Swiss Retailer Stats Reveal Which GPU Brand Has the Highest Failure Rates

[Timotheus865]

Summary

Digitec Galaxus AG, one of the largest Swiss online IT providers,  shares its statistics on which graphics card vendor has the highest failure rates and the time it takes to process a warranty claim.

 

Quotes

Quote

 The charts reveal that Gainward has the lowest number of defective graphics cards, with a 0.4% RMA rate. Gainward, which has belonged to Palit since 2005, is largely unknown outside the European market. Meanwhile, Palit is in third place on the chart with 0.8%.  

 

My thoughts

Information like this is important to keep in mind when buying new GPUs & can also provide some "directional" information regarding warranty claims by brand and the likelihood of a manufacturers product to have issues. With that said, the data is limited to information collected by Digitec Galaxus AG.

 

Sources

 Tom's Hardware - Swiss Retailer Stats Reveal Which GPU Brand Has the Highest Failure Rates by Zhiye Liu

  

[TVwazhere]

Quote

It's important to remember that the collected data is limited to Digitec Galaxus AG's sales. Therefore, the data does not portray the number of cases globally. For obvious reasons, Digitec Galaxus AG doesn't fully divulge the total amount of units sold. Sadly, that also means we don't have the whole panorama for the charts. For example, a lower value of failure rates doesn't necessarily mean the brand is better than the competition if it only represents a small portion of the global sales. According to Digitec Galaxus AG, the compiled information corresponds to brands that have sold at least 300 units over the last two years

Sadly this information doesnt have enough samples to have anything that people should even start looking into regarding longevity of a product. So all we can say  form this is "huh, neat". It is a bit interesting that EVGA's warranty took so much longer than most others, but that could be due to how far the card has to travel for repair/replace.

 

Though I am not surprised Gigabyte's service is shit, even in a small sample size. 

[Kid.Lazer]

1 minute ago, TVwazhere said:

Sadly this information doesnt have enough samples

Or Brands. I find it odd that there is no mention of Nvidia (first-party) GPUs. That would be a pretty important one to have a stat for if this were to be taken seriously.

[Skiiwee29]

1 minute ago, Kid.Lazer said:

Or Brands. I find it odd that there is no mention of Nvidia (first-party) GPUs. That would be a pretty important one to have a stat for if this were to be taken seriously.

Not really, Nvidia first party are exclusive to select retailers only. 

[Kid.Lazer]

1 minute ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Not really, Nvidia first party are exclusive to select retailers only. 

What do you mean? I can go buy an NVidia-branded GPU direct from their site right now. That is far from "exclusive."

[Skiiwee29]

Just now, Kid.Lazer said:

What do you mean? I can go buy an NVidia-branded GPU direct from their site right now. That is far from "exclusive."

Thats not Digitec Galaxus sales. 

 

It's important to remember that the collected data is limited to Digitec Galaxus AG's sales. Therefore, the data does not portray the number of cases globally.

[Kid.Lazer]

3 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

Thats not Digitec Galaxus sales. 

 

It's important to remember that the collected data is limited to Digitec Galaxus AG's sales. Therefore, the data does not portray the number of cases globally.

Oh right. Somehow the based on their sales part was making no connection in my brain. Carry on.

[RoseLuck462]

I love the Sapphire brand! Never had an issue with their GPUs, sad to see they have the most defects though.

[mariushm]

3 minutes ago, RoseLuck462 said:

I love the Sapphire brand! Never had an issue with their GPUs, sad to see they have the most defects though.

The graphs are misleading.

 

You don't know how many video cards were sold, just that it's more than 300 for each brand, over the course of 2 years.  Sapphire being OEM for AMD makes lots of models, and that 2.9% could be out of 10k cards sold, while the Inno3D could be 500 cards sold.  Same for Gigabyte and XFX ... Asrock doesn't surprise me because they're intentionally going for budget cards cutting corners with their Challenger models and wouldn't surprise me if they got returns for Asrock cards based on Intel cards, before they improved the firmware.

 

Also, those are failures over 24 months - a card could be returned as failed for a non functioning fan for example, in 2 years anything could happen.

