Hardware Reliability

fatsheep

Specifications can provide lots of useful information about a product but one thing they don't tell you is how reliable that piece of hardware is. Details specs will tell you the type of memory on that video card, the type processing chip, the speed of the RAMDACs, and the 3d clock speed of that processor, and more but they won't tell you much about the reliability. The first and most important quality of a piece of hardware is the reliability. I want it to work out of the box and I want it to work as long as possible, as well as possible.

In the past I have gone by user reviews on newegg and various review sites such as Toms hardware.com. However, their information is usually just based on performance benchmarks. I have not found much information on the long term or overall reliability of a certain line of hardware products.

My question is this: are there any websites similar to JDpower's for computer hardware? I would like information on the reliability of different brands of graphics cards to be specific. I have always found it annoying that there are so many different brands that manufacturer each type of graphics card that Nvidia creates and there isn't a whole lot of information to distinguish which manufacturer's product is better or more reliable other than customer reviews.

Leonardo

My question is this: are there any websites similar to JDpower's for computer hardware?

To my knowledge, no, there are not, unfortunately. About the only thing to do if you are interested in a certain brand is to do Internet searches, find hits at forums where the users seem experienced, and read the comments.

There used to be a site specializing in hard drives that had accumulated a huge database of hard drive failure information, including brand and model. The site is still around (I think), but they no longer have the drives' reliability comparisons.

Harudath

The problem is, people only really write product reviews if the product is not what they expected, good or bad. Unfortunately, people tend to write more about unsatisfactory products than really good ones, so finding an accurate review may be difficult. I reccomend using www.kelkoo.co.uk, search the product you are looking for, it should have it, if not google. There, somewhere, it will have a list of product reviews (somewhere) from people that have bought and either hated or loved it. Other than that... fans usually have a life expectancy on their details somewhere... but that's about all I know :P Good luck and I'll post anything if I find it.

fatsheep

Leonardo wrote:

To my knowledge, no, there are not, unfortunately. About the only thing to do if you are interested in a certain brand is to do Internet searches, find hits at forums where the users seem experienced, and read the comments.

There used to be a site specializing in hard drives that had accumulated a huge database of hard drive failure information, including brand and model. The site is still around (I think), but they no longer have the drives' reliability comparisons.

If you find the link to that site then please do share it. I did a quick google search and found this which seems like a good site (just briefly skimmed it) but I'm not sure if its the one you are describing.

Harudath wrote:

The problem is, people only really write product reviews if the product is not what they expected, good or bad. Unfortunately, people tend to write more about unsatisfactory products than really good ones, so finding an accurate review may be difficult. I reccomend using www.kelkoo.co.uk, search the product you are looking for, it should have it, if not google. There, somewhere, it will have a list of product reviews (somewhere) from people that have bought and either hated or loved it. Other than that... fans usually have a life expectancy on their details somewhere... but that's about all I know :P Good luck and I'll post anything if I find it.

Thanks for the link.