Products to stay away from. (horror stories)

Bennah · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:08

Its down to luck of the draw I think... Had some hardware that has proven to be failure's or bad.

Maxtor IDE HD's

IDE versions Ive had over the past years have just corrupted with bad sectors when overclocking. Yes, I go higher than I should have on the overclock, but thats finding out the max of your cpu / mem capabilities, but the HD's have corrupted and never worked again. Thats been on NF2 and NF4 formats.

Q-tec PSI's

Second is, Q-tec power supplies. Never use them even for powering up fans or such like. They are just cheap and nasty, simple as. Open one up and you would find a better heatsink on a northbridge of a DFI NF4, lol. They loose power like there is no tomorrow. Learnt my lesson when I bought one to power up a P4 2.4C, 2x256mb 3200 hyperx old skool BH-5, P4C800-E and a X800 Pro... big mistake. Killed the gpu and fried the agp slot on the mobo, when it was folding. Smoked and shut off. Didnt manage to kill the cpu or mem which was a maricle lol.

DFI NF2 mobo's (Good and bad)

Back in the day, when AXP-M was popular as A64's Opty's these days, I must have bought about 7 DFI NF2 Infinity's

What a tricky little board to get overclocks from. Never knew where the boards limit was. Push just that little further and bang goes your board. Need a new one lol. You might get a good one to 255fsb, solid as a rock. Push to 256fsb and bam. Bios is corrupted or mobo is fried by putting too much vcore and vdimm. You get a good board and bios setup for 270fsb 1:1 with 3.65vdimm. Was great till I dropped the FSB and increased the multi. Same cpu speed of 2700MHz but @ 245x11 and it would corrupt the bios once again lol. Changing the battery didnt work or a bios chip. It just blew something in the board that made sure it wasnt getting booted up again for another torturing

All the problems can with some good though. It was a defo great board to overclock AXP-M's on. Did have some fun. Some people who killed thier first board might of been put off but I didnt want to get a NF7-S v2.0 and had some faith the little DFI.

PC P&C psu (one off)

A little more recently had a PC P&C 510w SLi psu fail on me. Regarded one of the best psu's in the business. Dont get me wrong, I still love the PC P&C psu's. I would use one again. They are great. One day I went to switch my rig on and nothing. Couldnt get it booted at all. Switched over to my spare eagle star 350w psu

and powered up fine. The PC P&C had just died. I think that when I shut down the rig previously, with the psu turned off like normal, a resisitor or something inside must have popped. Thats only thing I can come up with.

Thought I'd share some things that have happened...

Got loads more, but cant really think of any particular mobo / mem or what not to stay away from. I usually get the best performance one anyways, not get something different like an Epox or something. Stay to the best products I know Ive had no problems out of it the past.

A little list of the things, I will not hesitate to buy again...

OCZ Memory (The best in the game imo)
Kingston Memory
A64 Venice's (3500+ / 3800+)
DFI NF4 Motherboards
P4 skt478 northwood C cpu's
Asus P4C800-E (great mobo)
Asus NF4 Motherboards
Asus nvidia Graphics cards (Had a great 6800LE 256mb

)
nVidia graphics cards full stop...
PC P&C psu's
Maxtor SATA HD's
Seagate IDE HD's
Lite-on CD-RW's
Thermalright heatsinks

Indy500 · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:11

ignore

xander_uk2 · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:12

Phil99 said:
Q-Tec or Q-Tech? Without wishing to be too pedantic they are two completely different brands.

Q-Tec are the cheapo ones OcUK sell.

Sorry mate, Q-Tec

Post edited

Bennah · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:35

xander_uk2 said:
Twinmos RAM I've been through 3 different modules of this stuff. All causing lots of memory related issues with my PC (Motherboard is compatible) All RMA'd, with the last lot getting sold to a friend

Cant find a fault with them tbh from all the modules Ive used in the past. All have been old skool BH-5 or new BH found on speed premium's and other sticks.

Depending what mobo they were on they worked great with some voltage. Had all my sticks on either a P4C800-E DLX or a DFI NF4 Ultra-D / SLI-DR.

Amp34 · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:40

J.T said:
Antec Neo He 430W PSU and Asus NF4 Mobos.

Brought an Antec P150 (from OCUK) case which comes with the Antec Neo He 430W PSU in it and at the same time brought an Asus NF4 based Mobo to go in it.

Worked fine for about two weeks (only a small crash now and then but nothing major) then it started to get random crashes while in games which would reboot the PC.

After testing all the hardware in another PC and not finding anything wrong I monitored the Voltage on the PSU and noticed the 12V rail would sometimes drop to just below 10V.

Didnt think this looked right so I googled my problem and found loads of people where having the same issue.

Replaced the PSU with a Hiper 580W Type R and all problems are gone.

