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What's the best or worst piece of hardware you've purchased? Or the best or worst purchase of hardware you've made? Was it something super useful or a really good deal or super high quality? Or the opposite of all that? I bought a QGeeM HDMI capture card about a year ago, and it's just worked wonderfully. I expected it to be way more expensive than it was, but it was pretty reasonably priced and has never given me any problems except the one time it got super hot on a super hot day during a long recording session, but turning on a fan fixed that. The worst hardware purchase I've made wasn't the hardware's fault at all, but mine. When I first moved to Europe years ago, I brought my XBox 360 with me. I tried to plug it in main and the power bank exploded. Not wanting to make the same mistake with my PS3, I look at the label on the PSU, and it says "120V". So I bought a voltage adapter. Like $120 or something. Then something (I think the manual) mentions frequency. I end up doing more digging and learn that almost all PS3s are universal, i.e. it will just work with 240V. Indeed, the voltage adapter might damage it because of the different frequency. I plugged it straight into main, and it's been working fine for a year now. So now I have this big ol' piece of machinery for nothing. Shadow0 fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Oct 26, 2022 |
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Oct 26, 2022 17:50
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Worst: the Surface Pro 2 That fucker had, literally, the worst keyboard I've ever used in my life. A plague to whomever designed it. Best: Google Nexus 7 (2013). I still use that thing for reading.
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Oct 26, 2022 18:00
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worst: my apple watch series 4 the first time i ever used the name "bad purchase" for anything was when i set the name of that watch in 2018. the story: i had bought it after a minor heart health scare and wanted to have the ECG feature because i had a few episodes where i was getting skipped/fluttery beats for 10+ minutes at a time and was hoping it would help shed light on what was going on. thing cost $400 and ended up being useless. i have a low resting heart rate, so most of the time i took an ECG it would tell me "your heart rate is too low, bro, can't help ya". my doctor referred me to a cardiologist when i mentioned the issues i was having. i showed the cardiologist some of the ECGs i had captured with the watch during episodes, and he basically said: oh that's neat, but not enough detail to diagnose anything, we really need a multi-lead capture and ideally you should wear a constant monitor for at least 24 hours. (if you're curious, i did end up wearing a monitor and getting an echocardiogram, and at the end the cardiologist said "yep, you're having pcaps, nothing we can do, that will be $200 please") about 6 months later it slid off my nightstand table while charging, fell about 2.5 feet onto the floor, and the screen shattered. i didn't bother replacing it since the ECG feature had turned out to be a useless gimmick, and the rest of the health data wasn't particularly useful to me either. the thing definitely lived up to the name i gave it, which i eventually recycled when i decided to buy a new account here instead of reviving and renaming my old one from the 2000s (which i had given away to a friend who had done a name change at some point). funnily enough i bought an apple watch again this year, but for an entirely different reason -- i got one with a cellular modem so i could leave my phone at home when i go running, and it's actually been good for that one specific use case. best: SNES or N64 probably? i'm not sure, probably could apply to most of the nintendo consoles i've owned. i got so much mileage out of my SNES, N64, Gamecube, 3DS, and Switch over the years. not quite so much with the Wii and Wii U. another item deserving honorable mention is the iphone 8+ i used for ~4 years. my iphone is by far my most used gadget and that thing worked flawlessly for years. can't think of a single complaint, and eventually i got a huge trade in credit for it during the iphone 13 release promos.
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Oct 26, 2022 19:20
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Another best/worst purchase was my TI-83+ calculator. It came with a manual for its programming language, TI BASIC. I ended up discovering my love of programming from it, and it ruined my entire life.
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Oct 26, 2022 20:53
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The best hardware purchase I ever made would have to be the 2500k I bought that's STILL seeing use. Probably not worth it for efficiency reasons at this point and I'll remedy that soon, but over 10 years of use is kind of insane for a processor in the modern world. Worst is my Pixel 6. I loving hate this phone, it's definitely the most expensive thing I've ever bought that I just want to destroy. Front fingerprint sensors are inherently bad and this one is extra bad, it's a battery hog despite having a huge battery because Google's Tensor CPU is actual trash, the camera is a huge downgrade from the old Pixel camera, and really none of the new features work right. If someone comes out with a decent current phone with a rear fingerprint sensor and the performance and features I need, I will make a video of myself smashing it to bits and pissing on it, because that's what it deserves. I hope every person who worked on this piece of poo poo platform feels a deep sense of shame for the rest of their lives.
