Were you assuming they were giant FPGA based NICs..? They are production server NICs, using asics with a reasonable power budget. I don't recall any failures.
I don't have any visibility into how many DOA NICs we have, so I can't say that Mellanox is better or worse at that point. But I do see most NIC related tickets for NIC failures once machines are in production. In general, we've found Mellanox NICs to be very reliable.