There were problems with the first batch of neo HE PSU's but later batches are fine now, It was only a very small release batch, you must have been unlucky and got one of those (see my sig). The Hiper I would say is way too noisy, especially for a quiet PC. It was by far the noisiest PSU ive had, even noisier than an old generic one i had.

I havent really had a problem with any components, except an hitachi deskstar which was DOA. The replacement hitch was fine and works perfectly still.

xander_uk2 · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:42

Bennah said:
Cant find a fault with them tbh from all the modules Ive used in the past. All have been old skool BH-5 or new BH found on speed premium's and other sticks.

Depending what mobo they were on they worked great with some voltage. Had all my sticks on either a P4C800-E DLX or a DFI NF4 Ultra-D / SLI-DR.

Glad to hear you got on ok. I've since read they can be quite fussy modules with regard to Motherboards, so I'm not discounting the possibility that it was me that was at fault.
I'll stick to Corsair in future though

Bennah · 28 Mar 2006 at 15:53

I hear you. Where as you would stick to Corsair in future, I would with OCZ. Just love OCZ memory. Great performance what ever your need

Only had one set of Corsair sticks and they were 2x512MB XMS LL Pro's. Good performing sticks, but prefer OCZ really.

Corsair sricks, Twinmos UT-BH-5 speed premium's and Mushkin old skool BH-5.... They were the days

Longest url title there lol...

Down to user preference, there are going to be difference's who people are sworn by.

Emlyn_Dewar · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:10

Maxtor IDE HD's, just to echo an above poster. My last one didn't even make it past 12 months without failing...

Cuchulain · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:15

dokko said:
Anybody got any prodcuts from hell they'd like to share so other comsumers don't have to suffer the same hiar pulling experience?

(Thought it would make a good thread for people to ref when buying)

I'll start:

AOpen - DVDRW - DUW1616L

Now apart from the drive being very noisy, this model doesn't recognise DVD games.

Not only that, but if you've say had FM06 in for the last hour and now decide you want to play a bit of COD:2 (these are just examples) you change discs over, the drive still thinks you've got FM06 in, and won't change its mind until a computer reset.

Now thats frustrating, but it gets better. So you ask what the problem is, the next logical step is to see Aopen, download a driver, see if that works.

Well, the DUW1616L is about the only producr Aopen does without a driver, or an update tool etc.. to solve any problems, which is quite funny considering they get about 30 complaints a week about this drive.

So what do you do now? Well i could get a RMA, but i thought its pointless for the sake of £30, the hassle of being without a DVD drive for a week would be worse.

So i contact Aopen, after using their utterly rubbish doctor thingy i wait for a response, i get nothing. So i send another, i get nothing, i use their forum, i get nothing onyl other people looking for the same type of answer.

I send off 3 complaints, 4 weeks later i get a response asking for system specs, i give them, and never here from them again.

-----------------------------

So there you have it. I recommend you stay away from the Aopen DUW1616L like as if it was the plague itself, and to be honest, really question yourself on when your buying anything from Aopen itself, because if its broken or needs a software update, it wont get fixed in any hurry.

I have that drive (the one with the silver/black/white bezels) and it works perfectly for me, has done since I bought it ages ago. It reads everything, write's every type of disk I've chucked at it without burning coasters and is probably the best DVD writers I've ever owned.

dokko · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:20

Cuchulain said:
I have that drive (the one with the silver/black/white bezels) and it works perfectly for me, has done since I bought it ages ago. It reads everything, write's every type of disk I've chucked at it without burning coasters and is probably the best DVD writers I've ever owned.

Wow, 1st time i've heard anyone say anything positive about aopen!!!

:eek:

So it worked 1st time without any drivers, madness.

Lucky you is all i can say.

You don;t want this one for £20 do you?

Cuchulain · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:34

dokko said:
Wow, 1st time i've heard anyone say anything positive about aopen!!!

So it worked 1st time without any drivers, madness.

Lucky you is all i can say.

You don;t want this one for £20 do you?

Drivers? For a DVD writer under XP? I think not, last time I checked Aopens/NEC's and Pioneers were all made in the same factory, just rebadged.

(I have an Aopen DVD rom too, that's also never gone wrong)

Bennah · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:39

Never knew that they were the same drives really but rebadged...

How about Plextor DVD-RW drives? IDE ones, they cream of the crop are they?

trojan698 · 28 Mar 2006 at 16:44

Crucial Ballistix, nuff said.

valerian · 30 Mar 2006 at 22:01

NeptuneUK said:
my old old pc was an MSI board, it was excellent i couldnt pick a fault with it

exactly

valerian · 30 Mar 2006 at 22:03

xander_uk2 said:
Q-Tec PSU's - My mate got through about 3 of them from his local ****** electronics store. All of them went pop within 48 hours. He then bought a Tagan 480 and hasn't had any issues since

A-Open optical Drives - I had one a while back (I'm sorry, but I cant remember the model) and it was the noisiest drive I have even owned. It was just a 52x CD-ROM but it sounded like an aircraft.....It died eventually unsurprisingly.
A-Open's tech support was non existent. A crap company for sure.

