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?
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.