my worst purchases. so perhaps i should stay green from now on.
My Core2Quad system from dell; not that it was a bad pc as such, but it was just before i got into building my own, i could of wept at what i could of had for the same money
I think for me it has to be my i7 950 & Asus sabertooth for £380 one day before sandybridge review comes out. dont get me wrong cpu is fast its at 4.2ghz but should of waited
mine would be a celeron can't remeber speed actually, which was quickly replaced by a pentium 4 2.8 (build no.3), before prescott was released - that was my second build, and only because my amd based first build machine died, back in 1997-8
My phase where I had to have SCSI disks looking back now would be my most wasteful purchases. Had an adaptec ISA card (1540 anybody remember them) to start off with some 4gb hard disks, eventually progressed to a 2940uw with some 74gb hard disks. In the end when I sold my SCSI stuff I managed to buy a pair of 120gb SATA disks, so twice the storage space I had and still had money left over.
I built my first desktop PC in 1997 in a massive server case and it was quiet and powerful for the time, especially with upgrades over the years. I then bought a Novatech PC in 2002 as I couldn't build one of the same specification for the price. As it turns out neither could they. It sounded like a 747 on the take off run, the PSU failed and took out the hard drives, DVD and graphics card (replaced under warranty). The memory failed twice, one of the times outside the warranty. The replacement PSU (probably cost them all of 50p) failed and so did the graphics card again outside the warranty. The only decent components were the Abit motherboard, Pentium 2.5GHz and I suppose the aluminium the case looked nice. Over the years the hard drives failed on a fairly regular basis. Put me off Novatech for a long time.
Hmm... pestering my father to upgrade a P133mhz to P200mhz. ...MMX technology came out three weeks later.
Buying a backplate from the USA for my Swiftech Apogee XT and then realising it's exactly the same as the one for my TRUE!!!
I purchased the i7 950 / Mem / Mobo from a friend doing the same before Xmas, the sleepless nights of him knowing he should have waited made him crack and sell it to be for peanuts! Atleast you didnt do that! I am loving my 950 @ mates rates
Buffalo Terrastation Pro 1TB (v1.0) in 2006. A 1TB proprietory hardware based NAS that became obsolete very shortly afterward for £566 - sigh. I still have it, it still works fine but it made me too nervous to use it. If the hardware dies, I will not be able to recover the data as I would have to find a PowerPC based system with the exact same RAID controller - I found one person on the net who managed to find an old PowerPC Mac and a RAID card, got it all working somehow and he still couldn't recover the RAID 5 array. I'm probably going to mod it into a mini-ITX system when I get time, that is about all that is worth doing with it.
I’ve been green for years and I cant really justify why, I once owned an ATI card (back when quake 3 and unreal tournament was my 2 main games) and it was sensational, but when it was time to upgrade I went green again with the ti4600 which was also awesome. Time went by and all I ever heard was good things about ATI, around the time HL2 came out they were in fact the dominant GPU in terms of public favour even valve favoured them. I bought a 6800 ultra and found it quite disappointing, at the time I used AMD religiously however my asus motherboard died and for the first time I used a 3gb Intel chip on a gigabyte board (also the 1st time I hadn’t used asus) with a huge front side bus and it was an awesome set up, I was converted to Intel chips. That system died 4-5 years ago around the time I had a breakdown and lost my job at the time, Now I own a new machine, my 1st in all that time and when it came to researching and choosing parts for it I new it was NVIDIA that id pick, I also stayed with Intel and opted to stick by asus, thankfully all these brands are solid after all this time. I still think about going back to ATI, but I can never make the leap.
I'm torn between my current system (i7 860) and the pair of 4870x2 blocks I bought from Heatkiller direct-one of 5 or so all acrylic tops and both blocks were racked and non-returnable.
Cooler Master M700W from Aria. Managed to get the perfect product/supplier RMA nightmare from hell. PSU was utter poo, even a shonky 450W generic £20 PSU worked were the CM failed. Aria made the whole experience even worse and have lost my respect and custom forever.
What's wrong with that PSU? Been fine with me for a while now. Worst purchase may have been my e5200, 1 core just sucked, couldn't break 5GHz
Helping a friend order a PC from Mesh in autumn 2004 brand new gpu blew inside of 2 months nvidia 6800gt took it back as i lived in london not far from them took 3 weeks to get back then 2 months later psu blew when i had it checked by a pc engineer who worked for my friend he said power supply looked like it had been opened and messed around with will never buy anything from Mesh and advise everyone else not to use them
