Here is an interesting article from a French etailer and their statistics on PC component return rates for 2011.
 
 
http://www.behardware.com/articles/843-1/components-returns-rates-5.html
 

that looks fairly acurate. LMAO at OCZ. but what do i know..
video cards are interesting..

PNY who makes the quadros, so far quadros for us have had a near 50% fail rate yes i said 50% (we do a lot of video boxes)
not to mention i dont recommend them (qaudro)anyway..

of the video cards mentioned only PNY and Zotac have lifetime warranty (if you register)

HDDs: the WD RE4 we have not seen that fail rate at all, if anything less than standard WD/Seagate (2%)
i am guessing much of the supposed fail rate comes from end users not setting up their raid arrays correctly.

they dont mention if the company bothered to test the RMAs

Mobos: hmm Asrock is asus.
didnt see much in the way of higher end mobos and PS's

Interesting stuff, thanks.

Warranty and returns procedures would be an interesting comparison too.

Things do go wrong but it's much less of a pain when you can get stuff replaced easily.  Seagate and Crucial I have had particularly good experiences with so far.

Somewhat surprising that Kingston ram does so well relative to the more respected names. One explanation might be that people trying to push the envelope with memory performance may not even consider buying such a pedestrian brand. After all some of these returns are undoubtedly not  so much defective  as not suitable to the application for which they are bought. Or maybe the aficionado's favorites have more defects than their reputation implies.

I used to do a lot of support on the Dell forums.   Dell's (older models) had a history of non-Dell memory compatibility.  Generally we suggested Crucial as it is guaranteed to work in Dell's.  Kingston in most cases worked OK, but Kingston Value RAM did not.

The listing does not break down, for example returns that tested good.  Also there is no way of knowing how many were "self inflicted" (user caused) failures and as noted, just didn't work for whatever application.