Up For Debate - What was the last gaming hardware component to die on you?

Written by Jon Sutton on Sun, Jan 12, 2020 4:00 PM

They same time heals all things. Whoever said that clearly wasn’t thinking of the time my GeForce 7800 GTX died on me. It’s been 15 years and I still can’t let it go. See you up in component heaven big boy. Sniff.

Sadly, it is just a fact of life that components will die on us. Ideally it’s later rather than sooner, of course, but there are all sorts of factors which could cause your CPU to give up the ghost 18 months after you buy it, or for your mouse to stop squeaking days after the warranty’s up. Manufacturing defects are par for the course and high intensity use will highlight any potential flaws much quicker.

So, at the risk of jinxing you all and kick-starting a year of melting graphics cards and expiring PSUs, how about we all come to terms with our grief and let rip on the last piece of gaming hardware which died on us. It could be anything from a keyboard to a games console, right on up to a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti which has been consigned to the slag heap.

What was the last gaming hardware to die on you and what happened? Has it put you off ever buying from that particular manufacturer again? 

Spill the beans below!

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13:26 Feb-01-2020

1 Radeon R7 370, 1 GTX 660, 1 SSD and a few mice

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17:20 Feb-03-2020

The GPU's die from overheating or something else?

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21:33 Feb-04-2020

the GTX 660 was DOA and the R7 370 stopped displaying a picture one day

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15:14 Feb-05-2020

0.0
Damn that has to be some of the worst luck I've heard in my life.
Were the cards custom, or reference?

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22:58 Feb-07-2020

yeah it is pretty bad luck! The 660 was a Palit and the R7 370 was an ASUS Strix. Luckily though, I now have a PowerCoor RX 580 8G Red Dragon which is perfect for my needs

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20:54 Feb-16-2020

Glad the 580 is serving you well.
My it have a long life.

P.S.
Sorry for the late reply. Clicked on clear all in global notifications before I replied to your post.
Took me a while to remember what the article was.

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13:15 Jan-29-2020

My Gigabyte Motherboard died on me. Send it in for warranty but it was refused because a few CPU pins were suddenly bent. Don't know if it they got bent in transportation or if they did it themselves to not have to give warranty...


Still salty about that one

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20:40 Jan-31-2020

Did you put the protective cover on the CPU socket before the transport?

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00:02 Jan-26-2020

Three i7-5960X CPUs. One at work, two at home.
One of my 2080Tis also failed.


All components replaced by warranty.

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11:09 Jan-28-2020

Wonder if the comments will be used for data collection?

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13:12 Jan-20-2020

Do I have to feel as an intruder because not a single piece of hardware died in my hands?


Using my PC regularly, playing intensive games regularly, but also doing periodic maintenance as well, such as thermal paste swap, removing dust, etc... Nothing really died, even the old hardware that I don't own anymore (old, but not obsolete!).

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22:39 Jan-24-2020

Damn. What's your oldest hardware component?

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04:26 Jan-20-2020

A Thrustmaster GPX precision XBOX 360 controller... Two years ago I had to acquire a new monitor... My ASUS V238H 1080P TN monitor died... S I bought the Acer G257HL bmidx IPS monitor... Of course like any ACER monitor I've had in the past there is one dead pixel out on it... Not really noticeable though...

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02:07 Jan-23-2020

None of my controllers never really never died, the cord caused a short somewhere...

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06:56 Jan-18-2020

Batteries in my Logitech F710

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22:39 Jan-24-2020

Can you replace them?

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23:28 Jan-17-2020

Antec Earthwatts 500w used 24/7. It was only 10 years old.

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09:46 Jan-18-2020

A 10 year PSU that was used 24/7 all the time is a good PSU.
How did the PSU die?

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03:16 Jan-19-2020

Capacitors started swelling from old age, giving wrong voltages. The built in protection did its thing and it shut off.

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11:21 Jan-19-2020

In theory, if the only problems were the capacitors you could take out the broken ones and solder in new ones.


All that depends on how much time you'll willing to invest in fixing your hardware, compared to simply sending it to the dump.

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03:19 Jan-20-2020

It's an easy fix alright, if you can do it yourself. It also needed a new 80mm pwm fan.
Repair shops charge more than it's worth.

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22:43 Jan-24-2020

That's often the issue.
The repair is only worthwhile if you can do it yourself.

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08:38 Jan-16-2020

my corsair PSU died after a little over 1 year of use :p sent it for replacement

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13:34 Jan-16-2020

Most Corsair PSUs must be avoided.

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17:41 Jan-16-2020

You get what you pay for if you buy a 20$ PSU dont be surprised ifs lifespan is short(doesnt matter which brands on it) or it could go for 1o or more years hard to say. But nothing is perfect even the highest end PSU could be a dud.

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18:30 Jan-16-2020

Problem is that Corsair PSUs cost 60$ and are worse than some 20$ PSUs.

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20:19 Jan-15-2020

I had an overheating MSI R9 290X that only lasted a year running at 94C under load until it started artifacting and couldn't boot. The box said that the it should run at 78C under load with the aftermarket cooler. Despite running hotter then this it shouldn't of died anyway since AMD said that 95C is normal load temperature for the R9 290X. I sent it to MSI to get RMA and got a MSI r9 390 in return. I sold it and got an MSI gtx 1060 6GB which runs at 67C under full load.