Aopen H600 Tower Case Very heavy, and difficult to work with. Poor airflow, and quite noisey. A nightmare to install/remove motherboards and PSU's

Twinmos RAM I've been through 3 different modules of this stuff. All causing lots of memory related issues with my PC (Motherboard is compatible) All RMA'd, with the last lot getting sold to a friend

ive had a couple of aopen drives, fortunately ive put em in others systems

valerian · 30 Mar 2006 at 22:05

had some poor liteon drives, didnt last long, had a dvd writer and a dvd rom go down
pioneer only now im afraid (until they **** up)

valerian · 30 Mar 2006 at 22:09

those vantec copper heatsinks,
the thermal tape wont stick
stuck em on with some arctic epoxy in the end (yes it was cleaned with TIM clean)
and my previous zalman heatsinks stuck like **** to a blanket, even when i put em on a 2nd card, with the same tape!!

nikebee · 30 Mar 2006 at 23:10

JRS said:
What, you mean like the Maxtor 60gb drive I've had for over 4 years that has never once skipped a beat, and the 120gb I've had for 2 years that has also never once skipped a beat?

Wish I could say the same about the WD Raptor I had that lasted about 2 months, or the Seagates that I put in a machine I built and had to replace 6 months down the line (RMA'd, replaced with Maxtors, never gone wrong since).

every HDD i've used in the past up until my P4 rig i built two years ago used Maxtor hard drives, and not one of them ever failed.

going from 5GB maxtors up to the 80GB 5K RPM IDE drives.

when i built my P4 rig, i built it based around my existing Maxtor and a new 120GB Seagate Barracuda... again no problems with the maxtor or the seagte (and this was putting the maxtor, which was a few years old with brand new technology).

then last year i finally moved away from maxtors all together when i got my 74GB Raptor, and it hasn't "skipped a beat" (as you put it)... my AMD4000 rig is now with the raptor and the seagate... neither have had any problems.

anyway...

my own main issues with a component and a particular brand is the Hiper Type-R PSU's, the 580w models.

first one i got arrived with a faulty FDD connector, turned out the wires were snapped inside the casing.

an RMA later

i was sent a "brand new" one by OcUK... which arrived in an already opened sleave (presume OcUK just tested it worked before it got to me... although the "lunch/tool box" the PSU comes in was still fully sealed, so it had obviously been manufactured like that :-/ ) the 20/24pin ATX adapter that has the little clips on it to hold it together were snapped off, and no hint what so ever of them being in the "lunch/tool box"... the fan is unusually loud for my liking...

i built my mates pc with a Hiper Type-R, build quality was much better but fan still seems loud and i'm still not too fond of them.

the PSU itself, is stable and reliable... but i honestly can't see what the hype (excuse the pun) is about for these PSUs.

the modular design is what attracted me as well as hundreds of people on here recommending them.

i've got a Seasonic S12 in mind as a replacement.

only other thing thats annoyed me is my Opteron 144, which was to be the crowning jewel for my AMD rig that i was building that wasn't even stable at stock speeds.

i tried everything (and i mean everything).... i tried it in two different motherboards, three sets of ram, four different PSUs, running two PSUs at once, different HDDs, lowering the voltage, upping the voltage, running one stick of ram, one HDD, different coolers etc...etc...etc... and it just wasn't stable at stock speeds.. it would just die out if anything remotely strenious was being done.

i'm talking winamp playing for too long, 1Mb Super PI failing, internet browsing after extended periods... if it wasn't doing ANYTHING it was okay... but prolonged activity to even remotely stressful periods it died.

an RMA to OcUK and they sent it back saying it was fine, but didn't charge me for the return postage ( :confused:

)
i asked for a second RMA but never got an email back... i sold it on the MM, buyer is having the same issues as i had... i've offered to give him the RMA numbers used in the past etc... but not had anything back...

the mysterious evil Opteron...

running a A64 4000+ @ 2.6GHz that i got off the MM now instead, no problems with it at all

Paa` · 30 Mar 2006 at 23:38

Maxtor hard drives, had several all failed/failing. My current 250gig maxtor 10 is making a strange noise and the drive does'nt always startup properly anymore.

My WD raptors have always worked perfect and a lot longer and in hotter conditions.

ALL DVD DRIVES AND NF4 MOTHERBOARDS - why wont they get along

Crucial 1gig pc4000 - Mine and my mates both failed within 6 months.

nikebee · 30 Mar 2006 at 23:46

Paa` said:
ALL DVD DRIVES AND NF4 MOTHERBOARDS - why wont they get along

care to explain that one a bit better mate?? :confused:

there must be thousands of people running NF4 motherboards and DVD drives lol... whats wrong with yours :confused: