Hardware to avoid

[ikjadoon]

I like my Pentium M 1.73Ghz!

~Ibrahim~

 

[bluntside]

i play in 1600x1200 and when you only have 1 7900gt and you want to play smoothly w/out having any stutters and you want the game to look killer, then yea, you want SLI 😀

 

[Parge]

anything that rolls through the Doors @ CyberPower.

-A friend of mine bought a $3800 very high-end PC from there and when we unboxed it...doa...and we had to install the back plates, "Fan Controller" was nothing more than a clock (Fan Headers were connected to MOBO, Temp sensors were all sensing ambient air ), Restore disk did not work, XP Pro License looked as if it came off of a laser printer (no holograms or anything)
.

Has anyone else had problems with these guys, I was just about to spend £1300 on a new pc from them!!!? (Well, when DX10 rolls around)

 

[ikjadoon]

HORRID COMPANY!! Stay away!

~Ibrahim~

 

[Darkchyld]

I've had a 7500 AIW, a 9600 AIW, and am considering a multi-media box that will have an AIW, ( still researching parts, prices and the like. ) Setting up the software always seemed tough but battled through it and was rewarded with excellent results, performance on par with the GPU's. All-round decent cards..

Someone keeps bringing up Maxtor HD's. looked in my dead pile and, yup, lots of Maxtors, in fact all Maxtors. Wish I'd kept purchase and install/failure dates on them. Like Seagates for the 5 yr warr. No prob with them so far.

Recently had an Antec PS fail under warr. To they're credit Antec took good care of me. MSI MB too failed 32 days after purchase, customer service made me happy. :lol:

I wonder, is there a thread for the good stuff/experaince??

 

[7H4_D00D3]

2. Cheapo PC-Chips/ECS/Asrock boards. Usually they're designs are so inefficient they'll start POSTing at least 10 seconds after you hit the power button. (This isn't a problem during normal service, but you see we assemble PCs for people and its a real pain to wait everytime during those 1001 restarts windows makes you go through). Examples are PC-Chips M761LMRT and Asrock K7VM3.

That may be your experience, for me ASROCK works just fine, it's not the best brand by any means but if you're looking for something cheap that will do the job it's the perfect cost/effective choice....my granny doesn't need mad oveclocking options to check her mail....

 

[PSYCHoHoLiC]

I've never owned an asrock, but have used a few for customer's computers.. They arent all that bad.. afterall they ARE a subsidiary of ASUS.

 

[s4fun]

Any ATI SE (Stupid Edition) boards. Neutered worthless crap.

 

[harmattan]

Steer clear away from HP Pavilion laptops - USB ports not following specs, fried DVD burner and real dustbusters (P4 based).

I actually have a Pavilion (Athlon 900) from 2000 that still runs strong. It does put out some massive heat though.

I've also still got a working 5900FX and a 4400Ti. I never understood the whole FX hatred. Guess I just got lucky...

Things to avoid:

P4's - I had a 570 for a while. You could cook muffins in the case.

Saitek X52 Joystick and Throttle - It looks sweet, but the drivers are shite and the joystick is only recognized 1/2 the time. Large paperweight.

Anything Cyberpower - While I've avoided like the plague, two of my friends weren't so smart. They were sorry.

286/386 math co-processors (yeah...old school) - you could just buy a "DX" version with it built-in for cheaper.

 

[kittle]

interesting set of opinions...

Ive never had any problems with my maxtor hard drives. I got them because they were 2x faster then their seagate and WD counterparts.

back when everyone was bashing IBM's deskStar drives for running hot, mine ran flawlessly for around 5 years.


stuff ive had PROBLEMS with...
ATI 9600 vid card -- crashed my PC on startup. went back go TI4600, problem solved

XFX brand geforce cards. driver would not find card, 3 weeks back & forth with manufacturer, return card for RMA. went back to above TI4600

Antec 1080 case (front door would break off in shipment).

PowerColor video cards - drivers that came with card would not find the card.



Stuff I wish other people would stay away from:
USB keyboards.

Bootable RAID array and Windows XP.

Outlook express (world's greatest virus conduit).

 

[Pepicek]

my hardware to avoid is any old Compaq that uses proprietary components (or any manufacturer that spurns the standards)

I play with a lot of old systems.

 

[7H4_D00D3]

PowerColor video cards - drivers that came with card would not find the card.

