It can be useful to know which are the components of a PC that fail the most to know how to prioritize our money, or to know certain tricks to maximize its useful life, what will be the one that fails the most of all? We tell you below.

It is important to know this information because it can save us from a scare or foresee what may happen in the future. It is not the same to invest a lot of money in a component that is going to fail, than in another that you know has a useful life of more than 5 years. We review all those that we find inside a PC to give you the answers you are looking for.

PC component quality and maintenance

To be as objective as possible, I wanted to advise you that the quality of the component will be decisive when determining which part is the one that fails the most. For example, we can’t compare a € 800 GPU to a € 30 PSU – they are in different leagues.

Therefore, I simply wanted to emphasize that the list of components is prepared with the highest quality products in mind. In addition, we have contrasted it with equipment vendors who have monitored which hardware gives their customers the most problems, whose identity we are not going to reveal to be as impartial as possible.

Finally, you cannot compare components with poor maintenance and others with better maintenance. So, we will presume in the «ranking» that adequate maintenance is carried out.

Fans

There is practically a consensus that fans are the components that fail the most in a PC , regardless of whether it is a GPU, a supplementary fan, a heatsink, AIO radiators or the power supply fan.

The fan is a piece with a basic operation, but we forget that it is constantly spinning : from when we turn on the PC until we turn it off. Ultimately, this has significant wear and tear, but we see a trend for more repairs when it comes to poor quality fans.

Those most frequently visited by the technical service are supplementary fans of questionable quality, usually included in PC cases from little-known brands.

After the PC case fans, it should be said that the source and heatsink fans are the following because they are always running (at a lower or higher speed). However, we found power supplies with more than 7 years of warranty (no coincidence) and heatsinks tested endlessly.

We can be more than 5 years using them without any problem. For example, in the 4 years that I have my EVGA source, it has not given me any problems. Like I have my heatsink for 3 years and it has not given me any problems either.

To extend the useful life of your fans, I recommend you do the following:

• Ventilation curves . Our box will not always be hot, so it is worth programming a curve so that they rotate slower when it is cooler. Wear will be less because they will rotate at a slower speed.
• Clean them often. Dust will impair the fan’s ability to extract heat from the case, so it will have to run faster to achieve the same goal. Cleaning the fans is very easy.
• Buy good quality ones. It is preferable that they come without RGB and that they have a good quality, than that they come with “lights” and are expensive. Check out the best fans on the market .

Mechanical hard drives or HDDs

Hard drives or HDDs are other components that fail the most, and this is something that has been studied a lot. Specifically, it is a component that has many mechanical parts in a very small space.

Likewise, its reliability is an issue that interests manufacturers and in which they have put a lot of investment to bring more reliable units to the market. I have to break a spear in favor of HDDs , and it is that they are components that reveal symptoms ( click , slow access time, etc.) that warn that their life is coming to an end.

Conversely, SSDs can die overnight for no apparent reason, which is a problem: we can’t salvage the information we hold most dear. However, there are studies that reveal that SSDs take longer to fail than HDDs, among other things, because they do not have mechanical parts.

BackBlaze analyzed an HDD vs SSD from 2013 to March 31, 2021, noting that the HDD failed significantly more than the SSD. In fact, roughly, the failure rate is usually as follows:

• HDD -> 1 in 292 fail.
• SATA SSD -> 1 in 874.
• M.2 -> 1 in 1250.

Graphics cards

Although they have a fan (mechanical parts), the truth is that software is a great cause of problems in many graphics cards, making them one of the PC components that fail the most . If not tell AMD with their RDNA “Big Navi” (RX 5000), which came out with many problems on the market.

Neither NVIDIA fought with its GeForce RTX 3000 , coming to light certain controversies about the capacitors. The truth is that professional graphics cards prove to be more reliable than gaming, why? Perhaps because they are manipulated by technicians and not by users, with quite a few who “don’t know what they are doing.”

Going back to the Puget data, the overall failure rate was that 1 in 90 GPUs failed . On the other hand, professional graphics cards (Titan) failed 1 in 222, which is a good figure. Of course, do you want to know what was the most reliable graphics card they have sold? The EVGA GTX 1050 Ti: no bug reported.

This seller is very happy with brands like PNY and EVGA , turning out to be quality assemblers (something we were referring to at the beginning).

Processors, especially if there is overclock!

We are talking about processors in a normal scenario, so if we add the overclock variable, the useful life drops a lot. This is not about an AMD vs Intel war because both brands offer a useful life more than enough, but it is true that the last generations of Intel were “tight” with a fairly high frequency.

In processors the thermal factor is very important: the cooler the better. The fact that Intel Rocket Lake-S comes to 5.0 GHz or more in “Turbo Boost” can cause a reduction of the useful life because they get very hot .

In this way, if you are going to overclock, try to achieve the balance between temperatures and frequency . On the other hand, it must be said that the first Ryzen came quite “tight” from the factory, although you already know the fate of silicon: it depends on the unit that touches you. In particular, you should avoid as much as possible that there is an electromigration problem in your processor .

Raising them above 4.0 GHz was crazy, although now they are quite close to 5.0 GHz. That said, there are no comparisons that reveal which chips are more durable, but you must be careful with their cooling and maintenance.

• Change thermal paste -> consult the best thermal pastes.
• Buy a heatsink that is decent.
• Clean the CPU heatsink .

Those 3 tips will help maximize the life of your processor, but we anticipated that processors last more than 5 years easily, I still see Intel Core 4th generation working like the first day!

RAM

We apply the same rule to this PC component: if you overclock the RAM, you greatly shorten its useful life. In Professional Review we advocate not squeezing the modules at such high frequencies because it is usually not worth it for practical purposes.

The RAM is one of the most PC components fail , but depends on the use given to it. Believe it or not, memories tend to strain when applications require a large amount of allocation. This may or may not lead to errors.

In my personal experience, after playing a video game with all the ULTRA settings and 8GB of RAM on my computer, I had memory problems. Apparently, the game required 16GB to play under these conditions, so it consumed almost all the RAM memory by itself.

Finally, I had to change the RAM memories and install 16 GB to work perfectly, and I did not overclock the previous ones. However, we do not put the RAM in this place from my experience, but from the data that Puget Systems offers :

• Standard RAM : 1 in 170 .
• ECC RAM : 1 in 833 .

We do not like to favor brands, but there are experts and technicians who point out that the most reliable memories are Crucial ( Micron ) and Samsung . Ultimately, it is about finding which PC components fail the most to know where investing is worth investing more.