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The "worst" purchases you've ever made

My very first PC had a 8600GT in it (Paired with a athlon x2 5200 @2.8GHz or something). Man that card was pretty mediocre.

I went from a 4890 at 720p to a 7870 at 1080p when the 7 series was new. That felt like a very mediocre "jump" compared to 8600GT to 4890! I replaced it with a 7970 pretty soon!
 
Probably a bit before most of your time but my worst buy was a Matrox Mystique.
A fantastic card...... For both games that supported it :/
 
The two Nvidia cards I purchased prior to the release of the 8800 GTX, because the image quality was absolutely pathetic compared to ATI cards.

(2000) Creative 3D Blaster Nvidia Riva TNT2 32MB - crap image quality.
(2001) ELSA GLADIAC Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS 64MB - crap image quality.
 
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Two leadtek gtx 6800 gt cards. First ever pc build so went all out on an sli setup. Two cards died within a week.
 
GTX 980. Such a premium for such a small bump over the 970. I mainly bought it because I went through four 970s that all had insufferable coil whine and didn't want to risk another one. Only positive is that I ended up getting almost all my money back for it on eBay four months later.

Telecaster said:
VTX3D HD 7870 Black Edition - utter garbage, ran loud and super hot, case airflow made barely any difference, not surprising looking back at it now, that cooler looks complete pony.
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Huh. I had a VTX3D 7850 X-Edition for a year or so and thought it was a great little card. Certainly much cooler and quieter than the 4870 that it replaced. The cooler was a fair bit different to the card you mentioned though.

1huafHl.jpg
 
tyler_jrb said:
Must have been very unlucky, bad batch maybe? My ROG swift has run fine. I did get some flies stuck in the panel. Both my Acer and swift. Asus would replace Acer didnt. Received replacement swift. Swapped at the door and it has again run perfectly no defects or problems for the past month.

Compared to my Acer, the Acer is garbage and that is my worst purchase. I hardly ever use it and would sell it if it wasn't for the flies. Poor quality, Poor customer service. Ill just wait for it to die and replace and sell. Worst £500 I have ever spent.
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I think they changed it more recently with the Swift due to the bad publicity but Asus's RMA procedure has largely been round-robin game of customer returns in the hope that eventually people get one that works for them or give up :S so once you are in that loop it tends to be bad replacement after bad replacement :(

Some of the early Swifts had a higher than normal chance of issues but I think they sorted it with the more recent batchess
 
xfx 7870 ghz edition the cooler on that card was terrible sent it back under dsr or xfx 4890xt the last ati leaf blower style card I've owned and if I get tinnitus this one may have been the cause
 
6870 #2: crossfire worked well, but 1GB vram just wasn't enough.

7950 #3: was unnecessary looking back, the vram was enough (barely) for 3 cards, but the stutter it introduced was bad, and i didn't get much better fps than just 2 cards. only really held on to it for so long because i couldn't be bothered to dismantle my water loop.

Overall my worst purchase (inc non gpu's) would be a samsung sm951 ssd. had high hopes for it but in the end it wasn't even supported by my board, sold it straight away and bought a sandisk z400 for raid.
 
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Fury X.

Terrible cards, had 2 of em, both EEEEEE'd like absolute ****, i should have just gone for the non Xs in the first place, as absolutely fantastic cards they are :D
 
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Nvidia FX 5900 Ultra, a friend bought for me in Miami for almost U$500, after 1 month the card died, I posted the card back to the shop to get it replaced, they want to send a 5700 back, I said no... at the end they didn't send anything, didn't reply my e-mails anymore... so I lost around U$550 as I had to post the card from SP-Brazil to Miami.
After that I only had AMD cards, until a GTX260.
 
R295X2 to be honest the card itself was very well built, support though was a joke, no crossfire support for latest games, no HDMI adaptor that was promised, by far my biggest waste of money.
 
My most expensive mistake was spending 380 pounds on an MSI TF 290x gaming. I bought it too replace an EVGA 780 Classified because I planned on getting a second card for crossfire and wanted the extra ram of memory to maximise life. At the time I was often hiting the 780's 3gb's limit due to the texture mods I game with. What I got was a 94 degree oven that I wouldn't dare add another card with. It takes me a long time too save up for my hardware so that was my worst mistake so far....
 
nashathedog said:
My most expensive mistake was spending 380 pounds on an MSI TF 290x gaming. I bought it too replace an EVGA 780 Classified because I planned on getting a second card for crossfire and wanted the extra ram of memory to maximise life. At the time I was often hiting the 780's 3gb's limit due to the texture mods I game with. What I got was a 94 degree oven that I wouldn't dare add another card with. It takes me a long time too save up for my hardware so that was my worst mistake so far....
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Must have been something wrong with the cooler as the twin frozr version of that card in reviews was in the 75c range or thereabouts.
 
Aretak said:
I had a VTX3D 7850 X-Edition for a year or so and thought it was a great little card. Certainly much cooler and quieter than the 4870 that it replaced. The cooler was a fair bit different to the card you mentioned though.

1huafHl.jpg
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I bought one of these and it had too go back as faulty, The replacement was also faulty so that went back for a refund and I got the Sapphire o/c 7850 instead. That was a great card so I got a second of those for crossfire which was a terrible experience at the time so I sold the second 7850 and eventually moved to an MSI TF 7950 boost.
 
Gerard said:
Must have been something wrong with the cooler as the twin frozr version of that card in reviews was in the 75c range or thereabouts.
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It's a common problem suffered by many (not all) owners of Hawaii on the Twin Frozer 4 cards and DCUII cards. It's the heatsink. The cooler was recycled and the heatsink is too thin and unsuitable. As you'll see from the difference with the heatsink they used for Grenada (three times thicker in places). 75 degrees under load is rubbish, I researched it after getting the card as I had also read those so-called reviews. I complained to OCUK and there response was it is fine we use the same card in one of our shop rigs and it runs at 94 degrees all day long with no problems.
 
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