Hardware Reliability

**fatsheep** · July 22, 2007, 07:59 PM

Specifications can provide lots of useful information about a product but one thing they don't tell you is how reliable that piece of hardware is. Details specs will tell you the type of memory on that video card, the type processing chip, the speed of the RAMDACs, and the 3d clock speed of that processor, and more but they won't tell you much about the reliability. The first and most important quality of a piece of hardware is the reliability. I want it to work out of the box and I want it to work as long as possible, as well as possible.

In the past I have used the user reviews on newegg and various review sites such as Toms hardware.com to judge the reliability of hardware. However, their information is usually just based on performance benchmarks. I have not found much information on the long term or overall reliability of a certain line of hardware products.

My question is this: are there any websites similar to JDpower's for computer hardware? I would like information on the reliability of different brands of graphics cards to be specific. I have always found it annoying that there are so many different brands that manufacturer each type of graphics card that Nvidia creates and there isn't a whole lot of information to distinguish which manufacturer's product is better or more reliable other than customer reviews.

**Doono** · July 23, 2007, 04:25 AM

Well the best way to discover reliability is to ignore the card itself and check the manufactures policy. EVGA and XFX both provide lifetime warrenties this should give you a very good indication that the company has great faith in the reliability of it's cards.

**Freddie** · July 23, 2007, 07:09 AM

I would read the reviews about what hardware you’re buying on the stores own site. Often if a product is unreliable people will tell you about it, and if see a lot of people complaining about having to return an item 2 or 3 times then you gauge that it suffers from reliability problems.

**fatsheep** · July 23, 2007, 11:26 AM

That sounds like good advice, thanks for it. I was hoping for a website like JDpower that had a centralized database of statistics that I could use to gauge the reliability of each product but most consumers don't actually purchase the hardware, they purchase a prebuilt computer. Hardware also changes month to month which makes it harder to review individually.

On a side note, Freddie, I don't think "zainest" is a word. Did you mean zaniest?