A four-year-old Filipino retailer Apparatus Sugar disclosed its earnings in the early years as a seller of computer components. It’s a small shop in no way comparable to Amazon, Newegg, Best Buy, and the like, but it does report some of the better-known brands’ returns and the percentage of failures on its shelves.
Hardware Sugar shows the failure rates of brands over four years of selling computer components
Not surprisingly, graphics cards are at the top failed components, only two companies are sold in their list – Gigabyte and MSI. The retailer sold 129 MSI graphics cards and 141 Gigabyte GPUs, but saw a five percent failure rate for the latter manufacturer. MSI witnessed a 1.5% failure rate, with only two returned within four years. Motherboards were also limited to MSI and Gigabyte, with 470 units sold and 388 units for the latter, with failure rates of 2.4% and 1.8% respectively.
Other limited component sales were in RAM and NVME SSD, TeamGroup in both, G.Skill in RAM sales, and Samsung in SSD sales. TeamGroup had the highest failure rates in both categories, with RAM failing 1% and NVMe SSDs failing 1.2% over the past four years. G.Skill RAM was close to TeamGroup’s failure rate, reaching 0.66%. Samsung never returned to SSDs in the previous four years with Hardware Sugar.
GPU failure rate:
| Producer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gigabyte | 141 | 7 | 5.0% |
| MSI | 129 | two | 1.5% |
Motherboard failure rate:
| Producer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| MSI | 470 | 10 | 2.4% |
| Gigabyte | 388 | 7 | 1.8% |
PSU failure rate:
| Producer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| corsair | 451 | 1 | 0.22% |
| DeepCool | 46 | 0 | 0% |
| Cold Master | 157 | 3 | 2.0% |
| Seasonal | 644 | 12 | 1.8% |
AIO Cooler Failure Rate:
| Producer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| NZXT | 154 | 6 | 4.0% |
| corsair | 42 | 0 | 0% |
| DeepCool | 149 | 0 | 0% |
Memory shortage rate:
| Producer | Total Sold | RMA | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| G.Skill | 601 | 4 | 0.66% |
| Command Group | 179 | 1 | 1.0% |
Power supply and cooling products Retail received the largest share of companies sold through Hardware Sugar, with PSUs offered by four brands and cooling supplies by three brands. In terms of power supply failure rates, Seasonic failed the most at 1.8%. DeepCool was the only manufacturer that did not have a single failed unit through its Philippine retail outlet. However, only 46 units were sold, while other manufacturers – Corsair, Cooler Master and Seasonic – sold more than 100 over the past four years.
Cooling supplies had the most interesting numbers, with NZXT being the only manufacturer on the list that included Corsair and DeepCool, with a 4% rate of any failed cooling supplies.
The only missing information was when talking about MSI and Gigabyte motherboards. It is unknown if this was a single CPU-based brand (ie AMD or Intel), which makes one wonder which company saw the most significant failure at the time.
News sources: Tom’s device, Apparatus Sugar