 

Graph on the right is also misleading, it's just duration ... not SATISFACTORY result.  Could be just Asrock saying "user error, reject warranty claim" and it's considered in that graph as 1-2 day reply. 

[PDifolco]

I'd take the defect % with a big grain of statistical salt, but the warranty claim duration is more interesting and in line with expectations ..

It confirms Gigabyte s*cks at this

[Forbidden Wafer]

Zotac with 10 days... It took them a full year to refund me for my dead RTX 2070 Super.

[igormp]

13 minutes ago, Forbidden Wafer said:

Zotac with 10 days... It took them a full year to refund me for my dead RTX 2070 Super.

Did you actually manage to get anything at all from Zotac here in Brazil? lol

 

All I see is people that never manage to get anything out of their RMA processes with Zotac.

[Forbidden Wafer]

2 hours ago, igormp said:

Did you actually manage to get anything at all from Zotac here in Brazil? lol

 

All I see is people that never manage to get anything out of their RMA processes with Zotac.

I had to sue them to get it back.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Timotheus865 said:

  

Nothing about this chart surprises me, except that they left out one detail.

 

The cards at the top of the list? Those are low-volume because they are generally enterprise  purchases. Go ahead, look up Palit or PNY on your typical computer store's page. You'll be lucky to find a "special order" icon.

 

The nvidia card vendors being above the AMD card vendors is not a surprise, other than Powercolor, since I felt they were on the same level as Gigabyte. So I feel this chart is more reflective of the sales popularity of the cards themselves and not something you should make a purchase decision based on.

 

That said, even if this is representative (eg each card+brand sold 10,000 units) rather than overall, that kinda only says what various tech youtubers have been saying for years, that Gigabyte's kinda trash, and you better hope you never have to return it.

 

[RejZoR]

Surprised Sapphire is so low. They've always been the go to reliable vendor for AMD/ATi cards. Hell, they even build cards for ATi branded Radeons in the past.

[strajk-]

Old news, dunno why Toms Hardware decided to now make an article about it, guess to parse the data after half a year of this being live?

Here the original source when this first was introduced:
https://www.galaxus.ch/de/page/gnadenlos-ehrlich-digitec-galaxus-zeigt-neu-die-garantiefall-und-retourenquote-25950

[porina]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

Go ahead, look up Palit or PNY on your typical computer store's page.

Beware of regional variations in brand availability. Both do nvidia gaming cards in UK, usually serving the lower price end. I never got the EVGA hype that North America had for example.

[Monkey Dust]

Feeling pretty smug about owning a Gainward card now.  Though, buying during the great GPU shortage didn't leave many options.

 

Your card probably isn't going to go wrong, though. The companies warranty performance is far more important IMO.

[LAwLz]

These numbers are pretty much meaningless.

• No way of knowing the sample size.
• Very strange categorization (like having Lenovo in the list even though they don't make GPUs and instead buy from others).
• Some of those numbers are very suspicious. For example an average of 2 days to get a warranty claim approved and have the new product shipped and arrived at a customer seems way too low. I would imagine just the shipping itself would take maybe 2 days. Since their threshold for warranty claims is five (yes, 5) my guess is that it's pretty unreliable since a single outlier could potentially sway the results a lot. Also, this only applies to the Czech Republic. Not to throw shade on that country, but there are probably not a lot of forum users from there.
• Some manufacturers say you should contact them directly in case of issues, not contact the retailer. For example I am pretty sure my Corsair keyboard came with a big red letter saying "contact us, not the retailer, if you have issues". Companies that do that will most likely have a much lower defect rate in these types of statistics since the numbers are collected by the retailer itself. I am not saying this is good or bad, but it is something to keep in mind since it will skew the numbers.

 

 

But I am sure people will use these to reinforce the biases they already have.

 

 

 

One thing I think we can see however, is that the failure rates are very low. Even if we assume a worst-case scenario, it's still just 2,5%. That's pretty good if you ask me.

 

It's also very even between the brands. The difference between the "most reliable" and "least reliable" according to this data is just 2,1%.

