Fresh out of college, I entered the workforce with a lot of enthusiasm, energy and the assumption that my education had taught me everything I needed to succeed. It didn’t take long for me to realize I had a lot to learn, and that began one morning when my first manager called me into his office.

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.

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.

Intel Announces New 9th Gen Core CPU Series
Today Intel has officially announced the launch of new mainstream desktop processors, including the first Core i9 branded chip for this market segment. We are testing these processors now, and are excited about what we have found so far, but cannot publish performance data until October 19th.

Not Just for Gaming: NVIDIA GeForce RTX Will Improve Workflows
NVIDIAs new GeForce RTX video cards have been all the talk lately. There is a lot of debate on the value that real time ray tracing brings to games, and some questions on how useful these cards will be to traditional ray traced renderers. With these cards becoming available for testing, and reviews starting to come in, many of these questions will be answered. However, there is an aspect to these cards that is often being overlooked: how the advances in real time ray tracing will dramatically cut down on production time before the rendering stage.

What Does the Launch of the GeForce RTX 20 Series Mean for the Future?
Like many of you, I was glued to my computer screen this morning during NVIDIA’s live-stream of the GeForce RTX 20 series launch. But what exactly was shown today, and what does it mean for the future of gaming, virtual reality, and other GPU-based applications?
The Storm That Is Fortnite
It’s been a few years since a game caught the interest of my family.
I worked in sales at Puget Systems when I began hearing customers mention a game called Minecraft. The simple, blocky nature of the game carried over to the hardware requirements. Minecraft didn’t require a high-end gaming rig. My three oldest couldn’t get enough of building homes, trying to stay alive and setting anything they could find on fire with lava.




