AMD – Return of the King?

Back in 2015, we quietly dropped AMD processor options from our workstations. At the time, I wrote a post explaining what had happened, and ended it with a hope that AMD would come back someday with a more competitive CPU. That did, in fact, happen – and over the last couple of years we have seen them surge back into our product line with a vengeance!

Cool New Cooler

Here are Puget Systems our product qualification team is constantly looking at new components to make our workstations better. Noctua recently released their NH-U12A, which is similar to the NH-U12S we have been using in many of our builds… but actually is more than it seems, in multiple ways. Here is an inside look at how we evaluated this new cooler, and how it will change the systems we build going forward.

New CPU Announcement: AMD Ryzen 9 3950X

AMD has launched the top-end model in their 3rd gen Ryzen processor family, a 16-core processor named Ryzen 9 3950X! We’ve tested it across a wide range of real-world applications, and are very excited about being able to offer this CPU in our workstations after AMD releases it for sale November 25th, 2019.

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.