You first major HW disappointment?

[Diatribe]

For me...it was when I jumped from 128 megs of ram to 512 megs. Felt like I gained about 5% more performance! LOL

Then I ran 3DStudio Max 2.5 a few months later. Noticed a nice jump. hehe

Dia

 

[JayPatel]

my riva tnt, wasnt quite the dramatic jump performance wise that i thought it would be

 

[Jumpem]

Hey, JayPatel, don't make fun of the original TNT! I'm still using one unfortunately, but an Ultra will be in my new system.

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

Hmmm...

The original 1 GHz AMD Athlon with L2 cache at 1/3 speed. What a piece of junk! T-Bird all the way!

 

[Mem]

Probably going from 128mb to 256mb,anyway I`m sure it will come in handy sometime in the near future.

 

[Zenmervolt]

My jump from a 4x CD-ROM to the 40x generic, the d@mn 40x tests slower than my 2x2x6 burner, and doesn't read burned discs at all, although it is supposed to. Learned my lesson about generic products.

Zenmervolt

 

[Slacker]

That would be a barebones kit with a cyrix PR200 cpu, nowhere in the add did it say the actual mhz was 150, I didnt know any better then

 

[TravisBickle]

Probably my 486sx25MHz. Not that it disappointed me at the time, but it never got any action. No cdrom. No proggies on hard drive. My 486 wasn't really capable of an awful lot to tell the truth.
Now I have made the LEAP to windows 2000, 60mb and a Pii 300.

 

[Mday]

my first MAJOR disappointment... my PS died =(, it's the enermax 451 (430W) =(

and now buttass one is back to 2 power supplies =(

 

[NoFish4U]

ATI All in blunder Pro.

Tried to play Half Life........

 

[hadoken]

anything VIA

 

[erikiksaz]

"WTF, my 2 meg s3 virge doesn't support Direct3d or Opengl!?"

And later on, i bought the crippled soyo 6vba133.

 

[DeeK]

Choosing a 2MB S3 Virge in a new PC. It was on the build-a-PC service at Staples and our other options weren't much better. I hadn't checked any reviews or anything, so I got burned on that.

 

[AdamK47]

My Memorex 32X CD-ROM and then my 48X Creative Labs CD-ROM. High speed CD-ROMs suck big time! They constantly spin up and down and are annoyingly loud. I just use my Creative Labs 6x4x24x CDRW now. It is super super quiet playing CDs at 24X. It's like night and day compared to those fugly doofy mofo high speed POS CD-ROMs. I actually punched my 48X Creative drive the last time it was in my system. I took it out after that and have been happy ever since.

 

[erikiksaz]

ouch deek.

 

[irrigating]

Overclocking an apple powermac from 66 to 80 mhz. Had to clip a dipswitch thingy over the clock crystal. It was all about pushin the hardware.

 

[slpaulson]

Probably my sparq drive then my memorex burner.

 

[Yoshi]

1. Abit BH6...Mine crapped out after about 13 months running a Celeron 300A@450. Celeron is still going on a BF6.

2. Kenwood 72X TrueX...Crapped out after about a year of use. Just like the reviews said the older slower models did. Screw Zen Technologies!

 

[Erasmus-X]

Hmmm, I've had a few HW disappointments in the past. But, here's by far my biggest disappointment.

I got a 386SX 16MHz back in 1990. It came with 2MB of RAM. About a year later, I boosted it up to 8MB (which was like a $300 upgrade back then!). With all of that software typically requiring less than 2MB to run back then (and the fact that Windows 3.1's memory management SUCKED), it made very little noticable difference. I really never saw dramatically faster performance until I bought a new 486 machine.

The S3 ViRGE (Diamond Stealth 2000, if I recall correctly) I had with my P200MMX comes to a close second (before I added a 4MB Voodoo accelerator to it).

 

[compuwiz1]

Buying a Hercules S3 Savage card. Yuck!

 

[zippy]

Ugh...don't get me started. :|

Abit BE6 for starters, the damn thing was DOA! My next dissappointment was with Abit's RMA dept.- not only did I have to pay $25 for them to RMA it (it's not my fscking fault it was DOA!!!) but pay for shipping then it took a month after I shipped it to get a new one. :| Oh well, then it wouldn't overclock my P3 450 (SL35D which later proved to overclock to 600 on a different BE6) beyond 508 stably! WTF?! I don't remember if I upped the voltage more than .1v but still, I should have been able to get 558.

 

[maxs]

Along time ago...Buying a Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum 16:frown:

 

[Erasmus-X]

Hahahaha....I remember the Pro Audio Spectrum 16. That card was a b1tch. Actually, way back in those days the only card that was relatively problem-free was a geniune Sound Blaster Pro or 16. I remember my SB16....it was a big, fat ISA card with a proprietary Panasonic header for my 2x CD-ROM in my 486. God, those were the days.

 

[Octoberblue]

I put one of those ridiculous Evergreen processor upgrades in place of an Intel 133. It had a 400Mhz K6-2 processor, voltage regulator, and a "BIOS Upgrade". Man, what a stinkbomb.

In addition to the fact that it was still a 66Mhz frontside bus a lot of processing power was lost in the whole platform crossover process. And of course that's not to mention that the K6-2 is a relatively weak processor anyway, especially if you don't have any cache on your mobo. The performance increase barely got me up to what a 200Mhz MMX chip would have done.

The bright side is that that was when I realized if your going to get serious about upgrading you have to be willing to take on the big Kahuna and switch out your motherboard. And that was what really got me started on this great adventure of do-it-yourself upgrading.

 

[Pocatello]

My LS-120 drive, what a piece of crap!