I always wonder how many system crashes that we put on the software or the OS are actually just sub optimal components. Computers are so complex and so fast that just a little bit of instability can probably lead to data corruption.
Maybe they just don't really use anything else, but I just love that the most reliable memory is just Kingston ValueRAM. No fancy heat spreader or packaging, not even a black PCB, just chips on a classic green circuit board.
My main home PC is a Puget Serenity workstation from 2017. It has been rock solid and outperforms much newer laptops. And it has almost zero fan noise which is a priority for me. Unfortunately it looks like they may have discontinued the Serenity model, at least I don't see it on the website anymore.
I am not surprised at all to see the W series Xeons with very high reliability. I know they tend to be pricier than AMD, and maybe not as fast, but I can't recall the last time I managed to kill an E3/E5/W series Xeon in the last 15 years, no matter how hard they're worked. Intel pooched it with the i-series core parts, but the workstation xeons have always been really reliable and more thrifty with power especially at idle than AMD.
I ordered a custom Ryzen 9950X3D workstation in a full-size tower from Puget last year with 192GiB of RAM before the memory craze happened and I've been quite happy with it. Zero reliability issues and excellent performance.
Coincidentally, I also ordered a custom Tiki-based gaming system from Falcon NW for a family member and that's also been amazing.
I think I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two system builders, but Puget definitely has the edge for workstations since they offer Full-size towers and other hardware that Falcon NW does not. Conversely, Falcon NW offers custom cases and the very best of hardware for gamers with unheard of customization options like custom paint jobs.
Can at least vouch for the (Sapphire Rapids) Xeons. With the right cooling, you can throw absurd TDP generating loads and they just keep on chugging along.
With octochannel memory, an 8480 can be slightly indistinguishable from an older GPU if used that way.
They don't sell Macs, so I guess Apple Silicon chips woulnd't make the list anyway, but would be interesting to see reliability compared to the Intel ones.
In my experience CPU are nonetheless a very low percentage of failures in consumer hardware these days, regardless of the designer.
We've had quite a few large Samsung SATA drives fail or start to fail. 4TB and up seems especially suspicious. Not back to spinning levels of badness, but we had a 3% failure rate. Previously, two years ago, it would have about an order of magnitude less.
I just... I dunno, I just mentally binned CPUs (as a solid state object, and one of the highest value add components to a system) to have failure rates in the ~1% range.
I know the effort it takes to get asymptotically closer to 0% failure rate, and so this is more of a misread (on my part) on what the market tolerates and the vendor's pricing/value strategy.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 33.9 ms ] threadEither them or a Falcon Northwest. What other builders exist at this level of premium quality?
Coincidentally, I also ordered a custom Tiki-based gaming system from Falcon NW for a family member and that's also been amazing.
I think I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two system builders, but Puget definitely has the edge for workstations since they offer Full-size towers and other hardware that Falcon NW does not. Conversely, Falcon NW offers custom cases and the very best of hardware for gamers with unheard of customization options like custom paint jobs.
With octochannel memory, an 8480 can be slightly indistinguishable from an older GPU if used that way.
I just... I dunno, I just mentally binned CPUs (as a solid state object, and one of the highest value add components to a system) to have failure rates in the ~1% range.
I know the effort it takes to get asymptotically closer to 0% failure rate, and so this is more of a misread (on my part) on what the market tolerates and the vendor's pricing/value strategy.
Cool!