Puget Systems Blog » Technology Commentary

Overclocking Done Right

William George — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:15:38 +0000

One of the services we offer here at Puget Systems, aimed at high-end gamers and enthusiasts, is overclocking. It is a practice that has been around for quite some time which involves pushing the processor in a computer beyond its rated clock speed. This can provide an additional performance boost without the need to spend more money on a faster processor, though there are some trade-offs involved: additional heat and stress above and beyond what the CPU may have been designed to handle.

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PCI-Express Performance and nVidia’s New Warning

William George — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 18:51:46 +0000

Puget Systems has been in the business of building computers for 11 years now, and we know what we are doing when it comes to assembling top-notch custom computers. It is a bit insulting, then, when a parts manufacturer puts out a warning which appears – on the surface – to indicate something we do is resulting in anything other than the highest performance possible. Yet here I am, to let you know about just such a notice that nVidia’s latest driver software is giving when using their graphics cards in certain configurations.

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H67, P67, and Z68 – Which one is right for you?

William George — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 22:57:46 +0000

Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor architecture is turning 6 months old in July, and has been a major seller in the PC market in these few short months. There was a slight hiccup a month after it was released, when it was found that there was a defect in the SATA controller of the chipsets designed to work with these processors, but that has long since been resolved and no further problems have arisen.

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Custom vs. Closed Loop Liquid Cooling

William George — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 21:14:11 +0000

As a custom computer manufacturer, we’ve sold liquid-cooled systems from well before I joined the company. A water-based coolant is able to transfer heat away from hot components like the processor (CPU) and video card (GPU) more quickly than air alone would. That added cooling is appealing for folks who want to push their systems beyond design specifications. Overclocking ability is perhaps the most the most tangible benefit of liquid-cooling, but there are other reasons some folks are interested in it: liquid-cooling can make a computer look very stylish, for example, or allow operation of more hot-running components than a chassis could normally keep cool.

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Windows 7 64-bit: Running 32-bit Applications

William George — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:20:42 +0000

Windows 7 has taken root in the PC community over the last year, a great improvement from the little-liked Windows Vista, and we’ve made the 64-bit version the de facto standard on the computers we sell – to the point where we no longer even list the 32-bit version on our website. We can special-order it still, though, and I find that I am often asked by customers if they would be better off with that because they need to run older programs. This makes me think there may be some misunderstandings about 64-bit Windows out there, so let me set the record straight.

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Home Theater PC – William’s Approach

William George — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 17:22:08 +0000

This is the first in a series of blog posts about Home Theater Computers (aka HTPCs). It’s really neat to see how people approach their home theater experience differently, so several of us were asked to write about our setup, what we chose, and why we chose it.

I’ve always been a proponent of using computers and technology to make our lives easier and more enjoyable, and one place I’ve focused on implementing that idea has been in relation to entertainment. I remember watching DVDs and listening to music on my computer as early as the mid 90s, and by the late 90s I had a TV tuner in my computer. I’ve owned several brands and models of tuners since then, but I didn’t make that type of functionality the focus of a dedicated computer until I got married.

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Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 – Mercury Playback Engine

William George — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:46:15 +0000

Traditionally, over at least the past 15 years, the main role of a video card in a computer has been to accelerate 3D graphics. That is a large part of what has made modern computer games possible, and it has also contributed heavily to CAD / CAM work and digital animation. Video cards have also helped with 2D graphics and video playback, but the main focus has been on 3D speed.

This trend is beginning to change, though. As CPUs have seemed to reach an upper limit on pure clock speed many programmers are looking elsewhere for ways to improve performance in a variety of programs. Designing software to take advantage of multi-core processors has been a big benefit, as is the push toward 64-bit software that can use more RAM. Video cards are also being explored as a source of more processing power, and in situations where their massively-parallel architecture can be harnessed effectively it can be a huge benefit.

One such situation is video editing, and many smaller programs and plug-ins have been making use of either CUDA (for nVidia cards) or Stream (ATI) to accelerate video encoding. The recent launch of Adobe’s latest version of Premiere Pro – CS5 – marks the first instance of a major editing program adding this kind of functionality. In order to use this feature in Premiere Pro, though, you need to have the right video card – so I’d like to take a moment to describe the situation, hopefully helping our customers to make an informed choice when upgrading or buying a new computer.

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Core i3/i5/i7 Processors – Making Sense of Intel’s New CPU Line

William George — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:34:42 +0000

When Intel first debuted the Core i7 processor line, code-named Nehalem, in late 2008 it made perfect sense. This line of quad-cores brought several new technologies: Turbo Mode, integrated memory controllers, triple-channel RAM, and Hyperthreading (making a comeback from the Pentium 4 era). There were three processors at launch, a 920, 940 and 965 – each slightly faster than the one before it, with the ’5′ at the end of the last denoting that it was an Extreme Edition chip with some unlocked settings to help with overclocking. Over time the 940 was replaced with a 950, and then 960; the 965 also got an upgrade in the form of a 975. The naming scheme now isn’t so simple — let’s take a look.

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Written by William for Puget Systems Blog. | Permalink | 17 comments

TV Tuner Update – 2010

William George — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:51:21 +0000

It has been almost two years since I last wrote on the subject of TV tuners in computers, and a lot has changed since then. Over-the-air TV signals have finally gone all-digital, and many cable providers have reduced or dropped their analog cable lineups as well. These transitions, coupled with the release of Windows 7, mean that this year should be an exciting one for those of us with home-theater PCs.

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OS Trends Over Time: XP vs. Vista, 32-bit vs. 64-bit

Jon Bach — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 19:55:12 +0000

This weekend, Puget Systems updated many of our preconfigured systems to default to Windows Vista 64-bit. This is in direct response to a dramatic increase in popularity of 64-bit over the last few months. As part of my research in making this call, I took a look at our operating system sales over the last few years. I found the data interesting, so I thought I’d share that data, as well as my thoughts!

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Written by Jon for Puget Systems Blog. | Permalink | 13 comments