At Puget Systems, we track a lot of data but one of the most important things we track is the failure rates of individual components. Reliability is of our primary values, so this data is invaluable for tracking both individual component, product line, and overall brand failure rates. With 2013 coming to a close, we thought we make public a bit of this data to let you know what hardware we found to be the most reliable in 2013.
The Kraken G10 from NZXT tackles GPU cooling in a way that we at Puget Systems have always wanted to see, but have not had the time or expertise to make happen ourselves. Instead of providing a whole cooling solution, the Kraken G10 is simply a metal bracket and fan that allows you to mount various different closed-loop coolers. These coolers are traditionally used for CPUs and allow you to custom tailor your video card cooling much like you can for your CPU.
Using numerous technologies, CPUs are able to dynamically adjust their frequency based on how much load is being put on it. The end result is much greater efficiency, but it calls into question whether the base frequency of a CPU really means anything on modern processors since a CPU will rarely spend much of it’s time at that advertised frequency.
AMD’s new Radeon R9 290X includes a hardware switch that changes the card between two fan profiles called “Quiet” and “Uber”. The Quiet profile makes the card run quieter at the cost of performance, but we have found that online reviews show much less of a performance drop than we tested ourselves. In this article, we decided to expand our normal testing to discover what might be causing this discrepancy.
Many hardware sites have shown in the past that video cards do not show any performance decrease by running in x8 mode and cannot utilize the larger bandwidth provided by the latest Gen3 specification. However, video cards are getting faster and faster so we felt it this is still true. Also, with the gaining popularity of 4k displays, we also felt it was important to see if the PCI-E revision/speed would affect a video card’s performance at the much more demanding 4k resolution.
ECC RAM is very popular in servers or other systems with high-value data as it protects against data corruption by automatically detecting and correcting memory errors. In this article we will go over the advantage of using ECC memory.
Winter is coming, and with the power bills stacking up it may be hard to justify gaming on your ulta-powerful gaming rig. But what if we were to tell you that, watt for watt, your gaming PC produces exactly the same amount of heat as a space heater?
When Windows 8 launched, there were many users who mourned the loss of the Start button, and many others who claimed that the new Start screen was much more useful than the Start button ever was. As tends to happen on the internet, this caused many heated discussions. With Windows 8.1, Microsoft has (sort of) brought back the Start button in response to the many complaints.
Maya 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for Maya is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
AutoCAD 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for AutoCAD is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.
Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.
We provide:
Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money
Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting
Support that understands
your complex workflows and can get you back up & running ASAP
A proven track record
as shown by our case studies and customer testimonials
