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Like a Spoiler on a Honda Civic

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On my way in to work today, I was passed by a small blue Honda Civic. It raced and weaved through traffic, sporting a bolt-on spoiler, and an exhaut pipe that made it sound more like a go-cart than a legitimate driving machine. I allowed myself my moment of sarcstic thoughts. “Really? Your Honda Civic gets around with such great velocity that you need a spoiler to keep your rear axle firmly planted??” Maybe I’m just getting old, but I looked at that vehicle and I didn’t see the style and power the installer may have intended. I saw immaturity and insecurity. This driver self-identified with performance and power. He didn’t have the right tool for the job, so he bolted on the parts.

Surviving CES

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Attending the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas reminds me of the years my grandfather took me to see the Ringling Bros. & Barnum Bailey Circus as a young boy. There was so much going on that it was difficult to concentrate on one display. It was also loud and crowded and occasionally didn’t smell quite right. But every now and then I saw something magical that I couldn’t wait to tell my friends about.

NVIDIA Small Form Factor PCs

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Powered by GeForce GTX gaming GPUs, GeForce Small Form Factor PCs mark a revolution in gaming performance-incredibly powerful, whisper quiet, and user friendly, in an unbelievably small and elegant design.

Xeon Phi Developers Starter Kit

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If you are thinking about getting a system for doing development work targeting the Intel Xeon Phi and you hesitated because of the additional cost of the Intel developer tools you would need then, you should get a system with the “Xeon Phi developers starter kit”. The savings on the Intel tools can completely offset the cost of the base system. It’s a serious bargain!

AMD A10-7850K Performance Review

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While new computer hardware is almost always faster than the models they are replacing, it is often hard to get through all the marketing talk to find out exactly how much better they are. For that reason, we are going to be comparing the performance of the A10-7850K to multiple CPUs and video cards. In addition, since the ability to use high frequency RAM is often cited as an important feature of the A-Series APUs, we will also be looking how much performance gain you actually will see by using high frequency RAM.

Most Reliable PC Hardware of 2013

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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.

NZXT Kraken G10 Review

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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.

Is CPU Base Frequency Still a Relevant Spec?

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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.

Money Alone Can Not Buy You PC Happiness

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At Puget Systems, we build extremely high end PCs each and every day. Some of our PCs are used as high powered workstations, where they are pushed to their limits every hour of every day. Others might be the expensive play-things for those of whom price is no object. Is there a such thing as a PC that is TOO high end?