Hi all,
I myself have a few desktop computer issues with freezing and lagging lately. Replaced the SSD, no fix with a fresh Windows 11 install. Starting to think it is the RAM.
So it got me thinking, what have you had fail in your desktop? In the past never I have had an issue with the odd Power Supply and Hard Drive, but that's been it.
Be interested to hear what others have had.
Had a 3090 blow up - smoke, electrical, the whole works. Didn't kill the computer thankfully, but it did scare my son and wife a bit.
Otherwise have had heaps of platter drives die on me over the years, a motherboard that fell victim to the capacitor plague (see below), and a RAM stick that caused me no end of weird problems.
one of my mobo screw got stuck with the case and i cant get it out :cccc
Two SSDs failed. Both of them were over 4 years old anyway.
Right now I think my motherboard is failing. It is functional, but I cannot change any settings in the BIOS without going through a boot loop. My PC is ancient and overdue for an upgrade anyway.
Don't get me started! I built the pc in 2017, In the time since it was built i have had fail and had to replace:
Power Supply
NVME Drive
SSD Drive
2070 Super Graphics card
4 X 4Tb Spinning rust HDD (Although in their defence, They were running near 24/7 for almost 5 years so…)
2 X Noctua 120mm Fans
1 X 8Gb DDR4 ram module
And the nail in the coffin that made me beat the whole thing up with a big hammer and bin it was the Ryzen 7 1800X failing.
Sounds like a bad PSU. Did you have a quality PSU in the system?
I can't remember the brand, but it was a 80 plus platinum psu.
Yeah, surely something is going wrong here electrically. Can't be that unlucky
*2x Seagate HDD's. First one died after a year, the warranty replacement after 6 months. Not even heavily used. Switched to Western Digital after that and have never had a failure so far
*1x Seasonic Prime Platinum 850W power supply. Blew up after 3 months. Replacement has been going strong for the last 5 years
*Various Corsair Products: 3x fans (RGB issues), 2x k95 platinum keyboards (RGB issues. Third ones RGB is buggered in the same fashion of the first 2). Live in North QLD and every year during the rain season the RGB on at least one of my corsair devices (keyboard/mouse/fans) goes haywire. Sometimes it sorts itself out a few weeks later, sometimes not. Gave up replacing them and will try another brand next time i do a full PC upgrade
My brother's PC was randomly blue screening and had a heap of weird faults.
Isolated it down to being his 2*8gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200 Ram. ( Might have only been one stick, but swapped them both out because why not )
Swapped and now it's all good.
HDDs would always go, specifically ones used in an unraid server.
And lots of fans. Basically anything with moving parts.
Have built myself 4 PCs over the past 20 years.
I would say I've been very lucky with the minimal amount of issues I've had.
1 x SSD fail after about 12 months use
1 x external HDD fail after about 3 years use
1 x GPU fail (980ti after 5 years use - randomly died and would spam BSOD)
1 x PSU (after about 5 years use was still functioning fine but the internals would overheat and it developed a bit of coil whine causing the fan to be running at 100% and be super loud/annoying. When playing games was like having a hairdryer on in the room).
Multiple so no vote. I had my first HDD fail in 2012 (external drive within 3 months of purchase).
I had a PSU partially fail which caused excessive draw from the GPU when under load to turn the computer off, this was interesting to diagnose. (GeForce 4 Ti 4200)
I had a SFF Dell that killed its PSU, bought and put in a new PSU, it died within 12 hours, chucked the whole thing.
Many more, including laptop boards with discrete graphic cards but that is what comes to mind.
From memory:
Inno3d 8800gt failed in 2yrs after I bought from Hong Kong back to Aus. It made a POP sound before it died
1 day my PC with AMD CPU just didn't boot and won't even POST.
Last 15-20 years of building PCs
Most common failure is Monitors!
Other failure points
SSD - 1x Samsung, 1xCrucial
Hard Drives - Not that common, only failed after many many years.
CPU - I think due a power surge though, AMD 3950x,
- took a lot of troubleshooting to work out it was the CPU as I thought too that they never faile.
- basically swapped out every part, including new motherboard, new ram, before swapping the CPU.
