Titan X – What is it and who is it for?

NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX Titan X isn’t for everyone – no $1000 video card ever will be – but it has some very specific roles where it excels. Click here to read about what the Titan X is and what it does well at!

Minecraft Has Taken Over My Home

On the drive from the kid’s school to our home, we pass through a field of black lava formations on the outskirts of Santa Clara, UT. My daughter asked asked why the lava was black, and before I could say anything my son said, “The lava turns into obsidian when it comes in contact with water.”

Where did he learn that? Minecraft.

Our Favorite Games: Star Citizen / Arena Commander

There is a game in development I have been following for almost a year now, and which I am extremely excited about. For anyone who was into PC gaming back in the 90s, the genius behind the Wing Commander series of games and Freelancer has returned to the game scene, to create the ‘best darn space simulator ever’: Star Citizen. It is a very ambitious project, entirely crowd-funded, with almost $44 million raised so far from its fanbase. Because this game is being crowd funded, the development team has opened up to the game’s backers – giving information out in a consistent stream, and details that would normally only be delivered to a publisher that was funding the game. We are the publisher, in a sense, and getting to be this involved in the process of making a game is fascinating and engrossing to me.

Can you submerge a hard drive in mineral oil?

Ever since we started developing oil-submersion aquarium kits in 2007, we’ve been repeatedly asked if you can submerge the hard drive in the oil along with the rest of the components. Our answer has always been a yes for SSDs and a no for traditional platter hard drives. While we are very confident in our answer, we have never actually tested to see exactly what happens. So, to finally set the record straight we decided to take the plunge and dunk a hard drive into mineral oil.

Small Form Factor Gaming

Several months ago I set a challenge for myself, build a small form factor system with a low wattage power supply to play modern titles at decent video settings. The goal was to use a low profile video card, modern components, and keep things as quiet as possible.

Is Windows 8 Right For You?

Windows 8 launches this fall, on October 26th to be precise, and it is shaping up to be the most controversial Windows edition ever. Past versions like Vista and Millennium Edition were underwhelming, certainly, and others like Windows 95 and XP changed the face of Windows dramatically – but each new version has generally been an attempt to improve the user experience. Some focused on better performance, others on a newer and sleeker interface… and while there were both successes and failures Microsoft has managed to maintain dominance in the PC operating system market.

The latest version of Windows, however, has a lot more to it than just a shiny new taskbar or updated applications: it represents a shift in the whole interface from a traditionally mouse-centered approach to a touch-centric design. The last time that Microsoft tried to add an interface option to Windows was Media Center, which was introduced part-way through the life-cycle of Windows XP and brought a ‘ten foot’ interface designed for use in a living room. That was simply an added interface option on top of the normal Windows UI, though, while Windows 8 has completely removed large parts of the traditional interface that PC users have become accustomed to.

Our Favorite Games: MechWarrior Online

MechWarrior Online (often shortened to MWO) is an upcoming “free to play” action simulator, the latest game in the well known MechWarrior series which is in turn based on the BattleTech tabletop game and novels. For those familiar with the franchise the setting is going to put you right at home: you are a MechWarrior, piloting a 20-100 ton bipedal war machine called a BattleMech. The graphics and controls are greatly updated from previous games, the last of which was published more than a decade ago, but the core game-play is very similar.

The main difference from past games is that they tended to be single player, story-driven games – which had small, tacked-on multi-player game modes. MechWarrior Online lives up to its name in that it is all about online multi-player battles – there is no single player option, and no specific story line. Instead, the game is set within the BattleTech universe at a specific point in the established history. Time in the game’s setting is progressing in a 1:1 fashion with the real world: each day there are news announcements pertaining to events going on in the fictional future time period, and eventually this will be integrated into a meta-game where territory is actively fought over by players. That all has yet to be implemented, but should be a huge draw for both competitive gamers / groups and long-time BattleTech fans when it arrives.

Our Favorite Games: Heroes of Newerth

Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is a free-to-play Action Real-Time Strategy (ARTS)-style game loosely modeled after the classic Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III, and it’s currently one of my favorite games. ARTS games have a top-down view similar to an RTS (eg. Age of Empires, Warcraft, Starcraft) but emphasize single-unit development and de-emphasize base building. Each person starts with control of a single unit or ‘hero’, and often controls only that unit for the entirety of the game. Teams compete in 3v3 or 5v5 games usually lasting 30-60 minutes depending on game mode.

Our Favorite Games: World of Tanks

Welcome to the first in a short series of blog posts we will be doing here at Puget Systems. The theme of this series is our favorite games, and it will include posts about current and upcoming games which our employees are excited about. Hopefully our readers can learn about new games through these posts, and get a feel for the sort of system specs that run them well. First up: World of Tanks!

Gaming Computers: Its All About Balance

We sell all sorts of computers here at Puget Systems, and one of the more popular requests is for a gaming computer. In fact, we have designed one of our main brands around gaming – the Puget Deluge is an excellent system to consider for a gaming rig. Some gamers come to us already knowing what specs they want, but others are seeking more detailed guidance on what processor, video card, and other components to go with. The exact advice we give depends on the situation: the sorts of games they are interested in, the screen resolution they plan to run, their budget, and other preferences. However, a lot of that advice can be distilled down into the following basic principles.