[TechSpot] Hardware reliability stats from Puget Systems

[Termie]

Really interesting article here reporting on boutique-builder Puget Systems' experience with component reliability:

http://www.techspot.com/article/780-puget-reliable-pc-hardware/

I find this very unique data, as few vendors that actually handle a lot of hardware would publish these statistics. Kudos to Puget Systems.

Some surprising results:
(1) Samsung SSDs were more reliable than Intel
(2) Kingston is their RAM vendor of choice
(3) Nvidia 780/780Ti are the most reliable video cards (and Asus/EVGA are best of the best)
(4) Asus motherboards top the charts (but the most reliable are workstation-class)
(5) Western Digital Green/Blue hard drives are the most reliable

And some not-so-surprising results:
(1) Antec and Seasonic power supplies are the most reliable
(2) Neither AMD nor Intel CPUs fail much

 

[monkeydelmagico]

Good info Thanks Termie!

NO enthusiast/pro Intel motherboards made the cut..... wow. Since Puget really only uses Asus boards that's seems like a slam on the Sabertooth and Rampage boards

I'm suprised to see the WD blacks and Velociraptor HD's did not make the cut either and were outperformed by the cheaper versions. Could be some distinct usage differences between folks ordering these parts though.

"Nvidia GeForce cards only had an overall failure rate of 3.3% versus AMD Radeon cards which had an overall failure rate of 10%"

 

[lehtv]

Interesting article.

as a whole, Kingston is as much as three to four times more reliable than other brands.

I think this is a big enough finding that warrants recommending Kingston over other brands even if it costs a bit of extra.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Hmmm...it seemed like a lot of actual numbers were missing.

Like, they said their samsung ssds are much more reliable than intel's, but didn't actually quantify that...or did I miss that?

 

[Torn Mind]

Yep, buy ASUS. Then, 99% of the time, it won't trouble you. But if you're part of the unlucky 1%, be prepared for allegedly the worst tech support on the planet.

 

[Sleepingforest]

I think this is a big enough finding that warrants recommending Kingston over other brands even if it costs a bit of extra.

I'm not sure I agree on a purely numeric basis. The normal failure rate is improving:

Standard desktop RAM as a whole has an low failure rate (.84%), which is a bit lower than last year's ~1% overall failure rate.

So if it's actually significantly pricier, Kingston's probably not too much better. At close prices though (a dollar or five) it's really a no brainer.

What I find very interesting is that AMD and Nvidia have a large reliability gap at the consumer level, but at the Quadro and FirePro levels, both are very low and very close (at just above 2% each).

 

[mfenn]

This is useful data, but they didn't report N, so it's not great. The fact that they have 0% failure for some components suggests to me that N is quite small in those cases.

 

[vbuggy]

No numbers to back it up, or did I miss something?

 

[mfenn]

There are numbers in the article. Some are embedded in the text and others are in tables, so it is kind of hard to find stuff.

 

[vbuggy]

There are numbers in the article. Some are embedded in the text and others are in tables, so it is kind of hard to find stuff.

No, no numbers in terms of supporting info to be able to turn those percentages into actually relevant figures. Differences in sample numbers between most reliable and least reliable, etc.

 

[mfenn]

No, no numbers in terms of supporting info to be able to turn those percentages into actually relevant figures. Differences in sample numbers between most reliable and least reliable, etc.

Ah OK, I didn't get your meaning the first time. But yeah, that's what I was saying too.