Partially agree, had a 9250, it had issues UNLESS you installed the drivers in a very specific set of steps, and updating was the same, a bit annoying but easily solved 😛

 

[shata]

i play in 1600x1200 and when you only have 1 7900gt and you want to play smoothly w/out having any stutters and you want the game to look killer, then yea, you want SLI 😀

yeah normaly your fine with one(1) mid to flagship card at or under 1600x1200

 

[fainis]

PLEASE, no one buy a prescott, or any Netburst based CPU

please go away :tongue: ...hmm...netburst,,he said

what notebook with a prescott cpu....i think you will need a battery as big as texas

 

[AngelDeath82]

stuff ive had PROBLEMS with...
Antec 1080 case (front door would break off in shipment).

Stuff I wish other people would stay away from:
USB keyboards.

Don't know if the 1080's were much different, but I've got 2 SX1040B-II's and know multiple other people with 1000-series chassis without any problems regarding the door breaking off. (Even with me lugging mine around every few months for LAN's).

USB Keyboards - as long as you have a new enough MB and OS, this is a non-issue. Happily typing away on my Ideazon zBoard which I've owned since at least December, and I haven't had a single problem with it.

 

[rupert86]

rupert86 wrote:

2. Cheapo PC-Chips/ECS/Asrock boards. Usually they're designs are so inefficient they'll start POSTing at least 10 seconds after you hit the power button. (This isn't a problem during normal service, but you see we assemble PCs for people and its a real pain to wait everytime during those 1001 restarts windows makes you go through). Examples are PC-Chips M761LMRT and Asrock K7VM3.

7H4_D00D3 wrote:
That may be your experience, for me ASROCK works just fine, it's not the best brand by any means but if you're looking for something cheap that will do the job it's the perfect cost/effective choice....my granny doesn't need mad oveclocking options to check her mail....

Hmmm, not all products of any company are good. Neither are all products of some company bad. Its just the general perception (majority, that is). For once, I've never waited more than 2 secs for an ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Intel mobo to start POSTing. I've seen it happen only on ECS (Elitegroup), Chaintech (this must be an isolated case plaguing maybe only one model, they usu have good products), PC-Chips and Asrock (I haven't tried many Asrock mobos, just the K7VM3 broke the impression so I stopped recommending it to other people).

And regarding your granny not needing OCing options (many people don't need them), you're true, but a high-end mobo doesn't mean only-and-only OCing options. And neither being a low-end (value) means stripping of those options. I have seen may value boards (e.g: MSI KM4M-L) which are quite quick to response (in fact installs standard XP pro in 16 minutes w/ Barton 2500+, 512MB and Seagate Barracuda 7200.7). Value board usually means micro ATX, lacking all those extra HDD, WiFi/bluetooth, FireWire and other controllers that some high-end motherboards have. Value boards usu only provide basic functionality (that is provided with the chipset). Low-end does mean I wouldn't get too many processors support (my MSI K8N Neo supports Turion S754, since its midrange, but not the budget ones), it means there wouldn't be as many onboard controllers, it means there will be lesser number of expansion slots, but nowhere does it imply it will have to be so poorly designed the components won't start synchronizing with each other even many seconds after startup.

Most probably not all of the Asrock mobos suck. (I'm very much into individual testing and not to forming a general opinion about the whole group on the basis of one example, the only reason why I stopped buying Asrock is that there are so many other options on the market I could expose my customers to. Its not b/c of some bias against Asrock/Asus).

EDIT: Another hardware to avoid are inno3D VGA cards. Although a bit inexpensive, and their good side is that they also write the memory channel width [like 'Geforce 6800GT (256-bit)'], I've found it most annoying that they tend to die in their 13th month of purchase. Although its good b/c it saves us warrantee hassles (we have 10 months warr here) and also fetches a new order, its against fair business practice and also agaimst Islamic teaching to sell something you know isn't as durable as the competitors. And I've noted it in all types of Inno3D cards, right from the Geforce 4 MX4000 to Gefroce 6800GT (we haven't got a 7-series back uptil now).

 

[windego]

XFX Geforce 7900GT graphic cards. Fan runs at max rpm constantly, and is extremely noisy. I RMA'ed it, got a EVGA one.

Not sure if the same applies to all their cards. My system is dead quiet, so a loud card stuck out like a sore thumb.

Raptor 74gig HD. Extremely noisy, bad performance. New segate drives are superior.

 

[SerbianBoy_Mylo]

I would add VIA chipset for INTEL!!! Specialy P4X400, P4X533, P4PT800 and PT880Pro. They have some issues with ATI cards and SATA interface too, and BIOS updates are... no comment 8O

BTW I bought a ASUS A8S-X motherboard and AMD 3200+ s939 a few days ago and i run perfect!!! I recommend this motherboard for low budget PC`s

 

[Dade_0182]

May Wusy not find this post. In his eyes, you just did the unthinkable: ASUS + AMD. He explained it all in his my personal anti thread.

