Hardware Articles

Adobe Premiere Pro CC Professional GPU Acceleration

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Premiere Pro CC utilizes the Mercury Playback Engine to take advantage of the video card to vastly improve both the performance and quality of certain features, but there is currently very little information available regarding the performance of the latest certified workstation video cards. In this article, we will be benchmarking a variety of workstation cards in both single and dual configurations to find out how well the MPE in Premiere Pro CC works with both NVIDIA Quadro and AMD FirePro video cards.

Technology Primer: Intel Ivy Bridge-E CPUs

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With Ivy Bridge-E, Intel is finally moving their enthusiast CPUs to their newer 22nm manufacturing process. While this does not greatly increase the raw frequency that the CPUs are able to run at, it does allow them to draw less power while doing so. In addition to the smaller manufacturing process, the new line also has more L2 cache per core and improved memory support.

4K Monitor Requirements and Usage

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4k displays have roughly four times the number of pixels as a standard 1080p display which results in a huge improvement in picture quality. But since the technology is still relatively new there are a lot of questions and misunderstandings about what you need to run a 4k monitor. In order to address these questions, we tested a variety of video cards on a 4k monitor to see how the perform at various tasks.

Haswell Laptops

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With the recent launch of Intel’s new Haswell line of CPUs, Puget Systems has completely revamped our laptop product line to take advantage of the new improvements in technology. In addition to supporting the latest mobile CPUs from Intel, these laptops also have newer chipsets and have received significant increases in GPU power compared to previous models.

Technology Primer: Intel Haswell Desktop CPUs

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Haswell is the codename for Intel’s 4th generation of processors and is the “tock” in Intel’s “tick-tock” development cycle. This means that it uses the same 22nm process as Ivy Bridge, but includes a different mounting socket and many refinements to the chip’s architecture.

Haswell Core i3 vs. i5 vs. i7 – Which is right for you?

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Intel has been using the i3, i5, and i7 naming scheme for their CPUs for quite a while now, but what these labels mean tends to slowly change over time as new features are introduced or older ones get replaced. On top of this, the naming scheme between desktop and mobile CPUs is often different as well. In this article, we will go over what differentiates i3, i5, and i7 processors for both mobile and desktop Haswell CPUs.

Z87, H87, H81, Q87, Q85, B85 – What is the difference?

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With the release of Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell CPUs, there are also a whole new line of motherboard chipsets available. Initially there are six different chipsets that are divided into two separate categories: consumer and business. In this article, we will examine the features of each of the new chipset to help you determine which is right for you.

Specs Explained: Video Card

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With the advancement of computer technology, the number of specifications for video cards has become overwhelming for those not deeply involved in the computer industry. In this article, we will explain all of the different specifications we list for video cards and what they mean for you, the end user.

Updated Puget Traverse Laptops

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The 15 and 17 inch laptops in our Traverse line received a slight upgrade from the manufacturer featuring better graphics and better battery life, but at the same time includes a small price increase. So while we want to evaluate these new models to ensure they are right for our customers, we also decided to take this opportunity to evaluate a laptop that removes the NVIDIA graphics completely and only uses the Intel graphics that is integrated into the CPU.

How to Check ECC RAM Functionality

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ECC (error-correcting code) RAM is essential in servers and many workstations as it dramatically improves the reliability of the system’s memory. This is great, but we have learned that it is very difficult to verify that ECC is working correctly. In this article, we will go over three methods that we have found to at least semi-reliably show if ECC is working as it should.