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Introduction
While this data is nice, one of the most important things we track is the failure rates of individual components. Reliability is one of our primary values, so this data is invaluable for tracking both individual component, product line, and overall brand failure rates. With 2013 coming to a close, we thought we would run some reports and share what hardware we found to be the most reliable in 2013. Since we are a custom computer company and do at times special order in components to meet a customer's specific needs, there is one stipulation we are imposing on what hardware we will be allowing into this list. Specifically, we are only considering high volume items from our product line so that we have a large enough sample size to make an informed call on the reliability of the component. With that said, let's take a look at one of the most at risk components in a computer: the motherboard. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MotherboardA reliable motherboard is essential in a high quality computer. Not only is a motherboard very difficult to swap out, but the effects of a poor quality motherboard can be far reaching and difficult to troubleshoot. This is complicated by the fact that motherboards are one of the most complex components in a computer. There are SATA, USB, fan, and network controllers as well as physical ports, audio chips, and everything else that is needed to inter-connect every component in your system. This is a huge number of small parts that have to work perfectly together, and any one of these could potentially have a problem. If there is a single dead USB port, slight static over the audio, or the voltage levels are measured outside of norm, it does not meet our standards and is considered to have failed. Because of this, motherboards have one of the highest overall highest failure rate of any core component with 1 out of every 20 motherboards failing for one reason or another. This may seem like a high failure rate, but the silver lining is that nearly all of these failures we catch in-house before the system is shipped to the customer. In fact, motherboards as a whole only have a .54% (or about one out of every 200) when you only look at post-shipping failures. At Puget Systems, every motherboard must pass an extensive qualification process but there is no substitute for reviewing hard evidence after offering the product for a period of time. We have to simply keep an eye on our failure reports and quickly move on any trends we may see. From these failure reports, we found four motherboards that had absolutely zero failures in 2013.
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CPUImpressively, even though more and more technology is moving from motherboards to CPUs (memory controller, voltage regulator, etc.), the overall failure rate for both Intel and AMD CPUs dropped dramatically in 2013. Whereas 2012 had an already impressive overall failure rate of .47%, 2013 was even better at just .39%. So instead of listing all the different CPU models that are extremely reliable, we are simply going to say that every CPU made in 2013 is incredibly reliable.
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RAMAt Puget Systems, we almost exclusively use Kingston RAM in our computers. We do so because we know from experience that they are extremely reliable. Any time we tried any of the other prominent brands (when Kingston was either in shortage or did not offer exactly what we wanted), we almost always ended up moving back to Kingston once we were able. This is primarily due to the fact that as a whole, Kingston is as much as three to four times more reliable than other brands.
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Hard DriveJust like RAM, we typically only use a few brands of SSDs and hard drives that we historically know to be extremely reliable. 2013 was a bit different as we switched from Intel to Samsung drives for most of our SSDs. Thankfully, this turned out to be a great move for reliability. In fact, only a single Samsung model we sold in the last year had any failures (2 total, or .7% to be exact). The other three models all had a 0% failure rate
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Video CardWith the wide range of video cards we offer (including a mix of brands), naming the most reliable model is a bit tough as we don't sell large quantities of any one card. However, of the cards we sold enough of to have a good feel for their reliability, there are a few that stand out with a 0% failure rate.
This list may look very NVIDIA heavy, but part of it is that we simply sell more NVIDIA cards than AMD cards, so there are more NVIDIA models that we have sold enough of to be confident in our data. On the other hand, NVIDIA GeForce cards on a whole were much more reliable in 2013 than AMD Radeon cards. NVIDIA GeForce cards only had an overall failure rate of 3.3% versus AMD Radeon cards which had an overall failure rate of 10% Not mentioned above are also NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro cards. Both lines had very low failure rates (2.05% for NVIDIA Quadro and 2.17% for AMD FirePro), but we don't have enough data on any one model to say that one model in particular is more reliable than others. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Power SupplyOut of all the power supplies we sold an appreciable amount of in 2013, there is only one model that had no failures at all:
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ConclusionSo there you have it: the most reliable hardware for 2013. While there is too much data to make many broad generalizations, there are a few simple ones that can be made. First, RAM (even non-ECC versions) was much more reliable in 2013 than it has been in previous years. There are a number of reasons for this, but the largest is that DDR3 is currently a very mature product. RAM reliability will likely drop pretty heavily when DDR4 is introduced, but for now it is more reliable than it has been in years. Second, we made a number of product line moves and additions in 2013 that turned out to be great for reliability. Chief among these was the move to Samsung 840 Pro SSDs which proved to be more reliable than their Intel counterparts (in our experience at least). Low voltage laptop SODIMM memory also was a great addition as it has shown to be much more reliable than the standard SODIMM RAM. Lastly, AMD CPU and motherboard reliability greatly improved in 2013, but AMD Radeon video cards as a whole dropped in reliability. This wraps up the most reliable hardware of 2013, but if you enjoyed reading this article we invite you to check out the next section that we decided to tack on to this article. It is not about the reliability of specific hardware, but uses much of the same data and in our opinion is very interesting. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tangent: Home Built versus Puget System Failure ChanceIn addition to tracking simply how often each part we sell fails, we also keep track of whether that failure was found while the machine was initially built/installed/tested or if it failed at some point after the customer received the system. While reviewing these numbers, we realized that this is actually a great metric for one of the many value-adds a company like Puget Systems provides: a much greater reduction in hardware issues for the end user. In short, the overall failure rate for each component category is equivalent to the risk of a component failing if you were to build the computer yourself. However, this doesn't take into account user error or mistakes and is reliant on using the exact same hardware we use which we have spent 13 years refining and tweaking to allow only the highest quality components. So if anything this number is overly optimistic. However, even as extensive as our testing is, we can't catch every possible problem and there are some issues will occur no matter how much testing we perform. The end user failure rate represents these failures and put simply is the risk our customers have of seeing a hardware failure.
What this shows is that if you built an Intel/NVIDIA GeForce system yourself, based on past failure rates you have about a 1 in 7 chance of there being some sort of hardware problem. But if you purchase the exact same system from Puget Systems, this risk goes down to a 1 in 30 chance since we catch the majority of the hardware problems before you would even see the machine. Similarly, if you build an AMD/AMD Radeon system yourself, you have a a 1 in 5 chance of having a hardware problem versus a 1 in 27 chance if you purchase the exact same system from Puget Systems. In short, our data indicates that you are approximately 4-5 times more likely to encounter a hardware problem when building a computer yourself than when purchasing a complete computer from Puget Systems. Keep in mind that these numbers are only true for Puget Systems computers/hardware and won't be true for every computer manufacturer out there. Here at Puget Systems we put our computers through a very rigorous testing process so we are much more likely to find hardware problems before the customer receives the machine than most other companies. So if you purchase from other companies - especially bigger companies that do little if any testing on their systems before shipping them to the customer - you may not actually be reducing your risk of encountering a hardware problem, or at the very least not reducing it by as much as if you purchased from a company like Puget Systems. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Tags: reliability, reliable, hardware, 2013 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||

Thank you for the data.
it's what sets you apart
What are the standard deviations on each of these figures? Without knowledge of the errors, it is hard to assess the difference between a 0.0% failure rate and a 0.1% failure rate.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the largest is that DDR3 is currently a very mature product.
Nice post buddy I like it