Gigabyte and zotac has the worst cooling materials on them ( cheap thermal pads) while maxsun and yeston have worst cooling mechanism over all but Msi, Asus, sapphire and others are the first on my list, they never failed me, I'm shocked you said they die easily it depends on how the owner took care if the cards, no matter which brand if care is not taken the cards will die fast
I think this is not true. I have 4 year old Gigabyte and zotac graphics cards and they work great. Somewhere I changed some thermal seals, because they deteriorated when removing the cooling system.
Each model has its own problems and here you need to talk specifically. For example, I would not buy MSI MECH or Armor video cards, because this is the worst cooling, and I would buy GAMING with pleasure.
He is probably judging old zotac cards, zotac just learnt about their mistakes year ago there old GPU has worst cooling pads, I had to change the pads on my zotac 1660 super the pad melted on the chips and I found out they using cheap pads