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22:34 Jan-14-2020

GPU, GTX 660

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17:46 Jan-14-2020

Last one to die (or at least almost dead) is my R9 270x hawk. HDMI says is out of range and VGA artifacts like hell. Now my R9 270 is lonely (it was crossfired)

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12:39 Jan-15-2020

Sounds like a vram issue perhaps underclocking the memory/core clock will help.

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17:30 Jan-14-2020

My stock AMD CPU Cooler died 6 months ago, I bought a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Editon RGB for replacement

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19:58 Jan-14-2020

If you're ever looking for a good CPU cooler check out scythe mugen 5.
Great value for the money.

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15:21 Jan-14-2020

A GTX 460 about 4 years ago. Managed to fix it by baking it lol

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17:10 Jan-14-2020

was the baking effective till nowadays, or died after weeks/months anyway?

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19:59 Jan-14-2020

I'd like to know that as well.

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06:10 Jan-14-2020

Last thing that died on me was GTX 285 Zotac, few years before that ATi Radeon 3800. Both cards were terrible :). The 285 was in warranty so they sent me GTX 460 as a replacement.

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02:07 Jan-14-2020

Since 1998 and my first PC I was really lucky and no hardware part died since then... almost. Everything in my PCs was working fine except CD/DVD drive. Didn't matter which brand: LG, Pioneer, NEC, Samsung, you name it.

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00:01 Jan-14-2020

7870 suddenly died in 2015 for no reason; the temps never hit 70c. RIP 2012-2015. I was impressed with how it offered GTX 580 performance for about $200 less; admittedly it was on sale for 50 bucks off, and the GTX 6xx was just rolling out.

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00:04 Jan-14-2020

But ever since then I've gone to Nvidia and have not looked back, as deep as my respect for Radeon products go, I have had an HD 6870 die within 24 months and a 7870 die within 36, meanwhile, my GTX 460 still runs! If Nvidia's pricing doesn't improve with ampere, I will, of course, be looking to Team Red to provide a more money-conscious option for me

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23:31 Jan-13-2020

Does the full rig count as a component? Angus Young and Malcolm Young once wrote:


You've been thunderstruck

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22:47 Jan-13-2020

It's either my seagate hdd or GTX 970, they pretty much died within the same month. At least the hdd was only used for storage so didn't lose a lot of stuff, but a gpu dying during a raid in wow wasn't really it's best way of saying goodbye -_-

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21:47 Jan-13-2020

Last one was headphones, right side stopped working like exactly after 2 year warranty was over I think. That was like 2 or 3 years ago, I think, since then I got HyperX Cloud 2 and I am happy with them. But from internal components... I think it was hard drive, good decade ago when younger me was getting new PC after working during summer and HDD was bad, causing freezes.

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21:49 Jan-13-2020

Got it replaced via warranty and that was it for that. But other than that, from internal components nothing failed till now. Though one graphic card that I had failed in interesting way that limited me to use 640x480 with up to 8 or 16 colors, can't remember exactly, hat might have been 2 decades ago... that was actually kind of funny. :-D

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21:52 Jan-13-2020

Also one of more funny ones was PSU, which failed on me... I think it was still like 90s... Because I am pretty sure I wouldn't get momentarily entertained by smashing power button like a maniac, that was till PSU went bang. I am pretty sure I never unplugged my PC faster than at that time. But hey, at least I knew where the issue was... black smoking issue. :-D

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19:55 Jan-13-2020

Had my PSU (Corsair VS 550) start dying on me about a month ago, when i began noticing my gpu being unable to throw decent frames at games I'd been playing for a while (mainly sekiro). Was scared ****less about my gpu since i got it used a few months ago and the buyer warranty had ended. Fired up MSI afterburner and found out the my gpu couldn't draw more than 50W of power (125-130 is its max). Later found out it could be either my mobo, my psu or my gpu - thankfully it was only the psu - wasn't too bad... it already lasted more than 3x the Corsair warranty period

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Can They Run... |

| 60FPS, Ultra, 1440p
Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8GHz GeForce RTX 3090 Zotac Gaming Trinity 24GB 32GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 30FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 2600 GeForce GTX 1660 Gigabyte OC 6GB 16GB
| 60FPS, Low, 1080p
Ryzen 5 5500U 6-Core 2.1GHz GeForce GTX 1650 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1440p
Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core 3.8GHz Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB 32GB
| 60FPS, Medium, 720p
Core i5-10300H 4-Core 2.50GHz GeForce GTX 1650 8GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1060 Gigabyte Mini ITX OC 6GB 32GB
0% No [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core 3.6GHz Radeon RX 5700 PowerColor Red Dragon 8GB 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
0% No [1 votes]
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Core i9-9900K 8-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Asus ROG Strix OC 11GB 32GB
| 30FPS, Ultra, 1440p
Ryzen 5 2600X 6-Core 3.6GHz GeForce GTX 1080 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
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Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
| 60FPS, High, 1080p
Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
100% Yes [1 votes]
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Ryzen 3 3100 4-Core 3.6GHz GeForce RTX 3050 16GB
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Ryzen 5 5600X 6-Core 3.7GHz Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB 32GB
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Core i3-2367M 1.4GHz Intel HD Graphics 3000 Desktop 4GB
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