Hardware

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.

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.

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?

Intel Core i7 Temperatures

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There has been quite a bit of talk recently about Intel Core i7 CPUs and what temperature they should be running. The Core i7 CPUs have a TDP of 130W, and run quite hot compared to the Core 2 Quad CPUs we’ve used in the past. How hot is too hot? A Google search shows that there is massive confusion and misinformation around the web. In the absense of good information, I decided to find out for myself. As an Intel Premier Provider, I talked to an Intel engineer, and am writing to tell you what I found.

The New Puget Office! – Construction Video

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I’m very happy to be writing this post from our new offices, where we have been operating now for two weeks. When we bought a new warehouse last May, I can honestly say I had no idea how much time and effort it would take to get the construction done and our company moved. Now that we’re done, I’m excited to be back and focusing on the business (not the building!). Having purchased this building, there are two messages I want to make sure to put out there…

Our experiences with memory manufacturers

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When it comes to memory manufacturers, we’ve been around the block…a few times. We’ve learned a lot in the process — too much to keep to ourselves! For each memory manufacturer we’ve used in the past, we have thousands of sticks of memory out in the field, and that gives us some good objective experience. I wanted to take a minute to comment on the various memory manufacturers we have experience with, share our stories, and to explain why we are standardizing on Kingston memory going forward.

The New Puget Office! – Tour #1

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It’s an exciting time at Puget! Due to increased sales and growth, we have outgrown our current facility. To meet the new demand for space, we purchased a new building in Auburn, WA.

To show off the new space and the progress that is being made during the build process, I will be taking my camera and shooting some video updates. The first one is found here. Be sure to keep checking back for new updates. Enjoy!

Corsair Power Supplies Revisited

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A few months ago, I wrote about why Puget Systems had decided to move towards Corsair power supplies (see post). I promised that I would write an update after some time had passed, with an update. I am happy to say that the power supplies have been everything we thought they would be!

We now have just under 400 computers out in the field being powered by Corsair power supplies. How many failures have we seen? One! We had one unit that would not power on, and that’s it. While I’m not sure we have a big enough sample for a definitive statement, that’s a 0.25% failure rate. That is ten times more reliable than any other power supply we’ve used! Of course, we’ll continue to closely watch them as time goes on.

A Look at Popular NAS Units

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Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been on my mind quite a bit in the last year. With the birth of my son last May, my wife and I are going crazy with our digital camera, and what used to be a nice and spacious hard drive is no longer adequate. What’s worse, we’ve found that video is a much better way to capture all the little things we want to remember, which probably increases our storage needs by a factor of 100!

On the business side, we’re encountering the same thing. As our company grows, the 200GB network share we all use for shared storage has become both too small, and dangerously difficult to back up. As we expand our website with more and more multimedia content, the need for “scratch space” has grown exponentially.

Both at home and at the office, we need more space, and we need a good level of protection from data loss. A NAS is a natural choice.