Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025

Introduction

Over the years, we have published several articles covering the reliability of the components we use in our workstations and servers. The exact focus has shifted a little from year to year, but now that we have closed the books on 2025, we wanted to take the opportunity to call out specific brands and models of hardware that we found to be exceptionally reliable over the last 12 months.

Our Data Source

Before jumping into the results, it is important to stress that the information presented here is based on our experience at Puget Systems and does not cover the entire computer hardware industry. Moreover, there are some caveats regarding our data sources that should be understood in order to properly frame the rest of the article.

At Puget Systems, we have a meticulous qualification process for new hardware and regularly review RMA records – both for components that didn’t end up passing our internal burn-in during system assembly as well as failure reports from customers in the field. We do our best to avoid and minimize the use of brands and product families that don’t live up to our expectations, so our failure rates are often lower than the industry standard.

On the other hand, we also have strict standards for hardware – so we may consider things to have failed that a typical consumer or manufacturer would not. That can lead to higher failure rates in our records than might be industry standard, especially for complex components like motherboards that have a LOT of parts and potential failure points.

There are also limitations on the way that our internal records display failure data, which involve when parts were originally purchased, when they were sold in a system, and when failures were reported. In the interest of trying to be as comprehensive and accurate as possible, we are adjusting the date range we pull information from for this article, so it will not be directly comparable to past years. However, we will still narrow our analysis of the results to components that were actively being used in our builds during the 2025 calendar year.

Additionally, the hardware we look at will be limited to our desktop and rackmount workstations, with some limited inclusions from laptops and servers (notably SSDs and RAM). The other components in our laptops – CPUs, motherboards, video cards, WiFi modules, etc – are not split out in failure data enough for us to analyze within the scope of this article. Our server and storage systems are different enough that they would need their own, separate analysis, too. If either of those topics interests you, please let us know in the comments, and perhaps we can plan to cover them in the future.

CPU (Processor)

While AMD’s Threadripper™ and Threadripper™ PRO took the reliability crown last year, Intel has dethroned them in our 2025 data. This may be partially due to the Xeon W-2500 and -3500 series seeing enough of an increase in sales last year to have their results included, so rather than just naming a product family as the most reliable, we will dig into a few different ways to look at this title.

Most Reliable Workstation Processors of 2026

Not a single Intel Xeon W-2500 or W-3500 processor we sold had a recorded failure in 2025, and in fact, looking back at the previous W-2400 and W-3400 models, we only saw one fail in 2024. Granted, we don’t sell as many of these as we do of AMD’s Threadrippers – but we have now handled enough to be confident that Xeon Ws are more reliable, at least in the first couple years of usage.

Most Reliable Consumer Processors of 2026

On the consumer desktop side of things, results are less clear-cut. Looking at the totals for AMD’s Ryzen™ 9000 and Intel’s Core™ Ultra 200 Series, the failure rates are almost identical: 2.52% for Ryzen and 2.49% for Core Ultra. That is too close to say there is a statistically significant difference, so we can’t crown either product line as a whole.

However, there are two standouts within these families that did record fewer failures across a wide enough sample size! The most reliable individual processor was Intel’s Core Ultra 7 265K, with only a 0.77% failure rate. As a group, AMD’s Ryzen X3D processors also had a better track record than the Ryzen 9000 family as a whole, with 1.51% of chips failing in 2025 – and the vast majority of those being caught here before systems shipped out to customers.

GPU (Video Card)

In our 2024 reliability article, we looked at video cards by manufacturer and brand family – which showed that ASUS’ ProArt and TUF lines of GeForce video cards were particularly reliable, alongside NVIDIA’s RTX™ Ada Generation professional GPUs. However, we sold fewer of the ProArt and TUF models in 2025, so while they both still had amazingly low failure rates, there were not enough in our data set to qualify by themselves for consideration this year. Instead, we will have to zoom out to the manufacturer level for some of our analysis.

Most Reliable Consumer GPUs of 2025

On the consumer side, NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition models were the most reliable GeForce RTX™ cards we sold in 2025, with just a 0.25% failure rate. They were followed closely by ASUS (0.40%) and PNY (0.45%), though the former made up a pretty small slice of our overall video card sales.

