PCFormat Forum Archive

Greetings, i started this thread because i would like to know what the worst PC you've ever seen, had, worked on or heard about is. And what the worst brand of components is.

By far the worst i've ever seen is my friends 420mhz celeron and then a 1.6ghz semperon (yes the same guy's) not because they are slow but because they are always broken and are a royal pain to fix, it took me 8 houres to install XP because the mobo's usb was fluty (had to be disabled) and the ram would simply not work properly.

The bad:
P233 with 32mb ram and onboard graphics. Dont remember the details but the system was retardedly slow. Tried playing Tiberium sun on it and the results were far far worse than the 166mmx with a 2mb S3 Trio card. It was 2 of the same systems but it was just way points for me and my brother.

The worst:
This follow system should have beaten my celeron 466 to a pulp but this has been the worst ever system my brother could have owned and was almost the reason he completely gave up on computer gaming.
AMD k6-2 450. I remember the reviews on this in pcf. It was suppose to be comparable to a P2 or a celeron with a 100mhz faster clock speed. It was horrible. Even with a voodoo 2 in the machine 3d games didnt want to play properly. The games were barely faster than that of the 166mmx and thats with a 300mhz increase. Final Fantasy 8 kept on crashing, quake 3 didnt want to know anything and ran at 12fps instead of the 18fps I got on the p166. Later along the line my bro got a riva tnt2 ...M64. Just as bad as before but with a twist. Diablo 2 could absolutely not run in D3D mode. He ended up playing in Direct Draw mode while my celeron with voodoo 3 was kicking so much bottom in glide mode. My bro actually cried a few times over this and semi guilty consience since I was the one that read all the reviews and advised him on getting the k6-2 because all the reviews showed it was ahead of the celeron.
I later heard (and this is where my absolute hate and avoidance of Gigabyte products came from) is that the cache on the motherboard was so far from the cpu that nothing can save its miserable performance.

Imagine a skinny sickly guy (celeron) vs a super buffed athlete (k6-2). Before competing the buffed guy gets attacked and has his arms and legs removed (gigabyte board) and now he still has to compete in the 100m sprint. That was what this was like.

Eventually my brother finally got a proper upgrade. He got a AMD duron 1ghz and my old geforce 2mx. He was in gaming heaven finally after years of crap. And it got better for him from then on. He has since upgraded twice. After the Duron to a 64x2 3800 (same system as mine) and recently to an i7 (same as mine) with other minor hardware differences such as other graphics cards.

Anything owned by CesarePlay.

/thread

CesarePlay

Do tel.

Shame - be nice

When I worked for Charter Training we bought 30+ machines from Mustek. Mecer they were called. (Yes - my bad decision). It was when 486s first came out. Never seen thinner MBs in my life. We had endless trouble with them. That is where I learnt to swap out HDDs, Stiffies, Graphic cards, etc. Upgraded them in less than a year to P1s - different brand No trouble.

one system i remember back in the day was a K6 with i think 256Mb RAM, and a ATI Rage running NT workstation with SP6, and for some reason that machine was always slow, always overheating, and doing anything on it was an exercise in patience.

KALSTER wrote:

CesarePlay

Do tel.

Any electronic device that the guy came within 100m of just died. The prevailing theory is that he has some sort of static electricity exuding from his body that just fries anything within range.

anything by packard bell would wipe the floor with everything short of a soggy brick... PB's produce has got to be the skankiest i have ever been exposed to...

also, anything sourced from PC Zone.... the number of brand name components they plug which fail in a month or two has got to be record beating... sort of explains the price...

Anything from SAHARA

My uncle bought a Sahara laptop recently, and the motherboard died within a few months. He took it to Sahara in Midrand and waited while they replaced the motherboards. That was a bit of a plus for them. About the only one I can think of, though.

The worst pc i ever had was a mecer pc from computer mania. hated that thing. my dad bought it....

My friend is gaming on a:
AMD Sempron 1.6Ghz
1G DDR Ram
Nvidia 7300GT 512mb

COD4 low settings 600x400 ---> 40fps average....
pretty bad

see... that's not bad... that's just pushing the hardware further than it was ever intended to go... i imagine something like NWN2 would see 7fps...

i'm assuming the OP is looking for the true horror stories...

For me, nice brand spanking new Gigabyte Setups. Ok this was about a year ago now.. but still not too long ago.

1) If you decide to plug a SATA cable in for what ever reason, don't expect to take it out, we unplugged the cable and the whole connector popped off the Board.

2) Power supplies. Life expectancy = 1 month average. We have swapped out about 20 so far... out of roughly 30 systems we bought.

Dude, which supplier are you using for your PCs?!?! (Assuming the PSUs came with the cases.)

@ Staurt

Ah, didn't realise CesarePlay was a forumite.

We had a Celeron 333mhz with 32mb RAM and a 4Gb HDD IIRC which would die suddenly without any reason and would only restart when your finger started to blister. Knowing what I know now, the PSU was probably a goner, so this case is one reason why ignorance is not always bliss. Other things kept breaking during its life as well. Reinstalling Win '98 once required us to leave it through the night to finish (probably because of something we did though).

Eventually sold it to Cash Crusaders for R1500, because the lady only wanted to know if it was a Pentium.

Ive had pc's like that , and my list of least favorite OEM suppliers/equipment manufactures is:
1.Mecer
2.sahara
3.esquire
4.Frosa (gfx cards)
5.ECS elitegroup (never work properly)

As you can see Mercer is on top because every mecer i have worked on is absolute trash, badly designed, rubish components, and SLOW. Infact Mercer is to the pc world what Tata is to the car world ,the worst you can buy, and sahara is not much better. And as a general rule anything whith a celeron in it is rubish i have seen many celeron laptops be thrashed by my old IBM think pad 600x (500mhz P3) , so needless to say the worst pc i had, had a celeron in it (500mhz or something).

I agree with you there buddy - will never touch a Mecer PC again - my experience was that bad. I ran a Novell 2.11 network on one set and Unix/Xenix on another. Do not want to relive the problems I had. How many boards, HDDs etc I swapped out in less than a year. They are probably better now and so my dislike of them is unfair - but nope - not again.

and what about proline computers?

Tribble wrote:I ran a Novell 2.11 network on one set and Unix/Xenix on another.

Showing your age Tribs? (Although so am I knowing about Novell...

GDI_Lord wrote:

Tribble wrote:I ran a Novell 2.11 network on one set and Unix/Xenix on another.

Showing your age Tribs? (Although so am I knowing about Novell...

Sadly yes - I am ancient but Novell was hot!

andrekruger wrote:and what about proline computers?

Well they are the best S.A made pc's but compared to international brands like HP, Dell, IBM etc.., they are rubish and have you ever seen a proline at a LAN or in a high performance PC test in PC format.

nope, and that is why i was asking... he he he

AMD thunderbird and constant overheating and burning/melting, went through about 4 cpu's and two mobos. Not to mention, not cracking the die! it was impossible it was so brittle!

1nsan1ty wrote:AMD thunderbird and constant overheating and burning/melting, went through about 4 cpu's and two mobos. Not to mention, not cracking the die! it was impossible it was so brittle!

yea those old t birds realy were a pain to fit but they were very fast and not to expensive. pentium III's were also difficult to fit and had the same exposed dies but without the heat problems. (by the way i posted this from my new sony ericsson P1i ).