 

[mitch074]

There was no DX edition of the 286; the DX version of the 386 didn't include a math coprocessor. 386 editions are hard to track, so here goes:
oSX: 'value' branch using a 16-bit bus width, which allowed it to run with 2 9-bit RAM sticks (8-bit addressing, 1 bit parity, total 16 bit addressing) but with lower memory transfert speed
o DX: high grade branch, using a 32-bit wide bus requiring either 4 9-bit RAM sticks or one 32-bit FPM-DRAM stick (yes, there were some), sometimes coupled with some on-board L2 cache (mine had 64 Kb)
o LX: like SX, but understanding the 'halt' instruction - first power saving feature, used in laptops.
You're referring to the 486 when you say that the DX version had an on-chip FPU coprocessor.

ASRock is the cheapo brand name used by Asus to sell cheap stuff - it is usually robust but feature barren.

The early Nvidia FX cards were not much faster than GF4 ti on DirectX 8 games, and had an incomplete DX9 feature set (they didn't support all of OpenGL 1.5 either), ran REALLY hot and thus required a lot of power, a huge, noisy cooler (original 5800 was nicknamed 'dustbuster') and a lot of patience. It didn't bring much over the GF4 ti line and was completely buried by the GF6 line (much cooler, more feature complete, much faster) - thus the reputation of being a black sheep.

Maxtor hard drives were extremely robust during the 1 Gb era, but turned into real crap later on. They got better these past few years, but the reputation they earned themselves in the 3-12 Gb days sticks to them (I had a 1 Gb Maxtor running fast for 5 years - until I sold it, and a 20 Gb still running).

 

[SerbianBoy_Mylo]

Why not? 😀 I never had any problem with ASUS+AMD (K8N+AMD s754) or (A8x+AMD s939)

 

[TBlaar]

ok...

this is only my opinion.

ECS motherboards
Have never had any luck with them. maybe it's also because our ECS supplier is useless..

Western Digital Harddrives
OK, say I'm gonna get burnt on the stake for saying this.
I have a 40gig in my PC. manufacture date late 2003.
it works, but it soulds like an angle grinder.
all western digital drives i have ever owned started to get this noisy after some years. i mean, this 40 gig drive is still under warranty, but wont be swopped, because it works...
I now only use seagate, and i am happy!!!

CTX Monitors
Mine blew within 3 months, got new one, was fixed 6 months later, and now it's dead again. damn things...


umm..... i'm sure there's more.....

 

[TSIMonster]

PLEASE, no one buy a prescott, or any Netburst based CPU

please go away :tongue: ...hmm...netburst,,he said

what notebook with a prescott cpu....i think you will need a battery as big as texas

Nope, sorry, your stuck with me.

And it was one of those Desktop replacement laptops... battery lasts about 45 minutes, and if you sit it on anything other then a hard surface (say, your lap), it overheats within minutes and shuts off. I just hate Pentium 4s and any netburst based celeron, have had no expirience with Pentium Ds though.

On the other had, I love my Dothan Pentium Ms (Have 2)

 

[Fox_granit]

I've had both good and bad things with any company. Maxtor i've had drives fail right out of the gate, then i've got 2 80gigs that have lasted me for 4 years now. I've had an ASUS motherboard fail, now i love my A8n-e and its rock solid. That's the whole idea about the site, find out what lasts and what doesn't. If you get enough people together then you find out what products are bad and should be avoided, BUT running tests like what Tom's does, is the only sure way that you can prove the quality of the products you buy. Thats why I listen and read the reports, thats why i listen to the residents and old posters around here. They have the knowledge and the experience. Why I listen to Cleeve so much, lol 😉

 

[Evil-Weazel]

Anything that says, "Princeton Graphichs" on it. They used to make really good monitors way back when. But now after a few friends and relatives bought some my opinion is that they are total junk now.

Deer Power supplies - Got one once that came with a case thought I'd give it a try since it was a PC build for my kids. It made pretty sparks and smoke within a month. A friend bought one also he had about the same luck. Of course everyone here should know not to skimp on on PSU or Memory.

Zip drives of any size - DVD and CD RW are too cheap and ZIP media is expensive comparatively.

I have a friend who constantly asks my opinion on hardware, I don't know why though because I tell him I've never seen a good power supply from Bargains R Us for $15.00 that was worth even $5.00. He has spent enough money replacing generic PSU's to have bought a really nice PSU once that would still be working.

Anything off of the clearence shelf at the computer store or online is going to be hard to get support for soon, because "Clearence" means, obsolete or soon to be unsupported.