Reliable Tech – Hardware Repair Rate Rankings Released

As computer enthusiasts often get hostile about their favorite brands warranties, returns and reliability, we’ve just been given an insight into hardware failure and warranty rates across popular technology manufacturers.

Only just being released but complied with data relevant prior to October 2014, these statistics will show the top four performers in each category.

Starting with motherboards, the results read:

• GIGABYTE: 2.51%
• MSI: 2.65%
• ASUS: 2.86%
• ASRock: 2.99%

Before you grab your pitchforks and book the next-leaving flight to the island country of Taiwan, take a close look at the results and think about what you see. The first thing noticeable is that all four of these figures are land within a 0.5% margin, which is a pretty impressive result. Another interesting fact is that of ASUS’s ranking. We’ve just reported that ASUS are looking to out-sell all other brands in 2014, followed next by GIGABYTE, but looking at these statistics shows they aren’t the most reliable.

As with many other things in life (even including CS:GO tournaments), these broad spectrum statistics aren’t a be-all and end-all. Obviously it’s a little damaging for ASRock to be places last in the race and GIGABYTE are sure to have some PR bragging rights given their first place rating – but warranty tracking is often a fickle thing.

If you wish to see the full list of rankings and percentages (and have a translating app or add-on handy), please feel free to check a list compiled here (in Chinese), or the full comprehensive list (in French).

Power supply rankings came in at:

• FSP Group: 0.83%
• Be Quiet!: 0.84%
• Corsair: 1.32%
• Cooler Master: 1.51% 

The memory (RAM) rankings are:

• Kingston: 0.36% 
• Crucial: 0.57%
• G.Skill: 0.97%
• Corsair: 1.20%

Graphics card failure rates are slightly higher than any other statistic – ranking from 5.09% down to 2.25%.

• MSI: 2.25%
• Gainward: 2.67%
• GIGABYTE: 2.98%
• ASUS: 3.00%

It’s also interesting to note that there’s a rather large (in comparison) failure rate here reported of the Radeon R9 280X – coming in at 8.81%.

Hard Drive manufacturers have reported:

• Seagate: 0.69%
• Western Digital: 0.93% 
• HGST: 1.01% (former Hitachi)
• Toshiba: 1.29%

SSD’s saw most of the lowest rates of failure and a very close race within the top 3:

• Samsung: 0.24%
• Intel:  0.27%
• Sandisk: 0.29%
• Crucial: 0.57%

Please note that this statistical data has been taken from French online dealers, meaning some companies were not included due to their product sample being too small to manage. But either way this gives you a pretty fair comparison of companies units as a whole.

Coming from my own experience, as a person who’s previously worked in a hardware manufacturing company for 4 years, here’s a few things I’ve noticed about this warranty/failure rate subject:

• Not every end user will warranty their broken products
• Warranty percentages can often be skewed by a bad batch of products due to shipment, storage or factory error
• Warranty percentages are not always reported, double checked, nor stock-taken

Rankings thanks to Hardware.fr