Puget Systems crowns the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K as the most reliable processor in its consumer PCs, with Nvidia Founders Edition cards leading the charge for GPUs

Custom computer provider Puget Systems has released its Most Reliable Hardware of 2025 report, and it makes for some interesting reading. While the most reliable consumer processor category seems to have been a tough one to call, the company says that the Intel Core Ultra 7 265K was the most reliable individual chip overall, with a mere 0.77% failure rate across its sample size.

Puget Systems also gives a shoutout to AMD's Ryzen X3D processors as having a better track record than its regular 9000-series chips, with a 1.51% failure rate, while Nvidia's Founders Edition GPUs are said to be the most reliable GeForce RTX cards sold by the company in 2025, with a mere 0.25% failure rate overall.

The top processor may seem like a surprising pick, as it wasn't long ago that Intel was in the headlines for a host of CPU-crashing issues plaguing its older models. However, the Arrow Lake generation (along with microcode updates for 13th and 14th generation chips) appears to have steadied the ship considerably, and the 20-core Core Ultra 7 265K is something of a favourite around these parts, too.

Our Nick uses one himself, and has gone as far as to call it "underrated" and "great value for money". It's certainly impressed him more than the Core Ultra 9 285K and the Core Ultra 5 245K of the same generation, both of which underwhelmed us when they were released in 2024.

And now it appears it's a reliable old warhorse, too. In fact, if you're concerned about the reliability of your next CPU, you're more likely to find reports of AMD chips failing in their respective sockets these days than Intel ones—although that seems to be more of a motherboard manufacturer issue than anything to do with the CPUs themselves.

It must be said, however, that both processor giants now seem to have an impressively low failure rate these days, looking at Puget System's data. And in terms of our own anecdotal experience, we haven't had a CPU from either manufacturer fail in quite some time.

Looking further down the list, Puget champions the Gigabyte B890M Aorus Elite WiFi6E ICE and the Asus TUF B850M-Plus WiFi as the most reliable motherboards sold, although it admits that it only sold 100 of the former. Still, it says that no failures have been reported among those boards, and the Asus chip-seater only had a single failed unit in all of 2025.

Memory-wise, it's Kingston that edges out Micron, with a 0.19% failure rate versus 0.27%. It's important to remember with all this hardware, though, that Puget Systems can't possibly use components from every major manufacturer—so something not mentioned in its report may simply be because it's not offered in the company's systems, not that it's necessarily unreliable.

Which probably explains why there are no AMD GPUs listed in its graphics card data. Nope, it's Nvidia itself providing the "most reliable GeForce RTX cards" with a 0.25% failure rate, followed closely by Asus with 0.40%, and PNY with 0.45%.

Still, it's good to know that system manufacturers like Puget are keeping track of these things, and that there's plenty of reliable hardware out there from a wealth of major manufacturers. Now, if we could get reliable and affordable to line up across PC hardware as a whole, then we'd really be getting somewhere, wouldn't we?

Best PC build 2026

1. Best CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D

2. Best motherboard: MSI MAG X870 Tomahawk WiFi

3. Best RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB DDR5-7200

4. Best SSD: WD_Black SN7100

5. Best graphics card: AMD Radeon RX 9070

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