Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2021
Here at Puget Systems, we believe that computers should be a pleasure to purchase and own. They should get your job done, and not be a hindrance. That means it is important for the hardware we include in our workstations to both perform well (hence the testing we do in our Labs department) and also be as reliable as possible. Our product qualification process is the first step in building a reliable product line, but we also maintain records of hardware failures - both those we come across during the assembly process, as well as those reported to us by customers in the field - so that we can analyze failure rates over time. That information, in turn, can help guide our selection of products to qualify in the future.
While this is normally an internal process, sometimes we like to give our customers and readers a peek into aspects of our company that aren't usually in the public spotlight. In this article, we will look at both shop (caught in our production process) and field (after the system has shipped to the customer) failure rates of various hardware brands and models over the last three years. At the end, we will crown the most reliable component used in our workstations.
Computer hardware is very complex, and our qualification process takes place with small sample sizes - so there is always the chance that a small number of parts can be defective once we start carrying them en masse. However, one of the goals of our production process (where we build, install, and test every single system we sell) is to catch as many of these manufacturing defects as possible. This includes steps like checking for physical flaws, benchmarking the system to look for irregular performance and monitoring component temperatures under heavy load. We won't catch 100% of problem parts this way, of course, but we would much rather cause a part to prematurely fail while it is still in our shop (where we can easily replace it) rather than having it fail days, months, or even years after a customer receives their machine. Because of this, our "shop failures" include what most people would define as DOA (dead on arrival) failures, but also failures that occurred during our extensive burn-in process.
