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Adobe Flash 10.1 – Big News for Home Theater

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When we began development of our Echo PC, we quickly saw how NIVIDA ION would bring a new life to home theater PCs. The small form factor, low power draw, and near-silent operation are the perfect makings for a computer in the living room. As more content is put online, the PC is fast becoming a cheap alternative for home entertainment. But the strength of NVIDIA ION lies in the GPU, and applications that take advantage of GPU acceleration are anything but mature. In our testing, we found that ION was extremely well suited for DVD/BLU-RAY playback, and for Netflix. But Hulu — the final piece in the trio of current online entertainment — was not ready. Fullscreen playback was not acceptable on ION. We knew that NVIDIA and Adobe were working together on the problem. We waited.

New Website Design

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We’ve been hard at work over the past few months: designing, coding, testing, fixing. Although we’ve received lots of positive feedback on various functionality of the old site (configuration utility, order status updates, etc), we’ve also been less than pleased with the dated design and limited, navigational ability of the old design. What we’re unveiling today is the first step a vast improvement on top of what was already a great base.

Dedicated PhysX Comparisons

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A few years back, Ageia Technologies launched a product designed to help handle the increasingly complex physics calculations which were becoming popular in modern games. They named this product “PhysX”, and it was the worlds first dedicated physics card. Enthusiasts were excited, and many thought that this technology was set to be the next piece of essential hardware for enthusiast systems. We decided to independently test the Nvidia PhysX platform, and share our results.

Minor Hiccup on New Intel SSDs

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It seems like everyone has been excited about the recent release of Intel’s second-generation solid state drives (SSDs) this week. I am the proud owner of one of the first-gen models, and the idea that more affordable models will help more people to adopt this technology is just cause for celebration.

It came as quite a shock to me, then, when we were told to hold delivery of the drives to end-users this morning – just before our first shipment came in to the Puget warehouse.

Case Comparison: Antec P182 vs. P183

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There has been a lot of talk about whether or not the new Antec P183 is truly an improvement over the old Antec P182. The P182 has long been one of our favorite cases at Puget Systems, so there is some resistance to the P183 taking over the role as the flagship case in our lineup. The question is: is the P183 truly superior to the P182, or is the latest revision of the P180 series a step in the wrong direction?

Product Review: Cooler Master V8 Cooler

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At Puget Systems, we test hundreds of different computer components a year, and through this testing we constantly shape and improve our product line. In the past, we have kept the testing data internal to our company, but recently we have realized that we’re missing out on a large opportunity to help the public (and our customers) by publishing our findings. Why keep something internal if the data is useful to others? That being said, the Cooler Master V8 is the first of hopefully many product reviews by Puget Systems. We were looking for a CPU cooler to add to our line to provide a quieter cooler option for Core i7 CPUs. Does the Cooler Master V8 fit the bill?

Dealing with shipping damage

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You’ve probably seen that old scene a thousand times – some guy is putting the finishing touches on his house of cards or stack of dominoes, and then someone sneezes and ruins the whole thing. We have pretty much that same feeling we get when a brand new computer gets roughed up during shipment. Even though we analyze hardware with specific concern for safe shipping, test each component for proper installation, and use specially designed packing materials, sometimes we still see a damaged computer.

NVIDIA GTX 295: Bad choice for liquid cooling?

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I’ve always had a rocky relationship with dual GPU video cards. Our first bad experience was with the NVIDIA 7950GX2, which we found over time to suffer from higher shipping damage rates. The NVIDIA 9800GX2 was even worse. Now the NVIDIA GTX 295 is the major NVIDIA dual GPU card on the market. Are we set up for a repeat experience?