Most Reliable Professional GPUs of 2025

Among professional video cards, both NVIDIA’s older RTX™ Ada Generation and the new RTX PRO™ Blackwell models were popular last year. Both also had amazingly low failure rates, with one glaring exception: the high-wattage RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Edition. That model aside, we saw only a single failure among other Blackwell cards – and four across the various Ada Generation cards, though we also sold more than four times as many of those in 2025, so they still had a slightly better track record.

Motherboard

Of the core components inside our systems, motherboards have the highest failure rates – but as mentioned in the intro, they are also the most complex and have the widest range of potential issues that we count as failures. In recent years, the average failure rate across boards we carry has hovered in the 5 to 6% range, though more than three-quarters of those are caught here in our factory and thus have minimal impact on our customers.

Most Reliable Motherboards of 2025

With that said, two models rose to the top in the course of collecting data for this article:

• Gigabyte B860M AORUS ELITE WIFI6E ICE – We only sold 100 of these in 2025, so it barely met the quantity threshold for inclusion in our data set, but so far no failures have been reported among those boards. Other models we carried in the AORUS ELITE family also had lower-than-average failure rates, with all of the reported problems during the year caught in production.
• ASUS TUF B850M-PLUS WIFI – This is in the same TUF family as last year’s winner (the ASUS TUF B760M-PLUS WIFI II), and had only a single failure among the units sold in 2025.

RAM (Memory)

The final months of 2025 saw huge upheaval, shortages, and massive price increases in the memory market – but for most of the year prior to that, things were remarkably stable. Because of that, the vast majority of the DRAM modules we used in 2025 (more than 95%) came from just two companies: Kingston and Micron.

Most Reliable RAM Manufacturer of 2025

While they were close in overall failure rates, Kingston did edge out Micron slightly – 0.19% versus 0.27% – for the title of our most reliable memory manufacturer in 2025.

Most Reliable Desktop RAM of 2025

Digging further, Kingston’s reliability was “worst” – but still decent – on SODIMMs (for laptops, 0.55%), followed by RDIMMs (for workstation & server CPUs, 0.20%), and surprisingly was the best on desktop UDIMMs (0.15%). Some individual SKUs of RDIMMs had no recorded failures, but we carried so many capacities and models that the sample sizes for each are much smaller. On the desktop side, though, the top SKU from last year also stood out this time as the most reliable among UDIMMs we carried: Kingston ValueRAM DDR5-5600 32GB, with only a 0.09% failure rate.

Kingston ValueRAM DDR5-5600 32GB (KVR56U46BD8-32)

Storage

Like RAM, the storage market started to get a bit crazy toward the end of the year – resulting in a much wider range of brands that we are carrying now than was the case for most of 2025. Narrowing our focus to the models that we sold in large numbers, though, the previous winner of this title is still doing well! Kingston KC3000 drives maintained a very low 0.22% failure rate last year, up slightly from 2024 but still solid. However, Samsung’s 870 QVO 8TB SATA SSD had absolutely zero failures in 2025! We are still in the wake of Samsung’s 980 Pro firmware issue, so we don’t sell as many of their drives as we did prior to that incident, but the 870 QVO 8TB has been our go-to high-capacity SATA solid-state drive for many years now. While none were reported to have failed in 2025, there are a small handful that did fail across the entire time we’ve carried this model – but the resulting 0.19% failure rate is still well below the combined average for all SSDs we’ve sold (0.74%).

Most Reliable Storage of 2025

PSU (Power Supply)

This is another category with a minor upset victory. The bulk of the power supplies we use in our desktop and rackmount workstations are from Super Flower’s LEADEX line, some of which won this title last year. As a brand, they continue to be incredibly reliable with an average 0.47% failure rate – and just 0.24% in the field.

However, we had to pivot our small form factor (SFX) power supplies in early 2025 to Corsair due to supply issues, and so far none of those (out of over 200 units sold and shipped) have had a failure reported, either in-house during testing or in the field! That could well change as we sell more of them in 2026, and as those in use already continue to age, but it is nice to know that moving to our backup PSU option did not impact system quality and reliability.

Most Reliable Power Supplies of 2025

Conclusion

Hopefully you found the reliability info we compiled here interesting! If there are specific topics you’d like to see us dive deeper into, or additional segments of our product line where you think sharing failure rates or other records could benefit the wider computer industry, please let us know in the comments below.