Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
Aris Mpitziopoulos at cybenetics.com
I have a Zalman ZM-1000 from 2007 that's still working, my coworker at my first job lost interest in desktop PCs and gave it away to me. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/zalman-zm1000-hp/2.html
Power supplies - regardless of quality - die pretty regularly at scale. Only disks fail more often. They are the #2 component we replace in the datacenter.
Are data-center power supplies comparable to higher-end desktop power supplies? And how much do you oversize them compared to the load they will actually handle? E.g. for a desktop buying even double the power supply capacity you need won't really affect the overall PC price that much but I somehow doubt data center operators are willing to not optimize away that cost.
Funny, just had an 8 year old 1600W Corsair Titanium efficiency power supply go. Generally very high quality, GaN transistors, all japanese caps, etc etc. It was still under warranty, and Corsair refunded the original price, stand-up company. Too bad 1600W power supplies have apparently inflated ~50% since then, but still.
Had the EVGA 1000w fail on me. It did not fail dramatically though, rather it refused to output high power. Got a replacement under warranty
They just rebrand PSUs, not all of them are bomber. But they have 10yr warranties on PSUs and are good about honoring them. I wish they still sold gpus. I would only buy evga for every component if I could specifically for the painless warranty. Had to warranty an asus mobo and it was like pulling teeth.
Yeah I also had an EVGA 1080 Ti die on me, and got a better GPU as upgrade. Their warranty was worth the premium price for sure.
Overall I have made very good experiences with long hardware warranties. Soldered RAM on my ThinkPad died once and I got an entire new mainboard after almost 3 years (it died 2 months before warranty expired.) New one still works today but the hardware is just too old.
What brand of power supply?
> The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
Even that is not guaranteed to break a modern CPU though as they all monitor their thermals and down-throttle (even below way specified minimum speeds) as needed to protect themselves. Not that I'd recommend relying on that but still, I have had cooling fail without apparent damage.
You didn't hold on to your Pentium 4 long enough. :-)
My main machines were PowerPC G3s/G4s/G5s back then with the P4 boxes I had taking secondary/tertiary roles, so that lines up.
Anecdatum, but mine still works :D