Hardware return rates for mobos, ram, graphics cards, hard drives, ram, and SSDs

[Puddle Jumper]

If this would be better suited for another section please feel free to move it.

I found this article interesting as it has the return rates for a wide variety of components and some of the results are quite surprising. The results are taken from a major French online retailer and while it is likely all returns aren't actual failures this should affect all brands equally.

Components returns rates (5) (page 1: Introduction) - BeHardware

Some things that surprised me/ I found interesting
-MSI had the lowest return rate of the major mobo manufacturers
-Corsair had a higher return rate on power supplies than I would have expected although it was still quite low.
-XFX did poorly on graphics card returns
-Intel had the lowest return rate of all storage manufacturers both mechanical and SSD by a substantial margin
-OCZ had the highest return rate of all storage manufacturers, 7 of the 8 SSDs with a return rate over 5% are made by OCZ and all 8 are Sandforce powered.

 

[GhOsT1321]

Very interesting. I'm reading it right now, thanks for posting this.

 

[MindoverMaster]

As we said before, Puddle. They say OCZ has a higher return rate, because they make more SSD's than Intel. Hence, why OCZ gets more returns, they make more.

I have to disagree with XFX. I never had to RMA a XFX GFX, but I also never heard anything bad about their CS.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

As we said before, Puddle. They say OCZ has a higher return rate, because they make more SSD's than Intel. Hence, why OCZ gets more returns, they make more.

I have to disagree with XFX. I never had to RMA a XFX GFX, but I also never heard anything bad about their CS.

That's completely irrelevant, provided they had enough sales for a proper sample, which the article indicated they did, the results they found are accurate. This is not who had the higher number of returns, it's who had the higher percentage of returns.

You guys may not like how these numbers make OCZ look but this is how quality is measured in industry and a completely valid method.

I've always had good experiences with XFX too but our personal views of them are just anecdotal evidence. Like I said I was surprised by Corsair power supplies as well but ultimately what we think about a product doesn't matter.

Edit: OCZ also had the highest failure rate of ram manufactures by a large margin.

 

[Peter.Cort]

Interesting indeed. I think they should have broken it down a little more to give us more information, like the MSI boards, .8% return rate on the g31 boards which made up 80% of their sales. I think it would have nice to have a further break down of like performance vs budget (low end) components.

I feel like with the corsair VX450W is the kind of deal where they're perceived as a high end enthusiast supply and people got a bit overzealous with what they hoped it could do and over taxed it. Or it was just a bad PSU which is a shame.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Well, now that OCZ is out of the RAM market.

Wasn't OCZ SSD's out long before Intel SSD's? So they already had a higher return rate, if so.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

Interesting indeed. I think they should have broken it down a little more to give us more information, like the MSI boards, .8% return rate on the g31 boards which made up 80% of their sales. I think it would have nice to have a further break down of like performance vs budget (low end) components.

I feel like with the corsair VX450W is the kind of deal where they're perceived as a high end enthusiast supply and people got a bit overzealous with what they hoped it could do and over taxed it. Or it was just a bad PSU which is a shame.

I agree, It would be awesome if they could have at least broken it down by price range or even chipset.

I also wonder if something like that could be the case with Corsair since that model has traditionally been well reviewed. Even as it is Corsair still did pretty good in the grand scheme of things.

Well, now that OCZ is out of the RAM market.

Wasn't OCZ SSD's out long before Intel SSD's? So they already had a higher return rate, if so.

Intel has been in the SSD market since the very beginning, the X25-M G1 came out ages ago. That doesn't have any impact on this article though, all of the data in this article is on sales between October 1st 2010 and April 1st 2011.

Before everyone complains about the data being old that's a necessary evil since it takes time to get return info for a product.

I also am surprised that PNY was the best gpu manufacturer since we normally don't give them as much attention as some of the others.

 

[Peter.Cort]

The returns rates given concern the products sold between October 1st 2010 and April 1st 2011 for returns made before October 2011, namely after between 6 months and a year of use. Over the lifetime of a product the returns generally form a spread out U on the graph, with the bottom virtually flat. Our figures therefore cover the early part of the lifetime of products, where returns rates are high.

It's not uncommon for a whole lot of parts to be bad, if one part is bad, the whole lot is susceptible and therefore a chunk of the whole model line is going to be susceptible. It doesn't mean necessarily that that model as a whole is bad, but that some of the parts they got in were bad. Take all of this with a grain of salt. Also with SSD's they're still relatively new and companies are trying to do everything they can to maximize performance and minimize price, some things work, some things fail both in their marketing of the product and the physical construction.

Before everyone complains about the data being old that's a necessary evil since it takes time to get return info for a product.

especially since this takes into account whether or not the item was actually malfunctioning. I was just reading an article on the seagate utility site about how a large percentage of drives that are returned as defective aren't actually defective. I think the same goes for a lot of these products and it takes more time to effectively weed out the ones that are actually ok.

 

[Puddle Jumper]

It's not uncommon for a whole lot of parts to be bad, if one part is bad, the whole lot is susceptible and therefore a chunk of the whole model line is going to be susceptible. It doesn't mean necessarily that that model as a whole is bad, but that some of the parts they got in were bad. Take all of this with a grain of salt. Also with SSD's they're still relatively new and companies are trying to do everything they can to maximize performance and minimize price, some things work, some things fail both in their marketing of the product and the physical construction.

That's why Intel and Crucial are so impressive on the SSD front, they are clearly more reliable than traditional hard drives and other SSDs. I've owned a decent assortment of SSDs and I've never noticed a difference in performance in actual usage so reliability is the real deciding factor for me.