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Oct 26, 2022 21:01
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I kinda want to give a combined best/worst award to my VR headset. It's not technically the best hardware I've ever bought, but things like finding a really well designed VR game like Half Life Alyx or using a flight sim where I can just freely look around in 3D space, just feel like such a revolutionary leap forward in inhabiting a game world. It's just fundamentally different than anything I've ever done before. On the flip side, my gear is kind of an annoying piece of poo poo because I went cheaper and got a Windows Mixed Reality headset. The design is farmed out to other manufacturers and Microsoft basically gives it the bare minimum of technical support to keep it running. It won't successfully run twice in a row without rebooting my PC, and various system updates break its functionality even to the point of once needing a full Windows system restore to get it working again. And when it does work, it has to load its own dedicated Microsoft-centric software environment to run programs in. So if you like to use Steam games, you have to load that environment, load a virtual Steam interface from inside there, and then load the actual Steam VR interface from there just to get to the game When everything hits just right, it's legitimately incredible, but everything about using it in practice feels like it's holding together with duct tape and prayers. Between that and the relatively small amount of really high tier VR software out there, it just sits there unused a lot more than it should.
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Oct 26, 2022 21:44
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Best hardware: the original TiVo. Back when a DVR was a newfangled thing, it just worked, flawlessly and forever. Great UI, the remote always worked, it was responsive, it was intuitive, even the audio feedback from button presses etc. was fun and good and didn't get annoying.
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Oct 26, 2022 21:53
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Best was for sure my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Smooth, flawless, great battery life, and it's been a lifesaver for online classes and taking notes. It's a beautiful beast and has lasted longer then any smart phone. Worst is without a doubt my Jabra headset. Bluetooth is spotty and weak, and it's audio drivers regularly crash. It doesn't like to charge on my computer usb so I need to wallplug it regularly.
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Oct 26, 2022 22:00
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Best: 2500k, SNES, VG248QE, Surface Duo, Ducky Shine 3 are all good honorable mentions, but I think in terms of sheer milage and enjoyment, I have to give it up for the Playstation 2. Worst: I'm tempted to put Iphone 5 here, but I think it's the runner up to Beats by Dre headphones. I didn't understand how to evaluate headphones, and thought that a price tag matched quality. Holy poo poo was that a rude awakening. This was the catalyst for me to actually start to understand the product space I guess though, so silver lining and all.
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Oct 27, 2022 00:28
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Best: Thermalright Ultra Extreme tower cooler. In 2009 I got it for $63 without fans and I'm still using it. I don't know if it's technically enough for a high end CPU these days but it's got 6 heat pipes and fits two 120mm fans in push/pull, so it's still fairly decent. Worst: Xbox Wireless Headset On paper this looked good. Supports BT or Dongle, USB-C, boom mic with device mute, and a reasonably cool volume knob system. I do use it and it does work, so it's not utter garbage. I'm just disappointed in it. The sidetone/mic monitoring is so low as to be useless, even if you plug it in with a cable to configure it to "high". It's cheap bluetooth implementation that relies on handfree profile. If you use the dongle, you get interference from USB3 devices. (No interference in BT mode, thank gently caress.) The volume knob is a bit dumb. Despite being an analog knob there's discrete steps. The volume is also fairly low such that you'll only every use max or max-1 settings.