So if you were to buy a brand new GPU every single year for ~48 years then statistically the difference between going with the most reliable brand vs the least reliable would be one RMA. I am willing to take those odds.

[Senzelian]

I mean it's a swiss retailer... How much do they even sell? Their country isn't even part of the EU and on top of that it's one of the smallest ones in Europe.

They only have about a 10th of residents compared to Germany.

 

Edit: Actually, this company also includes Galaxus, which is a relatively large retailer in Germany and some other countries.

[Avocado Diaboli]

17 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Some of those numbers are very suspicious. For example an average of 2 days to get a warranty claim approved and have the new product shipped and arrived at a customer seems way too low. I would imagine just the shipping itself would take maybe 2 days. Since their threshold for warranty claims is five (yes, 5) my guess is that it's pretty unreliable since a single outlier could potentially sway the results a lot. Also, this only applies to the Czech Republic. Not to throw shade on that country, but there are probably not a lot of forum users from there.

 

Warranty cases in Switzerland are handled by the retailer, not the manufacturer. So getting an exchange for a product in 2 days, while very quick, is entirely reasonable. I had a warranty issue on my CPU a few years back that I bought on Digitec. I made the warranty claim on a Sunday and had a replacement by Thursday. And that was back in 2021, during the height of the chip shortage. So when I sent it on Monday (earliest possible day to send something by regular mail), I had a replacement 3 days later. Anecdotal, I know, but it lines up with my experience in general when it comes to warranty cases in Switzerland.

[Dracarris]

Not sure why Toms HW now picks

up on this, digitec has been doing this for at least half a year if not much longer for most product categories.

[strajk-]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Anecdotal, I know, but it lines up with my experience in general when it comes to warranty cases in Switzerland.

Nah everything you wrote is standard practice here in Switzerland, most of the people around the world underestimate the logistics and sheer purchase power of the average citizen here just because it is a small country not part of the EU.

 

Pretty much every retailer that has their warehouses here delivers their shipment in a single day to all of Switzerland and Lichtenstein.

RMAs are completed in about 1-2 days, often they don't even bother with repair, they will just outright give you credit worth the current market price of the product in their store, or ship you a replacement the same day.

 

Second hand market (Ricardo) is a massive business here, most of the items I purchase, use and then sell there a couple years down the line get sold at around 90% market price, some even for more, latest sell being a Rowing Workout machine which I sold for profit after I didn't need it anymore due to lifting of covid restrictions.

 

Swiss consumerism is massive, specially due to their huge purchase power, whatever latest product gets released, you can assume that at least a handful of Swiss already own it, I'm not boasting, just telling how it is.

 

https://www.gfk.com/insights/map-of-the-month-gfk-purchasing-power-europe-2022

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Warranty cases in Switzerland are handled by the retailer, not the manufacturer. So getting an exchange for a product in 2 days, while very quick, is entirely reasonable. I had a warranty issue on my CPU a few years back that I bought on Digitec. I made the warranty claim on a Sunday and had a replacement by Thursday. And that was back in 2021, during the height of the chip shortage. So when I sent it on Monday (earliest possible day to send something by regular mail), I had a replacement 3 days later. Anecdotal, I know, but it lines up with my experience in general when it comes to warranty cases in Switzerland.

Yeah, but in that case shouldn't all manufacturers get the same result?

I don't see how one manufacturer can get an average return period of 2 days while another gets 17 days if in both cases it's the retailer that exchanges the product.

 

I guess one explanation is that if they have a lot of one brand in stock then the risk of having to wait for a new shipment is lower, but that isn't a good indicator of how brands handle returns or how reliable the manufacturer itself is.

[Stahlmann]

19 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Yeah, but in that case shouldn't all manufacturers get the same result?

I don't see how one manufacturer can get an average return period of 2 days while another gets 17 days if in both cases it's the retailer that exchanges the product.

 

I guess one explanation is that if they have a lot of one brand in stock then the risk of having to wait for a new shipment is lower, but that isn't a good indicator of how brands handle returns or how reliable the manufacturer itself is.

The graph shows duration after the part arrived in the service center, so they probably mean the one from the manufacturer/brand, not their own store warehouse.