GPUCafé

With vendors offering cut throat discounts, bundles, features to differentiate themselves from the competition, you may wonder what really sets one vendor apart from another; reliability. At least in our opinion, as if you get a really good product, bundle or a really good deal, what good is it when the product has an abnormally short life span? Hardware France have published their quarterly article featuring failure rates of various PC components and obviously we’ll be concentrating on the GPU failure rates.

First up is the single-GPU based products. Nvidia has mixed results in this case as the Geforce GTX 260 comes out on top as the most reliable where as the GTX 280 has the worst failure rate; almost thrice the industry norm for acceptable failure rates.

In the multi-GPU product face off, Nvidia comes out as the clear winner. However, it should be noted that both SKUs have higher failure rates than their single-GPU siblings for obvious reasons. The higher complex circuitry & heat dissipation have an impact on the reliability of these SKUs. Also make a note that these figures do not take into account the newer reference GTX 295 board (single-PCB) into account. In the past, Nvidia has claimed that the dual-PCB (sandwich) design was better in terms of efficient heat dissipation, it will be interesting to see if the failures rates of this new design pays off for Nvidia in the long run.

Next up is the failure rate breakdown for vendors. Although the vendor list is not extensive, it still gives us a rough idea of which vendors are more reliable than others. Surprisingly Sapphire & Gigabyte are not the worst despite have some SKUs which had really high failures rates.

Last but not the least is the least reliable products. Cards based on Nvidia GPUs are more common with 6 SKUs out of the top 10 least reliable are from the green team.