RAM - ECC ram in a dell workstation computer had a fault
CPU and Motherboard also developed a fault, all replaced by DELL
I've had an older graphics card fail maybe 10 years ago in the AMD Athlon days (can't remember what it was)
I've only ever bought decent power supplies and all have survived, but I did replace my friends cheap no name brand one that failed randomly on his prebuilt computer.
I run about 4 computers, that run 24/7 and they're the main failures.
Feeling nervous about all the GPU failures. How do I stop mine from failing? Just got it 1 year ago.
Make sure it's kept cool and dust free. Also get a UPS with surge protection for when the power grid goes wobbly.
PSU is the only thing I've had fail that I can remember, even then it was still working but the fan didn't sound healthy.
Related question, whats the most common point of failure for gaming laptops? Considering buying a Asus X16 with IPS screen/3060 graphics/SSD.
Gaming laptops are horrible at dispersing heat, the fans can get clogged and thermal paste crack. Generally, the laptop won't 'fail' per say but will instead thermal throttle and thus run slower. Eventually, you might find the laptop becoming hot and shutting down.
Laptops can be wildly different to pull apart, but there are plenty of youtube videos of teardowns. Replacing the thermal paste is exactly the same as a desktop and pulling the pubes out of fans is gross but helps greatly.
Aside from that, keys just breaking and falling off is probably the most common 'failure'. Followed by the power-supply brick dying.
Thanks mate
PSU, HDD
Had a motherboard fail on me, when I took it out a thick cake of dust fell out from the back of the motherboard so I think it probs shorted.
Had a SSD fail after just 1 year of light use. One of the shitty blue drives that were initially somewhat reliable but wd reportedly started cheaping out on recently. First time I've had a drive fail and not been able to recover data. They've usually just slown down and degraded gradually in the past so I had time to move my data. Warranty doesn't cover repair, just replacement so. Will probably just stick with samsung for now (have one drive going 5+years strong in another media machine running 24x7).
But yeah, for the past 25 or so years have only had power supplies fail. Maybe a capacitor on a motherboard here and there which was easily replaceable.
I have a PC, and have had PC's the last ~12 or so years, however, it does make me think. I never had to replace a part on my PS1, PS2, PS3, XBOX, PS4 etc.
Hmmm
Mobo: Nvidia 680i chipset I think? Didn't fail physically. ASUS officially released a broken and untested BIOS that killed motherboards before they loljokes retracted it without giving a shit about warranties
HDD: Had one of my Western Digital Raptor 10000RPM drives fail which made me sad. They were godly in the pre-SSD days.
GPU: Crysis melted my GPU. No I am not memeing.
FDD: Darn thing not only stopped reading but somehow started to destroy other floppy disks I inserted afterwards.
PSU: OCZ was the brand I think and they didn't focus on quality. Probably why they are no longer around.
RAM: Had a set of four G.Skill sticks and one was bad. Had a set of Mushkin sticks that didn't play nicely with my motherboard.
Hard Drive many times.
RAM once.
PSU once.
Over 20 years.
what an absolutely generic thread to start….
Plenty of IT enthusiasts on Ozbargain.
and? basically nothing to this thread
"X owners, what have you had fail" for literally anything, no discussion to be had just people posting what they had fail.
and no ability to select multiple things on the list so have to post in threat
Star dot star
We need a chassis option tho tbh
How would a chassis fail?
Unless you mean the side panel glass shatter.
Yeah that would count
Inbuilt LED controllers/Fan controllers
USB ports, power switches, etc
My case is so old (coolermaster cm690) the plastic has gotten weak, things like the hdd/gpu 'quicklock' just snap off and most recently my power-on button holder snapped off, so now the button just hangs there (still works).
Nothing, and all the parts were imported from Nevada America from Amazon back in 2013, and stil going strong all parts…
A stick of ram. After 3 years of use, lucky it has lifetime warranty. Got it replaced hassle free. And it's the only component I got replaced without having to buy a new part. CPU is the only thing that never fail on me.
Have had a motherboard and GPU fail. Both ASUS.
Been building computers for myself and friends for 30 odd years. I have had everything in the poll fail at least once in that time.