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Oct 27, 2022 03:28
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I'm pretty anal about researching big purchases to the point of making huge spreadsheets of cots/benefits and so on, so I'm generally very happy with stuff I end up buying. Best: The Q6600 PC I built that lasted me until I got a off-lease i5-2500 ThinkCenter from work for $100 The Zotac 1070 I got for like $400 in Hong Kong at the height of the previous buttcoin boom, could've sold at a profit a few months ago The Ivy Bridge 3470 Optiplex I got later for like $150 to get USB3 for VR, still my main desktop PC Cube Mix Plus 2-in-1. Paid like $250 for a Core m3 tablet that was awesome for vacations. Wacom digitizer. Niiice. Worst Not terrible more disappointing really. Jabra headset that work paid for, expensive, bulky sealed design, no wireless, ANC isn't good enough to defeat fan noise from the GPU Chuwi Minibook X: I know what I was getting into with another $300 laptop with and 28Wh battery. Reviewers kind of dropped the ball though, it draws twice as much power at idle as the Cube, and the stylus while precise with great pressure sensitivity, is utterly incapable of making smooth diagonal lines or small circles. It's fine for a disposable laptop to take on trips but disappointing because it could've easily been so much better.
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Oct 27, 2022 09:51
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I'm revealing my age here with my choices but: Best: An RCA out to VGA in breakout box, its actual name has been lost to time. It allowed me to connect my Playstation to my monitor. This turned my 17" CRT from yet another computer to the hotspot for Tekken 3 tournaments and NBA Live 99 matches in my dorm in highschool. Cost me ~$80 late 90's dollars to get, but the cred I got from my fellow classmates for the videogame tournaments I arranged were priceless. Worst: 3dfx Voodoo Tv tuner. It almost worked on my windows 98 pc. Better drivers were promised, but NVIDIA bought the assets of 3dfx like two months after launch. got rid of the card soon after that. what a waste.
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Oct 27, 2022 16:00
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K8.0 posted:The best hardware purchase I ever made would have to be the 2500k I bought that's STILL seeing use. Probably not worth it for efficiency reasons at this point and I'll remedy that soon, but over 10 years of use is kind of insane for a processor in the modern world. Also best: One of those $15 HDMI capture cards. These are miracle devices that appeared all of a sudden a couple years ago. You expect them to be the chinese EZCap equivalent, but they Just Work perfectly and somehow only use USB 2.0. Worst: My WiiU that I bought when Nintendo was selling refurbs for $200. Almost never played it.
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Oct 27, 2022 17:35
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cambrian obelus posted:Best: An RCA out to VGA in breakout box, its actual name has been lost to time. It allowed me to connect my Playstation to my monitor. This turned my 17" CRT from yet another computer to the hotspot for Tekken 3 tournaments and NBA Live 99 matches in my dorm in highschool. Cost me ~$80 late 90's dollars to get, but the cred I got from my fellow classmates for the videogame tournaments I arranged were priceless. Good memories unlocked. I bought a "VGA box" from Lik-Sang in university for a common room that didn't have a TV and used it for probably thousands of hours for Melee. The power supply was incredibly fragile with a giant plug converter to adapt it to an Australia powerboard. Still got it in my AV box of junk.
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Oct 28, 2022 01:26
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Best: GP2X in 2006/2007ish. Handheld gaming console for emulator/homebrew games. I played so much sid Meier's pirates for SNES, dune 2 for genesis and Gameboy games, it was the best! I wonder what happened to it hmm. It's special because it pre Kickstarter, so it actually came out and was good. Worst: smartphone. I hate.
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Oct 28, 2022 06:23
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Shadow0 posted:Another best/worst purchase was my TI-83+ calculator. It came with a manual for its programming language, TI BASIC. I ended up discovering my love of programming from it, and it ruined my entire life. yep, my TI83 is also what got me interested in programming. i wrote all sorts of stuff to solve my math and physics problems for me in high school, and even dabbled in making games -- though mostly text based. i never got into the assembly stuff where you could really unlock the power of that z80.
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Oct 28, 2022 20:18
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Worst hardware: hands down, Motorola Cliq XT, a horrifically broken Android 1.5 phone. It’s been a decade and I still get angry thinking about it - every sin of early Android was concentrated into a single, purulent technological mistake. Non-removable apps, flaky, garbage alternative UI, and an update to Android 2.x that was delayed for around a year before being cancelled the day it was supposed to land. Getting an email the next day exhorting me to buy the Cliq 2 was one of the more brazen gently caress you’s I’ve ever been handed. My wife’s was so broken she could barely place phone calls, and my local phone resaler wouldn’t even take mine away for free. Best hardware: Several contenders, but off the top of my head, I will also second our Nintendo Switch; my wife’s 2012 MacBook Pro is still startlingly usable; and I have a Chenbro SR20503 midtower ATX case that’s built like a tank and has been home to several stable builds without issue or complaint.
