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The "worst" purchases you've ever made

Aretak said:
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.


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.

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I had one of these too. It overclocked really well after replacing the cooler with a Gellid icy vision 2 and flashing to the best asus bios.

It was the same price that I could get for selling my 6950, slightly faster and came with a free game. A no-brainer.
 
Leap Motion - it looked great in the videos but real world it was useless.
OCZ Vertex LE - failed after six months, the replacement even quicker.
 
Sapphire 295x2, owned it for 6 days before sending it back.
Could not keep it cool despite the claims of below 60c from manufacturers, I struggled to stay below 75c throttle limit.
 
X300se. I thought it could run games. I was mistaken.
Went and bought a 6600gt and could not believe the difference.

Runners up:

8800gts 320mb. Suffered constant memory leaks. Spent more time alt tabbing then anything else. Though eventually I think a driver update resolved this.

X1900xtx crossfire. Made the room feel like hell on a hot day with 2 jackets and winter socks on.
 
R9 285 Card , had it for just under 3 months , was a bit of an impulse buy as it was on sale quite cheap £120 , then I brought a 290X and flogged the 285 for £90
 
2006. I was using a 4 or 5 year old Powermac G4 that I'd had all through uni. It was a 1Ghz dual processor machine. I really wanted a new mac but it was way out of my budget as I was making poor money and paying off my student loan, so I decided to build a hackintosh.

I built a what I thought was a pretty good system around a 3Ghz Pentium D (Prescott?) and an ATI X1600XT.

I was deeply disappointed to discover the Pentium D was ******* pitiful. For the kind of stuff I was doing (I was big into Cinema 4D at the time) the much older G4 was still quicker.

I ran linux on it for a while before finally giving in and installing Windows XP so I could at least play games on it. I still despise windows but as an engineer by day and a gaming enthusiast I grit my teeth and live with it...

Can't say I've really regretted anything I've bought since, but I do research the **** out of everything before I buy it.
 
Sargatanas2511 said:
Long time ago now, but a Ti4600 that was DoA. Being that this was just after an MX440 that died after a week, I went for an ATi card, a 9700 pro which was amazing.
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Having a card that was DOA is hardly justification for the worst purchase you ever made. :rolleyes:

The Ti 4600 was an awesome GPU. The Geforce 4MX range was basically just a Geforce 2 MX on steroids.
 
2900XT.

Hated it when I got it, Whats funny is it actually got more use past 2 years than the 6 months I used it when I bought it all them years ago.

In the end of its life, it proved what a actual good card it was, played elder scrolls online absolutely fine :p

Another bad one was the 4870x2

Fantastic card when I got it, crap when it got confused if it was dual gpu or a single gpu card.
 
Radeon 9800SE - can't remember which make, but I bought into the hype that it could be unlocked to a full 9800, except didn't do my homework and bought the one with a 128-bit rather than 256-bit bus (and so couldn't even try to unlock).

Tagan PSU - can't remember the model number, but it was one of the first PSUs marketed for enthusiasts, raved about in CustomPC etc. Bought one and it blew up within a month, got a replacement but it suffered from electrical whine, so ended up with a Hiper Type R.

Also:
"Sparkle" Geforce 3 Ti200 - bought this based on recommendation from Friends who at the time had GF2 Ultra's, and launch GF3s. Great card, however ironically the first one I received actually exploded with Sparks (Sparkle lol) everywhere. No idea how my motherboard survived, but somehow did.
 
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Lokken86 said:
X300se. I thought it could run games. I was mistaken.
Went and bought a 6600gt and could not believe the difference.

Runners up:

8800gts 320mb. Suffered constant memory leaks. Spent more time alt tabbing then anything else. Though eventually I think a driver update resolved this.

X1900xtx crossfire. Made the room feel like hell on a hot day with 2 jackets and winter socks on.
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LOOOL! I had a 6600GT and it was one of the best cards ive ever owned.

I also had the 8800GTS and I adored that thing - it ran anything I could throw at it and some. Loved it to death.

I also had an X1900XTX and its the best ATI card Ive ever owned. Ive got team green again now but the 1900 offered performance at the time that in my opinion was far better price by price than any green offering.

I game less now sadly but have a 970 and honestly its superb also.
 
I´m not sure how much my cpu at the time held it back (an AMD Athlon 2500), but I wasn´t all that impressed with the ATi X800 Pro Vivo 256mb.
 
Back in the day I bought a 3DFX Voodoo3 3000, while my friends went for Nvidia GeForce 256's. Not only was I an outcast for getting a different card, but the Voodoo was also significantly slower. Painful memories :(
 
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