My Puget Computer's First Birthday!

[Preston]

My Puget computer is 1 year old and still performs as if it were brand new! I chalk this up to two things. First, the great work by the Puget folks in choosing the best components and taking great care with the build and testing, and second, on my end, keeping it maintained.

Here are the specs of the original build, based upon Puget's Obsidian Workstation:

Motherboard: Asus P8H67-M EVO REV 3.0 Micro-ATX
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500K QUAD CORE 3.3GHz 95W
Ram: Kingston 16GB DDR3-1333 (4x4GB)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GT 430 1GB Silent
Primary Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6 Gb/s
Secondary Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 6 Gb/s
CD / DVD: Asus 24x DVD-RW Lightscribe SATA (black)
Case: Antec Mini P180 (Black)
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 650W Power Supply
CPU Cooling: Scythe Katana 3 CPU Cooler
Keyboard: Microsoft Wired Desktop 600 (Keyboard/Mouse)
Ext. Drive: Western Digital External USB2/SATA 1.0TB Drive with free Automatic Backup and Restore Set-up
OS: Windows 7 Professional: 64-bit OEM SP1
Software: Security-Microsoft Security Essentials

Back in March, I added a Intel-520, 240GB SSD as my OS drive. The Western Digital hard drives are now used for storage, and my Photoshop scratch disk. That is the only change I've made to the build. I may upgrade to 32GB of RAM and a new video card in the future.

So, once again, I thank Puget System's staff for their all their help and for delivering the best system I have ever used. Keep up the great work, Puget!

--Preston

[PCC-William]

Awesome setup! How'd you like the speed boost of the SSD? I moved to one three years ago, so mine is nowhere near as fast as the 520-series, but it still felt like a huge improvement

[Preston]

Hi William,

The 520 drive is the bomb! My Windows Experience mark for the HD went from 5.9 to 7.9! It was a good move!

Edit: I thought I'd run some quick tests opening some programs and files for editing. This was pretty non-scientific, but here's what I got...

Open MS Word 2010: 1.0 second
Open MS Outlook 2010: 1+ second
Open Photo Shop CS5 (with Nik ColorEfex Pro 3 plugin): 10 seconds
Open a layered 1.12 GB PSD file stored on the SSD: 7 seconds
Windows boot time now averages about 28 seconds (calculated from boot data in Event Viewer)

One additional comment about the Obsidian Workstation with the Antec case: It is very quiet, to the point I can hardly tell it's running. For someone looking for a work horse, it's a great way to go.

--Preston

[Burton10]

I was amazed by this! This thing has tremendous power. It can play back 1080p files, perfectly. It can decompress .rar files quickly. I thought this was going to take forever. Flawless playback. Firefox 3.5 runs perfectly, quickly, beautifully. 7.1 surround, HDMI in the back runs perfect.



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[netultimate]

I am very much satisfied with my puget computer. Puget computer's setup was found to be great. I bought it nearly eighteen months ago but still it works well. Speed boost up of SSD was found to be good. And still my power backup is much finer.

Rajendran

[Preston]

Well, here I am a year later and my Puget Obsidian (second birthday) still runs along as sweetly as it did the day I got it! This is quite a testament to the quality of the parts and the build.

Aside from the SSD I added some time ago, I installed an Asus wireless PCIe card recently. My home network is now wireless!

So, once again, I thank Puget System's staff for their all their help and for delivering the best system I have ever used. Keep up the great work, Puget!

--Preston