I don't believe the 13 people claiming to have had a CPU fail
Why? While the failure rate for 'most' cpus is very low, (with a few notable exceptions) they do occur. For me it was a Cyrix cpu. Though just a few years ago both amd and intel had a generation with high failure rates.
clearly you haven't used pcs back in amd athlon xp days.
Yep, my 2600+ died after about 8 years.
Had a WD HDD fail 2 decades ago, i.e. click of death.
Nothing else has failed and I hope this stays true for the Corsair HX620 I've been using since 2008.
I've had a Hard Drive, a PSU, and a Graphics Card fail.
Motherboards seem the most prone to fatal failures. Other than that I've only had 1 hard drive and 1 Nvme SSD suddenly fail and not start up.
Nothing while in down under. Used to live in a hot humid and sea windy area growing up and I've had issues with almost every part from time to time (mostly needed replacement of part or whole system).
I've had CPU, Graphics Card, Hard Drive / SSD, Motherboard, Power Supply, and RAM fail on me…poll only supports one answer lol
I've had 2 x GPUs fail.
- One was a really old Nvidia 8800. It lasted about 9 years.
- One was a cheapo GPU just to display windows ($50).
I've also had spinning hard disks fail. They start ticking, then stop working entirely. Never had an issue SSDs.
I've never had anything fail, but I haven't been around long.
Gygabyte mobo I haven't had one that lastedmore than one yr
I buy what I consider safe brands and do my research before a pc component purchase.
I have been building pc's for nearly 25 years and routinely perform maintenance on systems.
Most commonly I have had fans seize.
Recently I had a 2tb Seagate external go 'pop' after not being used for years. Less than $5 for the chipset and it's good as new.
I have had a viewsonic 22" LCD fail and the clicker on my Mionix mouse fail (after 12 years of heavy use).
That's it.
Was even given a pc (intel i7 950) that I was amazed it didn't blow up. The previous owner had a fan on a 4-pin molex + the 3pin mobo connector and also thermal paste was gone so it ran at 110c constantly. The cpu still works fine even after 6+ months of 110c.
Some of my WD HDD's have not so great smart data, so I replaced them in my main system before they could fail. They still work as far as I am aware.
Could be dust build up on all the vent ports/fans and lack of cleaning thats causing overheating. Usually overheating is the main cause of freezing/lagging.
Years ago like maybe 20 years ago when the computer fare was on at UNSW, i had a wireless keyboard and mouse fail because my brother was playing Red Alert and decided to smash them. All because it disconnected when he was playing, is that included as a hardware failure? I have had issues with a few hard drives and also USB drives but that is to be expected i guess.
On another note how often does everyone re-paste their GPU?
PSU, PSU,Mother Board, PSU, PSU, Mother BoRd, Graphics Card.
Should have multiple multiple choices, I certainly believe PSU is the most failed part, but the poll shows otherwise, i should be able to pick it 4 times because I replaced 4 times, then 2 time Motherboard and 1 time graphics card.
have never had any parts die on me, always got old and replaced, I am lucky. I did lose a brand new XPS laptop in a storm from a power surge once.
Personally speaking, I've had multiple PSU's fail during electrical storms (now I keep them behind a UPS), 3 RAM sticks, 1 motherboard, a few NICs, 2 GPU's and 2 SSD's and 6 HDD's fail over the years. CPU issues have popped up but it's always turned out to be the heatsink/fans that are failing rather than the actual CPU itself.
About a decade ago when moving my HDD's to a new PC, one of the important HDD's failed to be accessible after the new PC was built. It was the HDD with all the photos of our kids on it. I actually ended up tracking down an identical model HDD from someone on Whirlpool and buying it from them, swapping the PCB on the back of the good HDD to my HDD and recovered the data. Was a super stressful few weeks as I literally tried everything I could think of to recover the data. I now keep those photos on multiple drives on multiple systems, as well as a copy stored in the cloud.
Professionally speaking - as I have an IT career spanning 20+ years - I've had everything. PSU's, RAM, CPU's, hard drives/SSD's, RAID cards, tape backup units, UPS's, generators, air-conditioning, mainboards, KVM's, NICs, routers, switches, firewalls etc.
Moral of the story… make sure you have backups, and make sure you test those backups regularly.
I've repaired my PC a few times over the decades and usually the HDD fails first then the GPU, RAM, CPU, PSU then MOBO in that order.
