Conclusion
Difficult to sum up such an article. One thing’s sure, you can never be sure of a product’s reliability in advance. The example of Seagate, for a long time lauded for its hard drives, is a good one, as they now stand at the bottom of the league due to a firmware problem on a big number of hard drives.
For motherboards, we note that the old nForce 6 series and 7 series are still monopolising the bottom places. Moreover, whether it be for memory or graphics cards, the highest-end products are most enclined not to function correctly, with sometimes frightening rates: reliability is sacrificed to give higher performance!
For many users, however, reliablility is at least as important as performance, even for high-end products. Though, unlike performance, this can’t be measured in our tests, we do hope that manufacturers make more efforts here in the future.
In the meantime, here is a list of 16 products that already have a 5% returns rate for sales from March to September 2009, namely from between 0 and 6 months of use. No doubt they will be badly placed in our next article on returns … rendez-vous here in 6 months!
- 17.3% for the ASUSTeK P5NT-Deluxe motherboard
- 16.8% Seagate 7200.11 1 TB hard drive
- 10.3% Seagate 7200.11 500 GB hard drive
- 9% for the PNY 9800 GT 512 MB graphics card
- 8.2% for the 2x1 GB OCZ Value DDR2 PC2-6400 memory
- 7.3% for the Thermaltake PurePower 450W power supply
- 7.1% for the Sapphire Radeon HD 4870X2 graphics card
- 6.9% for the ASUSTeK P5Q-SE2 motherboard
- 6.7% for the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3 motherboard
- 6.6% for the ASRock N7AD-SLI motherboard
- 6.6% for the ASrock A770CrossFire motherboard
- 5.7% for the OCZ 2x2 GB Platinum DDR2 PC2-8500 memory
- 5.3% for the Corsair 2x2 GB DDR2 PC2-8500 memory
- 5.2% for the Maxtor DiamondMax 22 500 GB hard drive
- 5.1% for the ASUSTeK M3N78 motherboard
- 5.1% for the Corsair 2x1 GB DDR2 PC2-8500 memory