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Oct 28, 2022 23:51
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Hasturtium posted:Worst hardware: hands down, Motorola Cliq XT, a horrifically broken Android 1.5 phone. It’s been a decade and I still get angry thinking about it - every sin of early Android was concentrated into a single, purulent technological mistake. Non-removable apps, flaky, garbage alternative UI, and an update to Android 2.x that was delayed for around a year before being cancelled the day it was supposed to land. Getting an email the next day exhorting me to buy the Cliq 2 was one of the more brazen gently caress you’s I’ve ever been handed. My wife’s was so broken she could barely place phone calls, and my local phone resaler wouldn’t even take mine away for free. That puts me in mind of My First Smartphone. I was late to the game, but my folks finally convinced me to sign up with one of those smaller alternate providers, and the only phone they had at the time was Motorola Defyi XTs on some flavor of Android 2. On the one hand, great, that was my first time using a full touchscreen device, so that was neat. On the other hand, everything else. Pretty much the same deal - garbage implementation of a cheap phone, bloated with little free storage space, laggy and crashy as hell. It was equally amazing when I finally got a usable smartphone after it. I guess the biggest thing in its favor was that it somehow used gorilla glass or something, so you could probably punt that thing through a window without getting the slightest scratch on it.
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Oct 29, 2022 00:09
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Worst I can remember was an 80mm Vantec Tornado fan I got in like 2005. I thought "this thing will improve cooling so much!" It was twice the thickness of a normal fan and sounded like a hair dryer. Absolutely unusable outside of a server room. Best (other than the 2500K) might be the CT-479 socket adapter and Pentium M combo which I got in 2006, I'm pretty sure from SA-Mart. The adapter allowed you to stick a Pentium M in a few ASUS Socket 478 P4 boards and came with an aluminum ~70mm cooler which was pretty dinky in retrospect but way better than most laptops. Adding to that the overclocking options of a flagship desktop motherboard and dual-channel desktop DIMMs, you could get some really ridiculous performance. Anand reviewed one and at 2.56GHz got comparable performance in games to a $1000 Athlon 64 FX. I think I got a similar overclock and might have paid $200 for the adapter and processor combined. I used that combo until I replaced it with an i7-920, which was itself a great purchase and a hell of a jump from a single core. Eletriarnation fucked around with this message at 00:40 on Oct 29, 2022 |
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Oct 29, 2022 00:36
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Eletriarnation posted:Worst I can remember was an 80mm Vantec Tornado fan I got in like 2005. I thought "this thing will improve cooling so much!" It was twice the thickness of a normal fan and sounded like a hair dryer. Absolutely unusable outside of a server room. Was having trouble thinking of my worst tech purchase but yeah it was definitely this, for some reason I didn't immediately uninstall it and just had a hairdryer in the background for a couple years.
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Oct 29, 2022 02:00
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Best hardware was an 80s model m keyboard I got for 50 cents at a thrift store 10 years ago. Worst was an amd fx 8350 I got for a very steep discount, it ran fine but no amount of cooling was adequate for that thing, it was like sitting next to a toaster oven while under any sort of load🔥🔥🔥, I was quite happy to ditch it for a cool running fist gen ryzen 5. I think it's crazy that amd is making their latest chips run at 95 celsius by default they might as well spec a water boiler to attach to them the way they are going.
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Oct 29, 2022 02:19
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Bests
Worsts
mdxi fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Oct 29, 2022 |
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Oct 29, 2022 20:54
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Best: Ryzen 7 1700X. The CPU that convinced me AMD was the real deal and completely changed the game as someone who does a lot of music production with plugins that require a lot of overhead. Would probably still be using it if it weren't for the fact that 1st-gen Ryzen had major issues with four sticks of RAM. Worst: PNY Verto GeForce FX5200. Pretty self-explanatory. Bought it before I really knew anything about computer parts and figured it would be fine for my prebuilt Dell. Quickly learned why it has since earned its place on the list of worst graphics cards of all time and upgraded to a 256MB 6200 a year later, which was a significantly better card.
