Best/Most Reliable New Orange Box

MoparMike1974 said

People say the mopar orange box is junk but I have one I have been using off and on since 1992 and its still kicking. Any of the new parts store ones are crap. They have a dummy TO-3 transistor on top but inside is a tiny TO-220 package transistor doing the work. This is why the new ones fail so often.
So your better off finding a good used old one or NOS.

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I’m not sure the TO-220 is really the issue. As semiconductor switching speeds have improved over the last few decades, the package sizes have decreased. The T0-220 is pretty common. Most of the heat is generated during switching, not when it is on or off.

I think it is more of a general lack of quality of parts, testing and manufacturing in the Chinese replicas, but that is just my opinion. I have used the $20-40 parts store boxes with some success. Using 50 year old hardware may well work a lot of the time for most, but that is probably not a guarantee for reliability.

There doesn’t seem to be any real test data out there on things like this, it is all anecdotal. This one failed for this guy, that one worked for that guy. Like everything low volume Chinese, it is pretty much a crapshoot.