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What I Wish I Had Known

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As part of my job at Puget Systems, I speak with many of our customers at various stages of ownership that range from about a week to a couple of years. These customers often share feedback that we use to improve our products and services.

Occasionally customers share what they wish they had done differently when they were configuring their computers. I share this information with our sales team, and figured it might be helpful to those of you considering a new computer today.

So in the vein of “If I could do it all over again…” here are a number of items our customers would change if they could turn back time:

Can you game on an NVIDIA Quadro GPU?

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Workstation-class hardware like NVIDIA Quadro video cards tend to receive a really bad rap in the gaming community because the cost-to-performance ratio is not anywhere near as good as the GeForce cards that are designed and optimized specifically for gaming. Some have even gone to the point of claiming that you cannot play games on NVIDIA Quadro video cards at all! In this article we will examine the gaming performance of Quadro cards to see how they perform in a number of games.

Impact of Temperature on Intel CPU Performance

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While we all know that modern processors need active cooling, there is actually very little official information on how temperature affects a CPU’s performance. Do you really need a high-end liquid cooled setup to get peak performance, or is the little stock cooler that comes with most CPUs enough? In this article we will examine exactly how temperature affects CPU performance.

The Right Tool

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A few months ago my car wouldn’t start. I narrowed the problem down to the starter motor. After doing a little research online, I decided I could perform the repair myself. I ordered the motor and expected the replacement to take a couple of hours.

If you’ve ever replaced a starter engine, you know that getting to the starter is often the most time consuming part of the project. It didn’t take long to realize the tools I had on hand were not tailored for the job.

I’m a lot more comfortable around computers than I am cars. But I figured with detailed instructions in hand, I’d have my car up and running soon. That wasn’t the case.

5 Time-Saving Apps

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I love apps that save time, even just a few seconds on each use. Most of my day is spent writing so any tool that allows me to keep my focus on that activity earns a spot on my computer.

Over the years, I’ve test dozens of utilities that promised to save time, and I’ve found that very few have lived up to that promise. Many are either too complex, require too much administration or just don’t work the way they should.

But a few apps have withstood the test of time. These are the apps I use multiple times a day. A few of these I use a dozen or more times a day. The attribute each has in common is they save time.

Western Digital Green vs. Red Hard Drives

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WD Green drives have a long been a staple in our quiet systems. However, the NAS and RAID oriented Red drives have a few features that make them much more attractive while being just as quiet. In this article, we will go over the differences between Green and Red drives to show why we consider Red drives to be the better choice than Green drives in most quiet systems.

Intel Xeon E5 v3 Haswell-EP Buyers Guide

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The new Xeon E5 v3 Haswell processors are here, all 30+ of them! There is a bewildering variety of clock speeds, core counts, and power usage. There are processors in the new v3 familly ranging from the single socket E5-1620v3 with 4 cores at 3.5 GHz to the dual socket E5-2699v3 with 18 cores at 2.3GHz. How do you make a choice for a new system?!

How do these new processors perform when you programs parallel scaling is less than perfect?

First Impressions

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I recently had two experiences while shopping for groceries that I want to share. I do most of the grocery shopping for our family in the evenings when the crowds are lighter and the kids are in bed.

I decided to try the largest grocery store in the area. Inside is a deli, bank, pharmacy and coffee shop. This store is open 24 hours. I entered the store around 9 pm, grabbed a cart and made my way down the aisles. I was especially impressed with the bakery, but when I got to the produce area, I noticed most sections were covered with large tarps. It felt like a game of hide-and-seek trying to find the gala apples and seedless grapes, but I managed to find what I came for and headed towards the checkout stands.

Western Digital Black vs. RE Hard Drives

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Here at Puget Systems, almost half of the traditional hard drives we sell are Western Digital Black drives. However, the enterprise-class RE drives have many features that make them much more attractive, but are also more expensive. In this article, we will go over the differences between Black and RE drives to show why we consider RE drives to be the better choice than Black drives in most systems.