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Oct 30, 2022 18:10
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Best hardware purchase I ever made was a set of Sony MDR-V6 headphones I bought off a goon way back in 2003 for like $70. Only had to have a lead in one of the cans re-soldered once, and replaced the pads early on, other than that they've been rock loving solid.
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Oct 30, 2022 23:51
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This year Best: IK iLoud Micro Monitor Far and away the best desktop speakers I ever heard without a subwoofer for the price. They sound just as nice as JBL 305Ps but at 10% the size. Worst: Acer XB273U GX - 240Hz IPS 1440P Got a unfixable stuck pixel in the center which is not covered under the warranty. 240Hz isn't a very noticeable upgrade over my old XB271HU 150Hz to my eyes, and the screen coating is far worse than the latter. Sold it at a 50% loss.
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Oct 31, 2022 12:17
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Best: Steam Deck: I’ve had one since they released and it is by far my favorite computer of all time. While I was in between MacBooks I used it as my daily driver. A powerful portable PC that runs Linux and windows, and can emulate whatever I throw at it? Incredible. This is the PC I dreamed of as a nerdy teenage. 1080ti: Bought on release for like $700. Sold last year for $800. In that time it absolutely slapped any VR game I threw at it, flew through all the CFD simulations I tried, and even mined half its own value in Eth (and kept my room warm in the winter). Truly incredible value. Worst: Xbox One S : Just constant hardware problems, controller disconnects, and overall funkiness. Had trouble with it for its entire lifespan. I like the Xbox platform, but this particular version I just had really really bad luck with.
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Nov 2, 2022 15:41
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Best: Maybe Logitech MX Master series mouse? Extremely reliably and versatile. Great for my big hands. Worst: A long time ago, a first-gen iPod Shuffle. Any other MP3 player had probably been a better choice. This one died an early death in a laundry accident. More recently, a 2014 or 2015 Thinkpad, one of the models with the mushy trackpad, and a horrible low-res display too. I still use it occasionally, only because it's so rare I need to use a personal laptop, but it annoys me every time I have to.
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Nov 3, 2022 15:03
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I’ve had a string of bad purchases lately in the “I spent money for something I never use.” Had a chance to buy 2 PS5s on the same day like a month after release. Sold one to a friend at cost and kept the other one. I’ve played Spider-Man on it for about 4 hours and haven’t turned it on since. Purchased an Apple Watch and used it for a week but I get 100 messages a day for work and I got tired of both my pocket and my wrist going off and haven’t charged it since. Purchased a $900 laptop during Black Friday on 2021 because I was doing a bit of traveling at the time. Think I’ve used it like 3 times. Honorable mention and it’s been years but I had about 15 HD-DVDs and the Xbox 360 player.
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Apr 10, 2023 18:54
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best: a 1080ti in May of 2017. Prices shot up immediately after that thanks to shitcoin and didn't come down again for what, years? Meanwhile this is the longest I have owned a graphics card without replacing it, and honestly I don't strongly feel I need to. Can still get playable FPS in most new games in 4K on med-high settings.
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Apr 11, 2023 04:31
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Best: Steamdeck (256gb) Arguably my favorite computer of all time. A handheld Linux based console that is completely unlocked? It’s like the second coming of a hacked PSP in the best of ways Honorable mention: 1080ti, same story as the poster above Worst: Nreal Air AR glasses Absolute dogwater software killed these. The screens themselves were good, but having a giant monitor pasted in front of your head turns out to not actually be useful
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Apr 12, 2023 14:51
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KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:best: a 1080ti in May of 2017. Prices shot up immediately after that thanks to shitcoin and didn't come down again for what, years? Meanwhile this is the longest I have owned a graphics card without replacing it, and honestly I don't strongly feel I need to. Can still get playable FPS in most new games in 4K on med-high settings. Yeah same story, 1080 Ti, May 2017. I also bought a pile of 2TB hard drives maybe a week or two before the floods in Thailand wrecked HDD prices, when was that.. 2010? I'd really have to think about this, because there's plenty of good hardware purchases I've made. I guess if we're going for poor value, I did buy a Radeon 9800 Pro to upgrade from a Radeon 9800. I was also probably one of the only people that had a Radeon 2900 XT. Still, I got the "black box" (a cut down orange box) with it, so it wasn't really bad.