I've not had it with DDR4 yet, but most of my DDR3 dimms have died at this point. I also have a few not quite dead but not always happy to boot PSUs which I would prefer not to connect to a rig lol
I have a Radeon HD 7950 that has a few knocked off caps but still manages to produce an image consistently
Surprisingly none of my HDDs are yet to die, they kind of get overtaken by the higher capacity HDDs and are removed from my system and placed in storage.
I find especially with older systems it's a bit rough when troubleshooting to know if it's a PSU or Motherboard issue outside of using another rig to test with.
Over about 20 years of building my own machines, I don't think I've had anything solid-state fail on me except for a PSU that once went out spectacularly— the whole routine with pop, bang, buzz, smoke. Glad I was home at the time. I did have a couple dud sticks of RAM a couple times, but they came that way. A few hard drives have failed, and 1 cpu fan that could've spelled disaster back in the Athlon days before thermal throttling/safeties. Overall I think I've been lucky, given some of the stories I've heard before and in this thread.
I had a power supply blow up while playing Cod at a LAN event and a random hard drive failure but apart from that very minimal.
The combination of power outage and faulty memory stick have caused a corrupted zfs pool. Had to do some nasty recovery to get my data back. The important stuff are getting backed up to google drive now.
One RAM stick recently.
PC would just lock up randomly and I thought it was software so reinstalled windows and it got worse… now GPU driver was crashing and certain games (Far Cry 6 for instance) would crash shortly after getting into a session every single time.
I eventually ran windows memory diagnostics and it too froze so pulled 1 stick of RAM and tried Far Cry again and it worked flawlessly. Decided to confirm my suspicions and swapped the ram sticks around and instantly it crashed.
Never had RAM fail in 20 years of working with various PCs so was tricky to diagnose and quite unexpected
Probably about 8-10 years ago I had the South Bridge chip on a motherboard catch fire while I was in the middle of playing a game. Needless to say I had to replace the motherboard as it is a bit hard to trust a motherboard with scorch marks on one of the key chips is going to work again.
Wow, that's serious. Did you immediately turn off your mains? Electrical fire is no joke.
Yeah definitely turned it off. Was not an electrical fire beyond only the chip on the mainboard itself.
mobo, HDD, graphics card, screens, keyboards, mice - but mostly the user!!!
Over 30 years. One motherboard, numerous HDD's, one PSU, 2 x video cards, HD5850 and a 780TI. All of this gear lasted at least 5 years so not bad and I generally ran overclocked systems. I did buy a Gigabyte 3080 which died after a week as well. Ended up getting a refund after reading about crappy reliability for that certain card.
1 TB WD black. Completely failed. Software couldn't recover anything. Lost a heap of data too. Wasn't happy
Had 1 SSD fail then had the replacement fail a month later.
I have had 1 x CPU failure on a brand new business server. The technician only worked it out after several visits replacing nearly every other component (multiple motherboard replacements, RAM replacements etc). Of course the server was also in a remote location just to make things harder…
Of my personal devices, only a PSU. When I worked in tech support; mobos, drives (both SSD and HDD), GPU, RAM. Don't recall ever coming across the failure of a CPU though.
Noctua fan stopped working for the D14 cooler. CPU ran fine for months without me noticing or any system lock ups.
90 degree config on the raven case and massive penetrator fans saved the day.
IT Guy here who has been using hand me down throw away computers from clients for as long as he can remember. (3-5 year refresh cycles)
Worth noting I have only ever really dealt with business HP / Lenovo lines (now all Lenovo, (profanity) HP), so in custom built Desktops there might be less quality control / lower end brands used particularly with power supplies?
SSDs sometimes fail, but it's honestly rare these days. Back when hybrids were a thing the firecuda's were atrocious, they'd be problematic within a year.
That said, I did get a bad batch of SSDs one time that all failed within a month of install, right after I installed them in about 10 computers (HDD->SSD swap back when it was worthwhile years ago). So that was fun, had to image them across to another disk and it took maybe 60 minutes to clone off these failing pieces of shit (120gb). At least the data was recoverable to save time reconfiguring anything.
Power supplies used to be a concern, but compared to a decade ago these seem to be very infrequent. I honestly can't remember the last one I saw fail.
