Introduction
Over the years, we have published several articles covering the reliability of the components we use in our workstations and servers. The exact focus has shifted a little from year to year, but now that we have closed the books on 2025, we wanted to take the opportunity to call out specific brands and models of hardware that we found to be exceptionally reliable over the last 12 months.
Our Data Source
Before jumping into the results, it is important to stress that the information presented here is based on our experience at Puget Systems and does not cover the entire computer hardware industry. Moreover, there are some caveats regarding our data sources that should be understood in order to properly frame the rest of the article.
At Puget Systems, we have a meticulous qualification process for new hardware and regularly review RMA records – both for components that didn’t end up passing our internal burn-in during system assembly as well as failure reports from customers in the field. We do our best to avoid and minimize the use of brands and product families that don’t live up to our expectations, so our failure rates are often lower than the industry standard.
On the other hand, we also have strict standards for hardware – so we may consider things to have failed that a typical consumer or manufacturer would not. That can lead to higher failure rates in our records than might be industry standard, especially for complex components like motherboards that have a LOT of parts and potential failure points.
There are also limitations on the way that our internal records display failure data, which involve when parts were originally purchased, when they were sold in a system, and when failures were reported. In the interest of trying to be as comprehensive and accurate as possible, we are adjusting the date range we pull information from for this article, so it will not be directly comparable to past years. However, we will still narrow our analysis of the results to components that were actively being used in our builds during the 2025 calendar year.
Additionally, the hardware we look at will be limited to our desktop and rackmount workstations, with some limited inclusions from laptops and servers (notably SSDs and RAM). The other components in our laptops – CPUs, motherboards, video cards, WiFi modules, etc – are not split out in failure data enough for us to analyze within the scope of this article. Our server and storage systems are different enough that they would need their own, separate analysis, too. If either of those topics interests you, please let us know in the comments, and perhaps we can plan to cover them in the future.
CPU (Processor)
While AMD’s Threadripper™ and Threadripper™ PRO took the reliability crown last year, Intel has dethroned them in our 2025 data. This may be partially due to the Xeon W-2500 and -3500 series seeing enough of an increase in sales last year to have their results included, so rather than just naming a product family as the most reliable, we will dig into a few different ways to look at this title.
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