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Apr 12, 2023 19:14
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best: nVidia RTX 2070 I was originally shopping for a Vega 64 on Amazon and found a deeply discounted Zotac 2070 that was just a little bit beyond my price point and stretched to get it instead because, hey, ray tracing!  I have almost never used ray tracing, but the 2070 has been a great card that is vastly superior to my old 1060, it can even run Microsoft Flight Simulator in VR well enough, and I got it for about half the price a similarly positioned video card goes for nowadays. Runner up would be the Abit KT7A card I bought as the foundation for my retro PC, it has been a rock-solid platform for retro games from the early DOS era all the way up until the mid-2000s, capable of hosting processors fast enough for Doom 3 but also with an ISA slot so I do not need to sacrifice conventional memory to get sound under DOS. Ironically, I've heard it and other KT133 cards were regarded as garbage in their own time.worst: Razer Diamondback Chroma I was very excited to try out a new version of my all-time favorite gaming mouse, only to find that it had a subtly different shape that made its ergonomics, at least for my hand, worse in every way, a terrible laser sensor with lots of Z-tracking, and it poo poo the bed within six months. I did not buy another Razer product for several years afterwards. Runner up would be the Corsair Crystal Series case I originally built my Ryzen in that killed my enthusiasm for glass and colored lighting forever by being loud, distracting, and showing off exactly how terrible my cable management was. The cherry on top was the lack of an optical drive bay that forced me to sacrifice two USB ports to an external unit. I ended up replacing it with a Fractal Design R5 and never looked back. E: Actually, my Lenovo ThinkPad T520 might be the best hardware I've ever owned, on second thought. It is not fast, it is not sexy, it does not game well, and it does not have great battery life, but it has been an indestructible cockroach of a computer that has never failed me even running the same Arch Linux install for five years (and the same configuration I set up in 2018 with almost no changes). Something ought to have broken by now but it keeps right on going as if it were new even though it was several years old when I bought it. It even has a nice keyboard that is pleasant to type fast on, which no other laptop I've ever used can boast of. Woolie Wool fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Apr 13, 2023 |
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Apr 13, 2023 01:18
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Best: 14” m1 MBP with 32GB ram, pretty obvious one of the greatest laptops ever made. Intel x25 160GB ssd, it cost $500 but there was no going back. Worst: Google nexus 1, basically the first google phone, it had a ton of bugs, the system partition was tiny for some reason and text messages would disappear. It had huge touch dead zone. It was oled but it had 4 white glowing touch buttons so you never got to experience true black. WD raptor 150GB 10k rpm, it died twice. Evga x58 micro, it had less features than reference board, and it couldn’t do pci passthrough. Should have brought an asus p6t deluxe.
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Apr 13, 2023 01:52
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Woolie Wool posted:I was originally shopping for a Vega 64 on Amazon... my old 1060... Wow, that's a bit of a weird upgrade. It's a good thing you didn't go from the 1060 to the Vega or else you'd probably end up with the latter under your "worst hardware purchases".
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Apr 13, 2023 02:46
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Going to reach way back for this. Best: Hercules Game Theater XP sound card. So take a soundcard, and make a giant breakout box for it. The breakout box had headphone and mic ports that were 1/4". It also had the 15pin gamepad/joystick port, and a few usb ports. It had optical ports, RCA ports, just did everything. Unfortunately killed by Hercules going out of business and drivers never making it to WinXP. Voodoo 2. I had built my computer in 98, but the graphics card it came with was a Riva 128, which was adequate at best. But every gaming magazine was going nuts about the Voodoo2. I saved up a few months of pay to order one, and what an incredible difference. Worst: Some Creative Labs graphics card. Mid 90s, graphics cards were starting to become A Thing. The problem is, they were all pretty terrible. Everyone was trying to find a way to get Quake to run well. Creative Labs jumped into the market with a handful of cards, one of them used a higher quality chipset, while another was much cheaper. From that I remember, they had a card called the Graphics Blaster 3d, which was the good chip. And another card, called the 3d Blaster, which was not. I bought the bad one. I ran Quake marginally better then whatever card that computer had, but not enough to justify the price.
