Last week, I held a small survey asking us technicians what hardware brands we like based on quality vs price to get an idea on what other computer technicians are selling to their clients. Here are the results.

Click on the pictures to enlarge the results.

CPUs
AMD used to be favored by many computer technicians about a year or two ago. I don’t believe this result was influenced by benchmarks as it was influenced by marketing. Clients that don’t know much about computers usually just default to Intel.

Motherboards
I was surprised by these results. I thought Gigabyte would have been voted much higher than it was. I often use ASUS for my own gaming machines due to their onboard features and overclockability (big fat heatsinks etc..) but I use Gigabyte in my clients computers due to sheer reliability. Anyway, the Technibble readers have spoken, Asus is the preferred motherboard amongst Technicians.

RAM
Good to see that the majority of us are using good quality RAM in our systems. I’m not surprised that Kingston won this one, being cheap, good quality and having a lifetime warranty, what more could a technician want?

Video Cards
The video card results were fairly even across the board and I’m not surprised. There were videocards like the Geforce 4 8800 series that were being sold under many different brand names even though the hardware itself was essentially identical. The only difference between all these differently branded 8800’s were that some were pre-overclocked, they had different warranties and there were different “bundles” having more or less games, adapters etc..

Hard Drives
As I am sure most of you would have expected, Seagate and Western Digital are the clear leaders in hard drives. Both are excellent brands and I suspect that Seagate pulled ahead with technicians due to their 5 year warranty.

Power Supplies
Looks like technicians know the value of a good power supply which is good to see. These results match up with the favorite case brands so technicians must be buying a lot of case/psu combos.

LCD Screens
Acer, Samsung and Viewsonic pull ahead in the LCD game. Ive sold all three of these brands myself and have had very few returns. I believe Samsung might have pulled ahead in this because of their quality panels and 0 dead pixel warranty.

Cases
As expected, these results match up with the favorite power supply brands. I personally would have thought that the generic case options would have been greater since many clients dont really care about the quality of a case when buying a computer.

Input Devices
Logitech and Microsoft are the obvious leaders. I would have expected Microsoft to win this because of their Business Hardware Pack, its inexpensive, easily available and good quality. However, I personally believe that Logitech definitely is the way to go for gaming so I am assuming that many of us technicians are selling high end gaming machines and using Logitech instead? or could it be a anti-Microsoft thing?

Optical Devices
All the major players were rated high in this one with LiteOn surging past the rest. LiteOn create inexpensive, good quality burners so this is to be expected.


In conclusion, it looks like scale of price-vs-quality has been slightly tilted to the quality side as these results had a lot of medium-to-high brands being chosen over the generic ones.

This is how I operate my own business as well. There will always be computer stores that can out price me and employ staff that are willing to work for less. I cannot play the price game and I expect most other technicians cant either. Instead, we build quality machines and provide great service for a little bit extra which often wins over the customers that have been burnt once by cheap PCs.