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Share your hardware failure history.

T

Thinker_145

Senior member
I have been a PC gamer since 2007 in the sense that I got my first real gaming computer at that time with each component selected individually with careful thought. I have monitored my temps and used quality power supplies since that point onwards. So basically I am talking about hardware failures where you didn't do anything wrong and neither were you using cheap parts or cheap pre-built.

I have had a fairly unfortunate experience to be honest and it has hampered my upgrade path way too many times. I live in Pakistan and warranties are pretty short here. So here goes my unfortunately long list.

1. My XFX 8800 GTS 640MB died in its third year while it was still perfectly fine for my needs. Warranty was only 1 year. I did not have the money for a high end card so I just settled for the cheapest option which wouldn't be worse. It was the most expensive component in my initial build so this was disappointing.

2. Second was my LGA 775 motherboard made by Intel which they used to do back in the day. Can't remember the exact name. It died in its 4th year and had a 3 year warranty. The platform was still more than adequate for me so I had no choice but to buy another LGA 775 board.

3. Next up my XFX GTS 250 1GB died in its third year again. While it was getting long in the tooth but I was still saving money for an upgrade and of course I lost all the resale value. So once again I had to settle for a mid range card due to the timing of the GPU failure.

4. Next up the SONY DVD burner died but this was expected and I never bought an internal drive again.

5. A 250GB Seagate HDD died which was part of my initial build. Again this wasn't uncommon but annoying nevertheless. Fortunately it was no longer my OS drive when this happened.

6. A stick of 2GB Kingston DDR3 ram died but this one had lifetime warranty so I was able to get a replacement.

7. This one was possibly most disappointing personally. My Dell 2209wa just died in its 4th year and nobody was able to repair it. Didn't have any warranty on it as I had imported it. For its time it was an incredible gaming monitor and a breakthrough for IPS into gaming. I was expecting a freaking monitor to last 10+ years or net me a decent resale value but oh well.

Second hand parts have a lot of value in Pakistan as many people can only afford to buy used so there is more demand for them and used products are looked at with less negativity. So everytime something outright dies out of warranty it is a big loss for me.

Fortunately my HIS 7850 2GB managed to last a whopping 4 years and here I am finally able to get a GPU that I actually wanted to and carefully planned for. I also netted a fairly decent resale on it.

Sent from my HTC One M9
 
The only component I've had fail on me was my Samsung 840Pro SSD... replaced under warranty. Considering my current 3 PC builds, the oldest of which will be 5 years old in December, but none newer than 3 years... I've had pretty good service out of my components, some of which might be considered sketchy... like an Agility3 SSD, a 3TB Seagate HDD (still in everyday service,) and a Corsair CX430 PSU. I have upgraded many of the components, but usually I've moved the older components to one of the other machines rather than outright replacement. Interesting still, a few of those main components I bought used... something I don't normally do (having been burnt too many times buying used audio equipment.)

My fingers are crossed!
 
I've had a few defective purchases; stuff that was broken when I bought it or failed almost immediately. I don't count that. 🙂

In the last 15 years, I've had... lessee... a couple motherboards that died on me, a couple hard drives, the occasional bad USB or SATA cable, and a GeForce 7900GS GPU that started crashing while gaming.

Other than that, my computing is pretty trouble-free.
 
My experiences are similar to Dave. I've had an SSD and mobo killed by a "cheap case PSU" (iMicro, for those interested), but other than those incidents, I don't think I've had much in the way of hardware failures, where something just doesn't work the next day. (Knock on wood, I guess.)

I have had a couple of Acer laptops die. One might have been due to a spilled drink in bed, the other seems to be a case of slowly falling apart and dying. (Been getting blue screens, unmountable boot device, etc. May be the refurb 160GB Intel Series 320 SSD that I put in it. But I wouldn't expect an MLC SSD to have read/write errors. I should try swapping the SSD just to make sure. It's my "junk" laptop, with an ethernet that I use for re-programming routers and stuff. I don't use it for anything personal.)

Edit: Oh, and I've had video card and PSU fans fail. The only PSU fan that I had fail was on an Antec BP500 with a sleeve-bearing fan, it started to go after only a year. The video card fans started to go around the 2.5-3 year mark. I had run DC on them, though, so they were "rode hard".

Edit: Also, replaced a few 80mm fans in my server case, and I more recently had a couple of EVGA Torx X3L laser mice fail in various ways (buttons, wheel).
 
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I can't remember the model, but the only failure was a AMD based Zotac MB. At least in the last 10 years it's the only thing that has gone belly up.

Cell phones on the other hand....yikes!
 
About 15 3.5" HDs from the main stream Manufacturers (WD-SG-Hitachi-Toshiba-IBM-Samsung).

Does not matter which Drive on which computer, even without overworking them hard, they seem to have"Time-Bomb" inside and they die after few years.


😎
 
Oh, I forgot. Dumped coffee on my laptop once, but it was older, and a common design that my employer had purchased several hundred of. So I fixed it by raiding the junk bin at work. (Had a couple donor laptops with smashed LCD screens.)

If you basically destroy something yourself, does that really count as a hardware failure in the traditional sense? It didn't fail me, I failed it.
 
Forgot to mention recently the top 200mm fan in my 6 year old HAF 922 started dying and now can't run at even half it's rated speed. This is the first time a fan has failed on me but it's not something to blame anyone over since my PC seldom sleeps. And of course it's fairly cheap and expected maintenance.

I have also had 2 logitech mice fail. The MX518 left click became problematic but only after many many years of service. However the G602 has been a disappointment in this regard. The wheel button died in 6 months and then same thing happened with the replacement. So I just decided to assign a thumb button to it and got used to it.
 
Had a super generic 500w PSU fail and eat my 7800GS. The AGP slot was fine, thankfully.

Lost numerous HDDs over the years, but the one that got me the most was a 30gb Western Digital drive from forever ago. I backed up my c: drive (A Seagate 30gb) to it, shut down and removed the IDE cable and power cable to the WD drive, formatted and reinstalled Windows to my c: drive, then powered down and reconnected the WD. When I powered back up... click, click, click, click. Much raging was had.

Crunched an AMD Duron 600. Bye bye l2 cache! But hello 1ghz.

Overheated a motherboard's VRMs because I watercooled and overclocked the piss out of an AMD XP chip. No airflow from the CPU cooler makes for unhappy VRMs.

I may or may not have damaged the GTX960M chip from my old laptop - after overclocking it, the whole machine froze in a game then just shut down. Finally got it booted back up, but the GPU after that wouldn't even accept 1mhz extra speed - just an instant black screen hang.
 
Abit IP35-E, had to RMA it because of a defective capacitor.
ASUS P4PE, died
ASUS A7V8X, died
ASUS P4P800, died
Gigabyte GA965p-ds3, died
XFX HD4870 overheated, not sure what the problem was on this one
PNY TI4200 would artifact and crash occasionally
all the Western Digital hard drives I've had died
 
I don't have a whole lot of history:

Antec 1200W PSU
Antec 750W? PSU (they sent me the 1200W as a replacement)
Tyan Tiger MP motherboard
Nvidia Ti 4600
 
have a seagate goflex nas with a 2 gb drive, the drive itself died a couple years after i bought it. i tossed in a wd 2 gb drive and it runs fine to this day.

had a antec tp 550 psu fan fail 3 years ago, antec sent a replacement that was better than the original is it was fully modular rather than all strings hardwired.
 
Overclocking:
Three Asus motherboards.
Two AMD CPUs.
No video cards though.

And of course a couple Seagate spinner drives.
 
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