I did that on my first PC (bad isolator in a piece of kit I was prototyping). As I buy two of everything, I just moved the prototype over to the spare machine (identical software, etc.) and put the "serial+parallel ISA board" in a pile to bring to vendor for replacement.
"Gee, I dunno what happened! It just went 'pop'..." :>
I've given up trying to sort out "best" and "avoid at all costs" vendors/products.
I volunteered for many years at a facility that recycled electronic products. My role being to try to recover/repurpose kit to divert it from landfills, get it into the hands of folks (schools, charities) that could use it (but couldn't afford to *buy* it), etc.
You'd be just as likely to see a pallet of commodity desktop machines (figure 1.5 - 3 yr life cycles in business environment) as you would enterprise *servers*! And, just as likely to find servers with bad motherboards, power distribution boards (redundant power supplies don't help you if the mechanism that shares the load fails!), CPUs toasted from failed fans, etc.
Of course, just because they are bought as servers doesn't mean the owner is operating them correctly *as* servers! E.g., no idea what their cold aisles may have been...
The only machines that I *never* seem to find "bad" (i.e., ready to run on the application of power) are Alpha servers. IBM, HP, Dell, Google, etc. all seem to have problems (often a common problem for a particular make/model).
[Of course, buying these sorts of things by the *pound*, as surplus, all that extra chassis weight is hard to swallow: "Cripes! Can't we put it in a lighter chassis and buy it for $10 instead of $20? I sure don't need to be carrying all that 'extra' metal!" :> E.g., my BladeCenter is close to 250? pounds and it's just 7U! (14 dual Xeon's each with dual Gb ethernet and dual 70G SAS drives, quad 2000W power supplies, two blower modules, etc. -- all hot swappable. OTOH, I can *stand* on it without fear of collapsing the case...]The surprising revelation was that SAS/SCSI/FC enterprise drives tend to have far more usable life than the servers in which they reside! (not true of consumer/run-of-the-mill PATA/SATA drives in desktop machines). I had expected the oppposite -- that the drives run so much hotter -- especially when "up" 24/7/365 as in a server.
I suspect the drive manufacturers are aware of this and take measures to prolong their operating lives. Including cooling to that portion of the chassis.
OTOH, the box makers probably think a couple of redundant fans will keep the rest of the box "comfortable".