Haven't seen a bad RAM/CPU/GPU in as long as I can remember.
RAM x 1, GPU x 1, MOBO x 1 and a couple 7200rpm HDD's. That's in roughly 15-20 years of building but probably only about 10 PC's
Each one from different PC's over the course of 15 years (Give or take)
KIA:
Lenovo laptop cooling fan (long service)
Laptop HDD (early death)
I only ever had NAS drives fail
I have Hard drives from 2004 that still function fine, never really had any hardware issues and I've gone through a few systems
First the HDD and followed by my temper!
I think my OG non-hash locked gtx 3090 just failed…
Waaaaaaaaa 😢
All of the above except CPU
Ooof, I appear to have a secret disliker going through and negging all my comments.
Need a 'nothing' option.
Have built multiple PCs, a couple Synology NAS's, each at least 5 years old and nothing has ever failed.
Have a friend, whose HDDs seem to fail on a regular basis LOL
Desktops have been incredibly robust with PSUs the only failures. Noisy fans and HDDs on the way out, but plenty of warning to replace.
We still have multiple Win95 machines running 24/7 at work, legacy software compatibility needs (if you stop them they are more likely to pop on startups), Pentium 200 etc pushing 25 years.
Every laptop has gone glitchy within 5 years and of course their battery is useless within a few.
the most disgusting thing i saw being a tech at Harris Technology was a PC brought in after failing to boot from a smokers house. It had yelow brown dust.
Roaches get in to PCs too.
Seen everything fail at one point. Most common is PSU,Fan, RAM, Hd Mobo
laptops with bad thermals have mobos die too
Not many PC parts but almost every peripheral I've had that was gaming branded has stopped working/presented issues within warranty period or right after.
My list can be broken down into things that died on their own and things that were broken on accident:
Broke on their own:
- WD 320GB Blue HDD. This was around 10 years old when it began reporting critical SMART errors. The data was copied off it before it died for good
- Super Flower PSU (don't remember what model). Initially thought a hard drive was dying and the PC couldn't boot off it, turns out the port for the modular cable on the PSU had unstable power. Replacing the PSU fixed the problem.
Killed by accident:
- Super Flower PSU (don't remember what model). This was an 850W model that came in a pre-built with 2x GTX295 (a setup that really needs at least 1000W). Was running Crysis 2 when the PSU blew up in smoke. Luckily, no other components were damaged. The store replaced the PSU with the model mentioned previously, and I removed one of the cards to prevent another accident.
- Ram. Killed a stick by not inserting it completely and then powering up a machine. The motherboard this was installed in only had a locking clip on one side of the slot, and it was the side without the clip which wasn't inserted properly. Probably would have caught this mistake if the motherboard was outside the tower case.
Aside from this, I've had numerous fans that started to develop ticking noises months/years down the line. Otherwise, the fan still works fine, but I replace them either way.
CMOS battery
1 power supply after a long time - no longer turned on.
And 1 hard drive within 2 weeks - loud tick sound.
10 yr old iMac just had the PSU fail
Had a HDD fail as soon as it was installed, somehow burnt tripped the power supply safety.
Took it back and the (nameless) store said that never happens and said it’s unlikely and it’s probably my PC. I told them to not test it and take my word for it as it’s dangerous.
Guy then proceeded dismiss my warning and test the drive, melted his test rig and burnt the power supply starting a small fire 🔥.
Most satisfying refund I ever got.
I forced shut down my PC while it was doing a mandatory update. Regrettably, I was frustrated as I went AFK briefly and came back to it updating. I had an urgent deadline.
The screen does tell you to not shut down for a reason. It was during a critical stage of the update and unfortunately I managed to corrupt the BIOS/windows.
Long story short, don’t shut down while updating.
Failed hardware: User
SSD's fail all the time, at work I've lost count how many have failed. Of course 9 times out of 10 the person involved wasn't using Onedrive to back up all their stuff.
I thought they were fairly reliable. Is it a common brand or type? How old were they?
RAM went - Caused weird crashes. Ran Memtest over it from a USB, found the dodgy stick, went from 16gb —> 8gb for a bit and it was good again.
Interestingly, that dodgy piece of RAM works just fine in my homelab system….