Recently, a question came up in one of our department meetings: are video cards getting more or less reliable? There are times when it feels like video cards are failing left and right and we start to pine for the “good old days”. Then, we remember how hot Fermi cards used to run. To get a more accurate answer this question, we decided to examine our GPU failure logs and break down the numbers by generation.
A SED (or Self-Encrypting Drive) is a type of hard drive that automatically and continuously encrypts the data on the drive without any user interaction. In fact, many drives currently on the market are SEDs, although the majority of users do not know the benefits of a SED, let alone how to take advantage of those benefits.
At Puget Systems, we’ve been using LSI RAID cards for a number of years now and have always been very happy with the quality of both the controllers and the MegaRAID software. The new 9361-8i and 9341-8i RAID controllers from LSI continue in their predecessor’s footsteps but add PCI-E 3.0 support and the new mini-SAS HD SFF8643 12GB/s connector.
The End Of Support deadline for Windows XP quickly approaching, and many users do not have a very good understanding of what exactly this means. In this Q&A article, we want to answer what “end of support” actually means for all the computers out there that are still running Windows XP.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AMD’s new Radeon R9 290X includes a hardware switch that changes the card between two fan profiles called “Quiet” and “Uber”. The Quiet profile makes the card run quieter at the cost of performance, but we have found that online reviews show much less of a performance drop than we tested ourselves. In this article, we decided to expand our normal testing to discover what might be causing this discrepancy.
Many hardware sites have shown in the past that video cards do not show any performance decrease by running in x8 mode and cannot utilize the larger bandwidth provided by the latest Gen3 specification. However, video cards are getting faster and faster so we felt it this is still true. Also, with the gaining popularity of 4k displays, we also felt it was important to see if the PCI-E revision/speed would affect a video card’s performance at the much more demanding 4k resolution.
Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.
We provide:
Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money
Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting
Support that understands
your complex workflows and can get you back up & running ASAP
A proven track record
as shown by our case studies and customer testimonials
