Well, Adam ... one of the nice things about the modern era is that you can buy computers vastly more powerful than any that existed in the world 20 years ago, and pay thousands, not millions, of dollars.
One of the downsides is that no one does extensive burn-in testing to catch infant mortality, unfortunately leaving that to you. Sounds like you did a good job :) Computer companies used to burn in entire systems (well, high-end companies still do, actually, but back when even minicomputers were expensive everyone did).
Of course, things were also a lot less reliable back then ... all those separate components to fail.
I don't know if AMD uses decent or totally shitty fans with their boxed CPUs, since I've never owned one (the DDR SMP machines that are just about to come out a whetting my appetite, though). But even good fans suffer a certain level of infant mortality.
