Blogs Long term reliability?

http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2009/12/09/long-term-reliability-brands/

 

Bit of both. Sticking with brands increases the chances of reliability, but of course research should be done on specific products.

Good work on the folding too!

 

Personally, I've never had any significant reliance problems apart from one Hickup*
Then again, I buy high end stuff when it stops beeing high end (so about a year old and the bugs are out), and I don't overclock.
My systems run stable for >5 years though.
The last 4 systems each at least 2 years with me, 2 years as "second machine" then 2-3 years with my parents.

*I've had one graphics card die on me within a few weeks of buying it (and got my money back) Sapphire X800. The replacement Sapphire X1800 has been running day in day out for nearly three years now (see system in sig).

I've had more monitors die on me than system parts.

 

I've had both hard drives and optical drives give up the ghost, and a mouse & CRT but that's it.

 

The only bit of kit I've had die on me recently was my DFI LP X48 -T2R. The SATA controller died suddenly.

 

I have a love of both BFG graphics cards and ASUS motherboards, I have had several of each with no problems and would look towards them both for future purchases.

 

All my hardware has been great, I've been building PCs for years, only ever had PSU failures.

 

I read a lot of negative stuff on the forums lately about Asus, but my skt 939 board (A8N-Sli Deluxe) is at least 4 yrs old and runs 24/7 with all four DIMM slots filled, my X2 ocd from 2ghz to 2.35 and slightly overvolted and managing 4 HDDs. It's never had a problem. Saying that, when I first bought it I had the problem that any veteran will remember. The southbridge heatsink was stupidly noisy and the fan broke. This was fixed by Asus with the "Premium" (which my Dad's machine runs and has done for more than 3 years flawlessly), but I had to replace the heatsink with a passive one. Apart from that solid.

Before that I had a socket A board from Asus which was again superb. Abit used to be great around the socket A/939 era, and I still know of several machines going strong from back then. They seem to have disappeared now though.

My biggest problem has been HDDs over the years and the most failures for me has been Seagate. From the first Quantum Fireball 4.3gig that I bought I've only ever had WD, Seagate or Samsung. Every Samsung has been flawless. My current setup consists of 5 Samsungs from T series to F1s.

Nothing else has broken!

 

Mucho respect for Gigabyte, motherboards are awesome and my 4870x2 is also Gigabyte (altho that was bought cos it was the cheapest ) as for the motherboards i'm sure the ultra durable bumf must have something to do with it, cooler = better afterall.

on topic i had some crucial ballistix exploderise on me recently, just one 2Gb stick out of 8Gb isn't bad i guess... although it was JUST inside warranty (11 and a bit months) so it makes me concerned for the rest now. bare in mind that was always left at stock speeds and stock voltages. still... it's nice RAM.

 

think almost anything standard quality will last if you your not using it as a testbed.. pretty impressive on your gigabyte board.. asus has always made decent stuff- their customer service isn't bad but it's not great either

seen a show on the gigabyte plant.. it's like watching robots as the boards go down the line- they have some good qc it looks like and they keep the tim out of shangs hands

 

Where are DFIs new boards? that's what I want to know..

Only going back to around 04/05 but the first DFI Lanparty board I bought: the nF3 Ultra-D AGP died within 6 months. I sent it over to nl for repair/replacement and they sent it back apparently with a newer revision chipset but still dead. Further correspondance proved fruitless however I still ended up buying an UT nF4 SLI-D because everyone was going mad about them.
The nF4 board has had at least two big 'ot graphics cards die in it and a corrupted bios (quickly replaced gratis by DFI nl) in it's lifetime, and it is still chugging away pretty much 24/7 in a family members house at the 2.8Ghz best compromise overclock I found on it back late 2005.
Lots of official bios and customs too but none ever made cool and quiet work well when returning from sleep mode or overclocking.

So August I bought a DFI LP DK P45 T2RS to go with an E6300 45nm for my latest PC and again I'm not disapointed. Easily got her to 3.5Ghz with no extra vcore on the stock cooler and left it at that. Returning from sleep mode no longer messes with clockspeeds and speedstep works even when overclocking so i can idle at a less planet destroying 2.0Ghz and game at full pelt.Theres a new bios for the P45 T2RS with all kinds of new options available just like the P45 T2RS PLUS, maybe I'll get a big cooler and go for 4Ghz one day.

