Hardware lifespan - Building a computer with durable components

[nerd866]

I was curious - is there any corelation between the tier of a product and its longevity before it's likely to crap out?

 

Back in "the day" (2000 to 2008 or so) I would typically buy mid-high tier CPUs and low-mid-tier GPUs. They met my needs and I basically never had durability problems with my hardware - Just hard drives, really, you know, the usual.

 

In the same era, I had known friends who purchased higher-end GPUs. When I was buying a Radeon 9550 I knew people buying stuff like x800s and similar. Every person I knew who ended up snagging a high-end GPU had some kind of trouble with it, either fairly quickly (within 6 months) or within about 2-3 years of buying it (new), while my little 9550 ran perfectly until the day I upgraded it for performance reasons (to an x1650).

 

In 2012 I built a high-end workstation rig with 32 GB of G-Skill 1866 DDR3 RAM. Within about 2 years, 2 of the 8 sticks of it showed signs of failure. I I'm still using that same rig to this day (typing this post on it) with 64 GB of 1066MHz Kingston DDR3 ValueRAM which ought to be lower-tier however it's been 100% reliable and had never failed a Memtest.

 

Bottom line, every time I see someone jumping up to the top-tier components, said components seem to have a shorter lifespan than my mid-tier hardware. Is this a trend? Is it a bad idea to throw, say, a 1080 into a new rig that you hope will last 8-10 years? I have a 10-year-old Core 2 Duo in my basement as a local gaming rig with a mid-tier Radeon 6850 GPU that's been in there practically since that card was released. Never a problem. That machine's cheap Kingston RAM? Same thing - 10 year-old RAM and still works great. I'm running an R9 270x in my workstation rig right now. It's been completely reliable.

 

TL;DR
Whenever I step up to higher-tier stuff I tend to run into more and more hardware failures. Is this a thing? Is there a tier one should  be staying in to maximize chances of component reliability or should a top-tier product theoretically have as good of a lifespan as a mid-tier, lower-performing piece of hardware? It just seems like, everywhere I look in my social circles, the higher-end a component is, the more likely it seems to fail on people when my 10-year-old mid-tier stuff still works perfectly.

[thekeemo]

Nothing in tech lasts 8-10 years

That is just the way it is

Top end hardware lasts maybe 5 (look at the 680 it is now a low end card)

If you mean life span wise it could be because they are hotter, more power hungry and more complicated.

[nerd866]

15 minutes ago, thekeemo said:

If you mean life span wise it could be because they are hotter, more power hungry and more complicated.

Is there really truth to that though? It makes sense on paper but are people who buy high-end components actually buying a product that's more likely to fail or more likely to blow up in a few years than someone buying a mid-tier product?

 

For example, is 1600 DDR4 statistically going to be more reliable long-term than, say, 2400 DDR4?

My next build will likely involve purchasing close to $1000 (Canadian Pesos) worth of RAM (128 GB). Information regarding reliability is exceptionally relevant to a use case like that because I don't exactly want to be REPLACING $1000 worth of RAM every couple of years. Yes, I can do the warranty thing but it's such a pain...

 

(Before anyone asks, it's a music production workstation that will be working heavily with samples. My current 64 GB rig is getting bottlenecked by RAM capacity and the mobo is maxed out.)

 

Is the average Geforce 1060 going to outlive the average 1080? Will there be fewer returns or warranty claims on the 1060?

 

Since we're not fortune-tellers here, what do the facts look like in terms of longevity in past gens of various types of hardware? What about things like motherboards? Will a typical $600 board outlive a typical $100 board because the $600 board has been built with higher-quality components and care or is it the other way around because the $100 board is simpler?

 

I don't know a single person in my social group who would be happy if their GPU exploded in 3 years.

[toms94z71]

I would think the newer gpus and cpus will last longer since the trend has been toward more power efficiency which also in turn causes them to run cooler. I haven't had any problems with higher end hardware that wasn't an act of God, ie the lightening that fried half my stuff. It took that to kill my almost 6 year old asus g73 jwa1 laptop which at the time was the highest end one they sold. 

[Daniel644]

people that buy higher end stuff tend to also push there computers harder (overclocking, heavy gaming, rendering and stuff like that, that stresses the parts more) which leads to premature failure. I've got an 8 ish year old Q6600 Core2Quad at work that is still running to this day, we've had 1 faulty power supply and one cheap tower where the power switch went bad and 2 hard drive upgrades (one for each PC) that we've had to do over that 8 ish years. Point is well cared for hardware of good quality should run a long time and be in need of upgrading due to performance needs of newer applications long before it fails from use. also remember there are good brands and there are crappy brands that make the same product. HEAT above all else is the number one cause of failure.

 

Also Kingston is just a badass brand and is the ONLY RAM I personally run because I know how rock solid all the tiers of RAM they have are, and should you have an issue, well LIFETIME WARRANTY (which I have personally had to use once) is freaking awesome.

[nerd866]

29 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

Also Kingston is just a badass brand and is the ONLY RAM I personally run because I know how rock solid all the tiers of RAM they have are, and should you have an issue, well LIFETIME WARRANTY (which I have personally had to use once) is freaking awesome.

+1 for Kingston! I've tried other brands a couple of times when doing a build in order to try and cut costs....Yeah it's backfired every single time. From now on I'm using Kingston because they've been SO reliable. The only other brand of RAM I'll touch anymore is Corsair.

