I was watching an episode of Tekzilla last night and one of the interesting parts of it was an interview with Jon Bach from Puget Systems in which he laid out some statistics regarding which hardware components fail the most. Surprisingly and sadly it turned out to be motherboards failing at a rate of about 12% on average, but it depends a lot on the model apparently as for some the failure rate is 2% and for others it's a whole of 60%!

He notes though that "failure" here is considered any component on the motherboard going bad, even components you might not be using. It counts for them because they make PCs, but if it were to fail for you at home and it's a motherboard component you don't actually use you'd probably just continue using it. The more features your motherboard has the more likely it is to fail.

Interestingly CPUs are most reliable of all with a failure rate of just 0.9%. Then there are hard drives which are about 3% regardless of the brand or model which indicates that you might be quite fine whichever brand you choose.

Interesting info. How does your personal experience compare to this?

12% seems to match my experience with motherboards

3% definitely doesn't match my experience with hard drives. 50% would be a lot closer! My last IBM ThinkPad was on it's 6th hard drive when I retired it.

Will.Spencer wrote:
12% seems to match my experience with motherboards

3% definitely doesn't match my experience with hard drives. 50% would be a lot closer! My last IBM ThinkPad was on it's 6th hard drive when I retired it.

My sister has bad luck with both, but for some reason she's always had bad luck with technology. She last summer changed a motherboard and a little earlier the hard drive.

I on the other hand have good luck with both. My motherboard and both the old and new hard drive still work well and I think I actually never had a premature failure of either. It happened once with RAM only.

My first PC had an issue where it would continually zap the memory controller chip. Back in those days the chips were socketed on the motherboard. The chips were about 89 cents each. About once every other month I had to open my PC, pry the memory controller chip out of it's DIP socket and replace it with a new one.

Nowadays the memory controller is just a tiny portion of a VLSI chipset and those are wave soldered to the motherboard. There's no replacing chips now!

Will.Spencer wrote:
My first PC had an issue where it would continually zap the memory controller chip. Back in those days the chips were socketed on the motherboard. The chips were about 89 cents each. About once every other month I had to open my PC, pry the memory controller chip out of it's DIP socket and replace it with a new one.

Nowadays the memory controller is just a tiny portion of a VLSI chipset and those are wave soldered to the motherboard. There's no replacing chips now!

So when it fails you have to replace the entire motherboard? Ah.. the trade offs of progress.

How about power supply. When I worked in a PC repair shop, few years ago, almost 50% of failures were related to cheap Chinese power supply units. Good percent of failures were also Maxtor hard drives, then after that were motherboards as MB being broken in 1-2 out of 10 computers.

Heck this can be related also to Bosnia.

Here cheap power supplies are very common yet, most popular names for motherboards
are Asus, Gigabyte, Abit, Asrock, MSI...

In history of my personal computer I had:

4 failures of PS unit
2 failures of Maxtor hard drives
1 failure of Western Digital hard drive
1 failure of Abit motherboard
1 failure of LAN card
3 failure of monitors

That's quite a history.

I think it's a similar situation here as well. Mentioning cheap power supply failure and Maxtor hard drive failures seems familiar because we had both. My sister's HD was Maxtor which failed and was replaced by a WD. Last summer she had a PSU replaced and then a motherboard. It's even possible that PSU issues actually caused motherboard problems.

For my computer I ended up buying a better PSU as soon as I noticed even the slightest issues with the one that came with the case such as problems with power on. I got a 400W Fortron Blue Storm 2 which is still working well even after a bunch of upgrades (second HD and DVD burner, more memory, new gfx card).

I really hope nothing fails any time soon.