Why is this important: It’s a sad truth that graphics cards and motherboards can fail for one reason or another. Provided they are still covered, now is the time to take advantage of their warranties. But which manufacturers create the most reliable hardware and which are the fastest to complete warranty repairs? A major PC reseller in Switzerland gave us an idea by publishing their warranty claim statistics.
Reddit user GaoHAQ (via VideoCardz) has published the GPU and motherboard defect rate for each brand sold by Swiss retailer Digitec over the past two years. This time frame is an important factor as it covers the height of covid-19 and the cryptomining craze, which could skew the warranty case duration stats somewhat, though it’s still an interesting read.
Starting with the GPU warranty score – how often a product of a particular brand has failed in the first 24 months – the most reliable company is Dell. This isn’t really surprising since Dell only makes enterprise/workstation cards like Nvidia’s A6000, which costs $6,799. The lack of custom cooling and factory overclocking, along with their high price and build quality, contribute to the 0% failure rate.
Asrock comes second behind Dell in the warranty scoreboard with a failure rate of just 0.3%, followed by other smaller companies: Gainward, Inno3D, PNY and Pallit. Interestingly, the two worst manufacturers, Sapphire (2.4%) and XFX (2.5%), only produce AMD cards.
Despite its relatively poor showing in the warranty scores section, Sapphire tops the warranty case duration chart. On average, it only took the company 3 days to process a warranty claim form from the time it arrived at the service center until the faulty card was returned to the customer.
EVGA, which has a reputation for offering excellent and effective product warranties, was the second best performer with a 9-day wait. Unfortunately, the company announced last year that it would not be producing RTX 4000 series GPUs due to an abusive relationship with Nvidia.
As for the manufacturer that took the longest to process a warranty, Gigabyte took that junk title with an average wait time of 18 days.
Moving on to motherboards, MSI has the lowest failure rate in this category (2.8%), while Supermicro 5% puts it last. As for how long it takes companies to repair these products, Biostar leads with 0 days, which likely means it sends out replacement boards as soon as the faulty boards arrive at its repair facility.
Ironically, Gigabyte, which took the longest to repair its GPUs, was second fastest with mobo warranty cases, taking just three days to complete a claims process. Asrock was last with 13 days.
There are a few caveats with this data, including regional laws around warranty claims, but it’s a potentially useful set of statistics for anyone considering buying a GPU or motherboard.