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Apr 13, 2023 04:14
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Woolie Wool posted:E: Actually, my Lenovo ThinkPad T520 might be the best hardware I've ever owned, on second thought. It is not fast, it is not sexy, it does not game well, and it does not have great battery life, but it has been an indestructible cockroach of a computer that has never failed me even running the same Arch Linux install for five years (and the same configuration I set up in 2018 with almost no changes). Something ought to have broken by now but it keeps right on going as if it were new even though it was several years old when I bought it. It even has a nice keyboard that is pleasant to type fast on, which no other laptop I've ever used can boast of. You know I was trying to think of the most fun I've had on computer and your post helped me remember. It's the X220 Tablet with the great keyboard, doing my first big CAD projects on it, math projects, and learning to code. Good memories. The IPS screen is the correct 13" resolution, 1366x768. There are a lot of old scientific programs that don't need that much oomph, and I had a really interesting time trying them after I took the wifi card out, and gave it a second life as an 'offline computer'. In this context, the bad battery was kind of an asset, like a long pomodoro timer, after which time I'd go 'look some things up on the internet' (and dick around) on the "online computer". I should probably go back to that system, in retrospect. I think that's been the most interesting time I've had operating one of these infernal calculators. ~~ 2nd best: I bought a 1060 off of SA-Mart, when my buddy's back went out we played Witcher 3 on it for a week straight on oxycodone. Then GPU prices increased and I sold it for hardly less than what I paid. ~~ Worst: A bunch of server equipment I never used, including 320GB of DDR3-1866 off SA-Mart. I got the Supermicro motherboard, PSU, RAM, but I couldn't get it to boot, and gave up. If anyone wants a bunch of Ivy Bridge era, never-touched-the-internet, just-as-fast-as-when-they-made-it, 320GB of pure research machine (parts), you wouldn't believe how little I would sell the box for.
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Apr 13, 2023 07:56
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Yours was IPS? I'm jealous, mine has the infamous zero contrast screen.
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Apr 13, 2023 14:37
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~Coxy posted:Wow, that's a bit of a weird upgrade. It's a good thing you didn't go from the 1060 to the Vega or else you'd probably end up with the latter under your "worst hardware purchases". I dunno I bought a heavily discounted Vega 64 and it worked great. Still have it although the system it was in died. Best: I guess the iPhone 5s, which is what made me switch from android to iOS and was a gateway drug into the Apple ecosystem. Before that I was all in on google nexus stuff but pretty much every one of them ended up with weird hardware issues. Although I do still have my Nexus 7 tablet somewhere, the good one not the first one. Honourable mentions are: PS2, Switch, my now dead 5820k x99 computer, MBP 2015 Worst: 3080ti FE, bought at the height of the height of the gpu price madness in 2021 for msrp but still by far the most expensive gpu I’ve bought. Died after 3 months of very light use and dealing with nvidia support was painful. Did eventually get a replacement card but still it’s galling that the only gpu failure I’ve had was the most expensive one. At least the performance is decent and I like the cooler design, but I’m never buying an fe card again.
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Apr 13, 2023 14:40
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Back in the early 00's trying to save a few bucks i bought a powerVR kyro II video card. It was anemic iirc but the true stinker was the drivers, which bluescreened like clockwork playing 3d games it was supposed to save me money getting access to.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:17
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Not my purchase, my parents', but they got a ZX Spectrum when I was about 5 because apparently I kept begging them for it (and this was like 1982 when even cheap computers weren't). 40 years later I've been a programmer pretty much straight since then; if they hadn't done that I'd probably be teaching high school history somewhere (badly) for about 1/3rd the pay.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:45
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