If you were to...

[rpcruab]

If you were to list your choice for most dependable/durable brand, in a component specific list, what would your list look like?

 

Example:

PSU - Seasonic

Storage - Samsung

Motherboard - ASUS

Etc...

 

I would like to see what some seasoned opinions look like here, as it may play into a future build.

 

Thanks!

 

[spartaman64]

PSU - corsair

GPU - gigabyte

ram - Gskill

case - fractal design

monitor - LG

Cooler/fan noctua

idk other than that I dont really have any strong allegiances 

[jaslion]

Psu whatever is on the tierlist

Storage whatever is reviewed well

Motherboard whatever is reviewed well

Etc whatever is reviewed well

 

Don't care about brand care about a quality product.

[Fasauceome]

General impressions won't get you very far for this kind of rating, and there's not really any data to match so that's all you'd get, mostly opinions on people who have been burned or have been lucky enough to never have problems.

 

You should instead go by what companies have good warranty service, so that if (and when) something goes wrong, you have support. EVGA, sapphire, and Corsair are known for great support, while MSI and Asus are pretty infamous.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Motherboard - MSI or ASUS

CPU - Intel (Before the Ryzen fanboys chime in, OP said dependable not best value)

GPU - MSI

RAM - Kingston

SSD - Samsung

HDD - WD

PSU - uhhh honestly whatever is on sale and won't blow up. But I've been using Antec and OCZ PSUs without much issue.

 

[minibois]

CPU: there

PSU: is

Motherboard: no

RAM: brand

Storage: loyalty

Case: choose

GPU: good

Monitor: products

Fans/Cooler: Be Quiet, Noctua or Arctic

[GhostRoadieBL]

PSU - check the tier list on the PSU forum page. anything A-tier is usually a good bet. Corsair AX, Seasonic Prime come to mind for longevity but price is harsh

Storage - NVME - Samsung Pro lines

Storage - HDD - Seagate Exos, WD Gold

RAM - Corsair Vengeance 

Motherboard - ASUS, Gigabyte (more price dependent for flagship models)

UPS - APC (most important if you care about longer life, find a sine wave generating UPS for the cleanest power)

[SansVarnic]

-= Topic moved to General Discussion =-

[DailyProcrastinator]

Speaking on personal experiences here. So this is my experience and opinion and others may not agree, but this comes with 7+ years of frequent PC building for myself and friends, and experience with nearly every platform within the consumer enthusiast space. 

 

PSU - EVGA and Corsair (high end gold and platinum models) just A+ quality and warranties to stand behind it. I've heard bad and good about SeaSonic (issues with their Focus Gold series) but have only used one PSU of theirs so I'm neutral to them. BAD exercises with Bronze Thermaltake units. Here I trust the PSU tier list though, Tier B or better and you have a good unit on your hands (linked in my signature).

 

Motherboard - Asus, best stability and bios in my experience and opinion, used both with AMD and Intel. MSI seems okay as well but not my preference. I personally will not touch Gigabyte, one very bad experience and RMA process, that was years ago though, they seem good and I would recommend many of their products just not personally a brand I want to own a motherboard from. 

 

GPU - Asus and EVGA, EVGA has phenomenal Customer support IF you ever have to use it. Asus products just seem like good quality with regards to GPU's. I'v eonly owned GPU's from these two. RMA process with both in the past, but happy with the end result, although EVGA did better overall.

 

Storage - WD Black is my go to NVME, competes with the high end overpriced Samsung BS without the unnecessary price premium. Seagate for mechanical HDDs, bad experience with WD HDDs in the past. I have used a lot of Crucial SSD products as well due to the excellent $/GB ratio and they have worked issue free as well. 

 

RAM - Corsair, G.skill, Crucial, Kingston, can't go wrong with these, haven't personally used the more budget brands. I have had 2 RMA's in the past one with Crucial one with Corsair, both were quick easy with no BS.

 

Air Coolers - Cryorig, Noctua, Be Quiet, Cooler Master, personally have used multiple options from all and was alwasy very happy.

 

Liquid Coolers - Corsair, NZXT, and Arctic make solid products. I have had issues with cheap Cooler Master AIO's in the past. When it comes to liquid cooling cheap is cheap.

