Least Reliable PC Hardware of 2021 Include 11th Gen Intel Core Processors and NVIDIA Quadro RTX Series GPUs, according to Puget Systems

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Image: Intel

Custom PC builder Puget Systems has shared a handful of charts that reveal the most error-prone PC hardware that the company had worked with over the past year.

According to Puget Systems’ experiences, the CPUs that were most likely to fail were Intel’s 11th Gen Core “Rocket Lake” processors, which ended up with a 5.28 percent shop failure rate and 1.32 percent field failure rate. Intel’s 10th Gen Core chips only saw failure rates of .19 and .29 percent in comparison.

Image: Puget Systems

In the video card category, NVIDIA led the pack with its Quadro RTX Series, which saw a 6.78 percent shop failure rate. This is quite a bit higher than what Puget encountered with GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards; the Founders Edition and custom models only saw shop failure rates of up to .41 percent and 1.63 percent, respectively.

Image: Puget Systems

“The most noticeable issue here is a massive spike in shop failures for the Quadro RTX Series cards,” Puget Systems pointed out before clarifying that there was a “manufacturing problem with the USB-C ‘VirtualLink’ port on RTX 4000 video cards.”

“All of them we received from May 2020 onward were defective, so huge swaths of our inventory of those cards failed our testing here – and for a long time after that discovery, we stopped offering them at all.”

Other pieces of hardware that ranked higher on Puget Systems’ failure rate charts include Western Digital Ultrastar HDDs, EVGA SuperNOVA 1200W power supplies, and non-ECC DDR4-3200 memory.

Source: Puget Systems

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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