I took my Honda Odyssey into have its oil changed last week. Within a mile, I have a choice of no less than five quick lube and oil shops. My selection often comes down to which shop has the shortest wait time.
Big Enough
During a recent discussion with an engineer who was considering having us build him a workstation, he made a comment about our company: “You’re big enough, but not too big.”

OctaneBench 2019 Performance Preview
OTOY is nearing completion of OctaneBench 2019, the first version of their OctaneRender benchmark to support the new RTX technology in NVIDIA’s Turing-based GeForce and Quadro video cards. We will do a full performance roundup when OB 2019 is finished, but for now I wanted to put out a quick preview of the performance increase that RTX tech can bring to GPU rendering.

Intels Core Xperiment i9 9990XE
Intel launched a new processor in their Core X series recently, and it is novel in many ways. It combines a fairly high core count with very high clock speeds, at the cost of power consumption and high heat output. It also is very limited in availability, being offered only to select system integrators via a private auction. We got our hands on one in the first auction, and have been putting it through several rounds of benchmarking to see if it is worth the price and hassle, as well as to determine if we will be offering it in our workstations.
Creating vs. Consuming
One benefit that computers and the internet have brought to us is that they have made it easier than ever before to be creators.
Making a Connection with your Customer
Around Thanksgiving last year, I decided to take advantage of a sale at a popular online gaming company. After researching various titles I might enjoy, I settled on a game and purchased it through the store. The game installed fine, but wouldn’t allow me to start a new game.
I don’t have a lot of patience when it comes to troubleshooting games. Games should be a break from work. I enjoy a good RPG such as Diablo that I can play with my sons or daughters. When this new game wouldn’t launch, I searched Google for help, but after a few hours, I hadn’t made any progress.

NVIDIA RTX Graphics Card Cooling Issues
With the RTX series of GPUs, NVIDIA has moved to using dual fans as the standard cooling layout on their GeForce and Titan video cards. This is a big change from past generations and has even bigger implications for using NVIDIA graphics cards in multi-GPU workstations. Let’s look at what changed, what it impacts, and what can be done to work around it.

My 5 Favorite Tech Accessories of 2018
For the past five years, I’ve worked from home. At the end of each year, I like to go through my home office and clean and organize it to begin the new year. This is the time I clean out my computer, wipe down my monitors, and organize my desk and filing cabinet.
Graphite Pads vs. Thermal Paste: Which Is Better?
Rather than applying from a tube like thermal paste, graphite pads are sheets of material that you simply set on top of the CPU and throw on the heatsink. They work great, but unfortunately we found that they have issues if you try to reuse them multiple times.
High Expectations
A couple of years ago, a new restaurant opened for business in town. For anyone traveling into St. George from Las Vegas or Zion National Park, it is hard to miss because it’s situated the ledge which overlooks the town.