 

Fans - Corsair ML Pros or Noctua NF's aaaaalllll the way. For budget PWM RGB the DeepCool RF120 5-pack is great value though, I was impressed for the price.

 

Case - Fractal Design and Phanteks make the best consumer cases IMO. Just great thought put into the deisng and good build quality. I know people knock Thermaltake but I have also liked many of their cases that I have used in the past. I would like to use a LianLi case in the future though, they seem highly regarded in the community.

 

Monitors - I think I have been lucky because I have used so many different brands issue free, never a single RMA. My favs overall though have been Asus, Dell, LG, and BenQ. But I have used Viewsonic, Samsung, and Lenovo displays as well without any complaints or issues.

 

Peripherals (Keeb & Mouse) - Logitech and Corsair have been solid to me on both mice and keyboards. Corsair is obviously more gaming oriented but I really like my Scimitar Pro and Ironclaw Wireless mice. The best value MMO gaming mouse is the UtechSmart Venus, amazing value and options nothing beats it for $40-50 IMO. Gaming keyboards are okay overall, switch quality and feel is nothing compared to custom though. The best value I have got out of a gaming keyboard was a Logitech G610 w/ MX Browns, it was such a good deal and other than fancy RGB my Corsair K70 Lux really offers nothing more for double the price. I've also used many non gaming products from Logitech, customer support was great in an RMA process and I have really liked many of their products over the years. 

[NineEyeRon]

45 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Psu whatever is on the tierlist

Storage whatever is reviewed well

Motherboard whatever is reviewed well

Etc whatever is reviewed well

 

Don't care about brand care about a quality product.

Doesn’t get better than this!

[LogicalDrm]

Its funny to read replies when question is "durable/dependable". In reality you would need to buy stuff for small business or otherwise use them in very intensive tasks to get to see what brands constantly produce durable stuff.

 

For example I have had 5 PSUs in my rigs since we bought prebuild in 2004. Only one of those have blown up, and the replacement is still in there. Can I tell which of them is most reliable/durable? No. Same with storage, but there I have had 2 bad Maxtor disks. But everything else has been good. RAM? One bad Kingston stick of probably 10+ owned. CPUs? No bad ones. Mobos? Actually had one bad overclocker and one producing some instability overall. So won't be buying Abit or AsRock again. GPU? No bad ones.

 

Picking brands you like, products scoring high on 2 week review testing and so on is quite different than using product daily for years.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

15 hours ago, Fasauceome said:

MSI and Asus are pretty infamous.

Early last week I sent MSI support a paragraph detailing a concern I have with one of their products that I own.

 

Their response was a link to a youtube video. Nothing else. Literally just a link. And the video did not even address my concern.

 

I sent them a follow up explaining that my concern had not been addressed.

 

-no response-

 

I sent them a follow up explaining how shitty their customer service was.

 

-no response-

 

I will no longer be recommending any MSi products here, and if I do, I will always give a disclaimer that the customer service is non-existent.

[flashiling]

10 minutes ago, HairlessMonkeyBoy said:

Early last week I sent MSI support a paragraph detailing a concern I have with one of their products that I own.

 

Their response was a link to a youtube video. Nothing else. Literally just a link. And the video did not even address my concern.

 

I sent them a follow up explaining that my concern had not been addressed.

 

-no response-

 

I sent them a follow up explaining how shitty their customer service was.

 

-no response-

 

I will no longer be recommending any MSi products here, and if I do, I will always give a disclaimer that the customer service is non-existent.

i'd suggest calling them, speaking to someone over the phone gives a different sense of urgency.

[Hairless Monkey Boy]

Just now, flashiling said:

i'd suggest calling them, speaking to someone over the phone gives a different sense of urgency.

Its not an urgent issue. It concerns proper maintenance of the RTX 2080 Sea Hawk EK X.

 

For specifics:

Spoiler

I have had the RTX 2080 Sea Hawk EK X in my system for about 9 months. Soon, I will be disassembling my loop for basic maintenance (inspecting and cleaning all parts). There is some inert build-up in the GPU block that I would like to clean out. Not corrosion or growth or anything like that. Just normal sediment, probably from the tubes or the radiators. You can sort of see it in my profile pick if you zoom in.