When I bought this Kingston 1066 ValueRAM I literally made sure to get the lowest-clocked RAM I could because I was scared s#!tless to put more 1866 RAM in this machine after how epically my other stuff failed. As a sidenote, I can't really say I noticed a performance difference between my old 1866 and the 1066 I'm on now, even for workstation tasks. Quad Channel might be making up for it, I'm not sure, but when I benchmark this machine it scores above-average in terms of SSD performance and RAM performance (as in, my SSD scores relatively high compared to similar benched SSDs and likewise for my RAM). Considering I'm on relatively slow RAM I'm imagining the "x factor" here might be the advantage of quad channel and the extra cores of the E-series i7 mitigating the slower RAM clock.

 

You make a good point that people with high-end components are also probably pushing those components to their limits moreso than people with mid-tier components. That Core 2 Duo I mentioned was my old workstation and while I pushed it pretty hard, that CPU is so easy to keep cool that even at 100% load it didn't get hot by any definition (topped out around 50 ish C on the CPU). The GPU was always mid-tier at most and never drew that much power or put off that much heat. Heat has just never been an issue at all in that build, which probably helped its longevity. I pushed the RAM hard on that machine (8 GB of Kingston DDR2) but meh, it's RAM, it's hard to really worry about it. Other than that, I just kept the case interior dusted and all was well.

[Bhav]

MSIs current motherboards are dying within a few months, and their GPUs are having more seriius issues in Asia.

[CtrlAltELITE]

The only computer hardware you will see a quality based reliability disparity with are mechanical based components (fans, pumps, hdds etc), PSUs and to a much lesser extend motherboards.

 

For the latter two it is just a case of spending money, higher quality components have better caps and will last longer, always buy from a reputable brand.

 

For mechanical components my rules are:

1. Buy decent fans, more of an inconvenience than anything else but cheap ones do burn out

2. Avoid AIOs and watercooling in general like the plague adds oodles of complexity for not much gain (unless you have a compact build where a large tower cooler isnt appropriate

3. Hdds die. Thats unavoidable. All the mainstream brands (yes even seagate) will fail over roughly the same period of time, just the nature of the component. Design in redundancies, or if you dont use a lot of media do away with them and go full ssd, modern ones will last a long time.

4. Good case with dust filters this will prolong the life of ALL your components dont skimp on the case

 

As a general rule to prolong the life of all components:

1. Keep them cool, a modern i7WILL last pretty much the useful life of the component (3-6years) pinned at 95c, provided the paste is replaced as appropriate. However if you wsnt it to last 10 even 20 years keeping it in a nice, CONSISTENT temperature range is good

2. Keep the inside of your case clean and free of debris, cable management helps a ton here, dust can cause shorts which can damge components

3. Undervolt, dont overclock. Hell everyone with a k series is getting ~4ghz OC out of them. Most users (read: gamers) dont need and wont use that extra horsepower. By undervolting you are still getting the most out of your component, but allow it to run cooler and more efficiently rather than faster.

4. Finally: dont be retarded. Chucking a vacuum or can of coke into the inside of your computer are FAR more likely to result in hardware than some cock&bull about silicon breakdown or ssd write cycles.

[Bhav]

Well I dropped my 6850k to stock volts (1.25v) and it OCs to 4.3 Ghz, but even reducing the voltage one step wasnt stable at that clock.

 

I wont be overvolting it anymkre, since it needs 1.32v for just a 100 Mhz gain.

 

Though the stock frequency is already 4 Ghz, and tbh running that at below stock volts wouldnt be discernible from my OC.

[ConnorKempf]

I would say conservatively 5 years for mainstream stuff and up to 10 as a general use computer. It depends on how its built and how its maintained. As for OC'ing 4790k 4.7GHZ stable @ 1.17V (h100i)

[Mark77]

No reason why well designed hardware can't last 10+ years.  I mean, physically last.  It might not be able to run the latest/greatest software though, nor might it be economic to actually run a machine that long if more energy efficient alternatives are available.

 

I ran a dual P3-450 machine for 10 years basically 24/7.  No issues.  I've seen machines running 15 years, again, no issues.  In the 2000s, there were 2 major themes of failure -- bad capacitors, largely due to the transition from relatively low-current design, to the extremely high current PSU's embedded on motherboards (a contemporary CPU needs in excess of 100A to run at peak loads!).  And the transition from lead (Pb) solder to lead-free solders which required different manufacturing methods, and created some interesting failures. 

 

GPU's require their power supplies to be implemented in very small footprints.  They have a lot of hardware, and people demand very low prices on them.  So its no surprise that some of them experience failure more rapidly. 

[Builder]

4 hours ago, thekeemo said:

Nothing in tech lasts 8-10 years

au contraire, mon chéri. there's a toy shop in my town who's pos POS system (get it) is still running good ol' Mac OS 9.2 from 1999.

[Mark77]

BTW, you'd probably be doing yourself a favour by not buying stuff marketed towards 'gamers'.  Whether it be video cards, motherboards, or RAM.  "for gamers" is basically code-word for designing for a 3-5 year life, at best.  Not to say that you're automatically guaranteed better longevity if you buy Supermicro this, or that, but there's much greater chances of it if you stay away from the 'gamer' stuff I personally believe. 

[thekeemo]

4 hours ago, Builder said:

au contraire, mon chéri. there's a toy shop in my town who's pos POS system (get it) is still running good ol' Mac OS 9.2 from 1999.

But is it unbearablly slow?