Hardware France managed to convince a major un-named French retailer to give them some RMA numbers in comparison to the number of units sold. The data was collected in the period of seven months from August2008 to March of this year. The breakdown is vendor & product specific, which will give us a better idea on the reliability of brands as well as individual products. First up, the vendor specific RMA rates. Keep in mind that the lower the RMA rate means better reliability. Asus leads the pack with Sapphire & MSI putting up very similar numbers. Sapphire (ATI), Leadtek (Nvidia) & PNY (Nvidia) are the only exclusive vendors that are under the 3% industry norm. Point of View, an Nvidia exclusive AIB does the worst with almost twice the normal acceptable rate.
Moving to the product specific RMA rates, we see a real strong showing by ATI with all of its products below the normal threshold. Nvidia's previous generations (Geforce 8800 & 9800) put up similar numbers but the Geforce GTX series, especially the GTX 280 has a failure rate of almost 10% while the GTX 260's does not as bad with a failure rate of 4.3%.
Looking at the Multi-GPU products, the Radeon HD 3870X2 claims the worst while the 4870X2 claims the best spots with the 9800GX2 falling in between. Seems like what ever the issue was with the 3870X2 was fixed and now the 4870X2 is class-leading in terms of reliability.
The above results are surprising in view that the GTX 200 series are considered to operate at cooler temperature thresholds in comparison to the Radeon HD 4800 series. This should also be very helpful when you are deciding on the brand of your next graphics cards. If you havent bookmarked this already, then we have a comparison of different vendors for ATI & Nvidia based products for helping you decide the vendor for your next graphic card.
Moving to the product specific RMA rates, we see a real strong showing by ATI with all of its products below the normal threshold. Nvidia's previous generations (Geforce 8800 & 9800) put up similar numbers but the Geforce GTX series, especially the GTX 280 has a failure rate of almost 10% while the GTX 260's does not as bad with a failure rate of 4.3%.
Looking at the Multi-GPU products, the Radeon HD 3870X2 claims the worst while the 4870X2 claims the best spots with the 9800GX2 falling in between. Seems like what ever the issue was with the 3870X2 was fixed and now the 4870X2 is class-leading in terms of reliability.
The above results are surprising in view that the GTX 200 series are considered to operate at cooler temperature thresholds in comparison to the Radeon HD 4800 series. This should also be very helpful when you are deciding on the brand of your next graphics cards. If you havent bookmarked this already, then we have a comparison of different vendors for ATI & Nvidia based products for helping you decide the vendor for your next graphic card.
Good luck buddy!