 

The issue is, half or more of the screws that hold the water block together are covered by a thick logo sticker over the front of the card, so I cannot take the block apart to clean it without serious damage to the appearance (and resale value) of the card.

 

I have seen other people who have had the same concern as me, and MSI has replied to reviews detailing the concern, so I know full well that MSI is aware of the problem.

 

From Newegg reviews:

Quote

Jeff H: ...Cannot disassemble to clean the water block with out removal of glued on brushed aluminum panel and mock fiberglass msi logo to get acess to screws...

 

 

 

It's just completely unacceptable customer service, plain and simple. I will have to give them a call...

[LAwLz]

I think these threads are always hilarious to read because the truth is that most people on these forums only have experience with like 2-3 brands, and only 2-3 products.

So someone might have bought an AX850 PSU from Corsair and in order to feel good about their decisions they will go "yeah that's a good brand. I have one and it's awesome" when in reality you would need to do a large scale test with hundreds if not thousands of components to actually determine how reliable something is.

Not to mention that pretty much all companies have good and bad products. Generalisering an entire company with a product portfolio in the triple digits based on your own personal experience or what you have read someone else online say (based on their personal experience) with like a handful of products is silly.

 

Just because you are happy with a particular EVGA card does not make them objectively the most reliable cards.

Just because you read some other people write that they were happy with a particular EVGA card does not make them objectively the most reliable cards.

Just because one particular EVGA product is reliable does not mean it is true for their other products.

Just because you had a bad experience with some product does not mean that brand is objectively unreliable.

Just because you read a post from someone who had a bad experience with some product does not mean that brand is objectively unreliable.

Just because one particular product from one company is unreliable does not mean all other products from that company are unreliable.

 

 

I have had terrible experience with Razer mice. I've owned 4 Deathadders throughout the years. They constantly broke. Then I bought a Logitech mouse and it has held up longer than the 4 Razer mice combined.

But that does not mean I can go around and say Razer makes unreliable mice. Because my sample size is only 5 mice and 2 models of mice. Razer currently has 36 different mice on the market, and I only have experience with 1 of them. Does that mean my experience with literally 2,8% of their product lineup, and a sample size of 4 (out of the millions of mice they ship every year) qualifies me to make comments on the rest of the 91,2% of their product range?

My experience with Razer mice certainly doesn't mean I can make comments about their keyboards either. My Razer keyboard I had before was amazing. It still works even, and it's 10 years old at this point. But again, my good experience with a single Razer keyboard does not mean I can make comments about all their other keyboards.

 

 

 

 

Now, with all that being said, if you want actually statistics and data on which brands are the most reliable then the best I think you will be able to find is this article from early 2017. It is based on the return rates a large French computer component retailer. Which is to say, they actually have data on thousands of products sold, on all major models. So they more or less know how reliable each individual model from each individual brand is. I do believe this data is based on the percentage of components returned within the warranty period. So it does include DoAs but also components that have worked and then failed after a few months.

https://www.hardware.fr/articles/962-1/taux-retour-composants-s2-2016.html

Here is the summary, but please keep in mind that this is 4 year old info at this point and many things could have changed.

 

 

 

Most reliable component brands in 2016:

 

Motherboards - Gigabyte (1,48% return rates versus the worst, MSI, at 1,63%). Interesting point is that MSI was the most reliable when you looked at Z170 and Z270 boards, with Gigabyte being the second least reliable.

 

Power supplies - Antec (0,46% returns vs the worst, Zalman, at 2,37%). 

 

RAM - Kingston (0.30% vs the worst, Corsair, at 0,77%)

 

Graphics cards - Zotac (1,13% vs the worst, Sapphire, at 2,90%). Seems like it is was mostly the Sapphire NITRO Radeon RX 480 4G (7,69% return rate) that dragged Sapphire down because the year before they had a return rate of 1,15%.

 

HDDs - HGST (0,82% vs the worst, WD, at 1,26%). 

 

SSD - Samsung (0,17% vs the worst, Kingston, at 0,44%)

 

As we can see, the return rates between brands are very minor. We're talking in the neighborhood of 1% difference in reliability when we're making these types of generalizations, and that's when we are comparing the most reliable brand against the least reliable brand.