My first Powercolor card the 4870 512MB was dead on arrival, the Powercolor 4890 1GB which I chose instead has worked perfectly well since August

OCZ are always happy to give you as much info as they can on your kit/settings. I've had 1GB PC3200 EL and 4GB PC2 9200 LV both kits have been push to to limits and are still passing all the stabilty tests

A Tagan Easycon 530w is still powering the overclocked nF4 machine from 2005. The 120mm cooling fan did randomly die on this unit, since the PSU was out of warranty and I admited to their tech support that I had opened it to trail a case fan in there to get it working pronto they didn't seem interested in allowing me to pay for the repair to be carried out, as I had no email response to that request. This is a shame as I'm sure one of their repair engies would have sorted it out in seconds.

The Corsair HX 520w coping with the new overclocked machine no problems at all.

Hard drives.. they all die at some point backup now!

 

Hard drives are always an issue.
Until the Raptors came out, you couldn't convince me to buy WD. It was junk, they seem to have stepped up since. Seagate used to be what I bought, then they bought Maxtor and seemed to take a dive. Hitachi seems fine. I won't touch anything else, too many problems.

For video cards, I have had 3 (2 were high end) ATI cards fail while sitting in anti-static bags on a shelf. WTH! Good cards while using them though.

Also, I won't touch another Thermaltake case either, cheap tin cans is what they are. Parts not fitting properly, extremely thin... Yes it was pretty and it was light weight, but also paper thin and the screws stripped if you even looked at them crooked.


My worst hardware failure though, is mice.
Mice are my worst enemy. Logitechs seem to last the longest, averaging a bit over a year before either the batteries give out or they start acting funny. Too bad their support has taken a serious hit.

 

Okay, it's prebuilt, but this HP Compaq PResario SR1939 (Athlon 64 3700+ skt939, 1GB ram, originally with a geforce 6200se *rolleyes*) has, apart from killing 2 graphics cards (one after a power cut, the other just... died) and the monitor dying... lasted 4 years. Though I *did* replace the mouse a few times and recently the keyboard as well.
Not bad for a generic box thing, eh?

 

I've had a few failures fairly recently... The worst being a <12 month old OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD.

It just 'stopped', I walked away for my machine for 10 minutes and on my return black screen. BIOS couldn't find the drive.

I tried multiple SATA ports, SATA cables, different PSU cables, etc to ne effect. In the end I RMA'd it and received a Patriot Torqx as replacement. May be just a 'bad un' but less than 12 months reliability isn't good!

I still have a couple of S939 systems going on DFI & Biostar mobos and they're still going strong after 4-5 years tho'

Andy

 

I had three Asus A7n8x's die within a month of each other, whereas the Soyo sy kt400 that replaced it has been chugging along since august of 03. The only Asus thing I have allowed myself to buy has been my EEE.

 

I've based all 5 PCs at home on Asus. One of them - A8N-E died because of crappy chipset fan, but at least it was performing it's duty over 4 years with honor until chipset's last IO operation.
Unfortunately - this week I've discovered my brother's new M4A78T-E can't detect Ahteros' LAN chip. I'll RMA it later this month...

Otherwise I've got rather good experiences with Asus boards.

 

Been lucky in the long run. 1 or 2 psu's have blown up but apart from that I have only had problems with 2 nvidia cards and some ram.

I have run ati/gigabyte and asus kit for years without issue. My 6+ year old machine (backup) runs a gigabyte 7nnxp (with sticky-uppy voltage card(y) and nice blue lights) and AMD athlon 2800+ and a gigabyte 9800pro (which I swapped my 9700pro for when it came out for 400 quid in tottenham court road.. those were the days!) and it all still runs along with the 2x 80gb WD (my memory fails be but I believe these were the first with 8mb cache?)

I will never again buy an nvidia product after my 8800gts 640mb died at the same time as 2 of my friends nvidias. Sorry I left ATI - I love you really!

 

I've been really lucky, I've never had anything die on me for the two systems I've built.

 

evga 8800 gts after 2 years
1 viewsonic vx922, and 1 viewsonic vx 924(refurb, replacement for the vx 922)
tiny fan on asus a8n-e(mobo still works after i installed a heatsink in place of the fan)

that's all i can remember.

 

same here from now on.

i was fan of BFG + Abit where they never failed be. but since Abit went out of business, im looking at the next in line (alphabetically): Asus