I have been asking myself lately which brands still are reputable in the pc hardware sector. Asus has been frying AM5 CPUs, Gigabyte GPUs (RTX 3000 Series) are cracking… Various brands refuse to acknowledge warranty claims. What are the brands that are left / and are reputable after companies like EVGA have left the segment?
Personally, I have a Gigabyte RTX 4000 series GPU. From what their support is saying, the card should not crack if it is well-supported, and you don’t let your case bounce. They definitely should repair the cards if the user did nothing wrong. But the support bracket situation is getting difficult, some motherboards/cases don’t provide space for the brackets they give, but if you don’t install the bracket they could refuse the warranty claim…
When I picked this card, MSi and ASUS both had cards with heavy coil whine. I guess if I had to pick a more reputable brand, I would have gone with the NVIDIA Founder’s Edition cards…
I have also built pcs with Gigabyte 3000 series GPUs for friends. I have secured them properly from GPU sag. I have my fingers crossed… But it does leave a certain unwellness behind. I myself have used a Palit RTX 2080ti for some time now, which runs perfectly fine, but there were VRAM problems with some model as well. As many things in hardware, almost nothing is without its faults, I guess :)
I gave up buying parts for pcs 13 years ago after months on an ASUS warranty replacement, and intel at the time having onerous limitations on RAM and PSU you could use with a motherboard. Not worth the time. Also started costing more to build than to buy and have one company guarantee the entire computer, often with offers of ~2 day on site repair vs being without a motherboard for perhaps 6 months like ASUS.
I just went back to buying ThinkStations and save sooo much time and headaches.
That’s a pretty responsible approach to these issues. In my daytime job, I also sell whole systems to business costumers because it obviously is the more wise choice when prioritizing system uptime and replacements. But I also still have a soft side for custom hardware builds in private use cases, which cannot be satisfied with prebuilds :). But I also migrated mostly to a Laptop recently (used XMG Fusion 15) for daily use and light/medium gaming. Big plus is the portability, works like a charm on LAN parties.
Yea, I actually don’t mean just business usecase, though obviously at work - SPEND THE MONEY, you’re paying a fraction of peoples salary. But at home, unless the actual build of the computer and troubleshooting etc is part of your hobby, I strongly think you can get a workstation that can do what most people need, including moderate gaming, and it’ll just work for a long time.
Of course, if your hobby is cutting edge gaming and you want to update GPU every year or the like, then yes, you get to deal with crap like bad batches of parts. However, then I don’t get why you’re getting cases that won’t hold the parts and brackets you want to use.
My final point is I gave up on PC gaming because the software management was a real big PITA vs using a console where it’s way more “someone elses problem” if the software doesn’t run. Games crap all over windows and make it unstable and insecure. And I never wanted to have 2 PCs, one for games and one for everything else - might as well have the console then and save pain. But I also kind of outgrew videogames so YMMV.
