[dredmorbius]

My suspicion is that branded hardware manufacturers are uniformly reasonably good in quality. White box vendors may vary widely: some are good, but some (many? few?) are really, really bad. This can skew data.

It's also possible that it's getting more difficult to accurately spec systems, to enforce vendor quality (Dell gets a bad batch of drives, they can 1) detect it and 2) tell the vendor to stuff it, Ahmed's Boxez'R'Us may not have that leverage or depth of experience), and to do burn-in testing of their own systems.

That said, I've had good and bad experiences with big-name and white box vendors alike.

[flomo]

One question is what happens to a component that fails a major OEM's QC standards, where does it go? In to the garbage? Or into the whitebox channel?

For example, some have speculated that "Gamer RAM" with mean looking heatsinks is actually poorer quality stuff that requires additional cooling to work correctly.