There has been a lot of talk about whether or not the new Antec P183 is truly an improvement over the old Antec P182. The P182 has long been one of our favorite cases at Puget Systems, so there is some resistance to the P183 taking over the role as the flagship case in our lineup. The question is: is the P183 truly superior to the P182, or is the latest revision of the P180 series a step in the wrong direction?
Product Review: Cooler Master V8 Cooler
At Puget Systems, we test hundreds of different computer components a year, and through this testing we constantly shape and improve our product line. In the past, we have kept the testing data internal to our company, but recently we have realized that we’re missing out on a large opportunity to help the public (and our customers) by publishing our findings. Why keep something internal if the data is useful to others? That being said, the Cooler Master V8 is the first of hopefully many product reviews by Puget Systems. We were looking for a CPU cooler to add to our line to provide a quieter cooler option for Core i7 CPUs. Does the Cooler Master V8 fit the bill?
Dealing with shipping damage
You’ve probably seen that old scene a thousand times – some guy is putting the finishing touches on his house of cards or stack of dominoes, and then someone sneezes and ruins the whole thing. We have pretty much that same feeling we get when a brand new computer gets roughed up during shipment. Even though we analyze hardware with specific concern for safe shipping, test each component for proper installation, and use specially designed packing materials, sometimes we still see a damaged computer.
Windows 7 Release Candidate – Awesome OS, free for 10 months!
Earlier this week Microsoft made public the release candidate for their next OS – Windows 7. It is available as a free download from them, which will be good until March of 2010 (with limited usability for a few months after that)… so like many other tech enthusiasts I downloaded it and gave it a spin.
NVIDIA GTX 295: Bad choice for liquid cooling?
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?
OS Trends Over Time: XP vs. Vista, 32-bit vs. 64-bit
This weekend, Puget Systems updated many of our preconfigured systems to default to Windows Vista 64-bit. This is in direct response to a dramatic increase in popularity of 64-bit over the last few months. As part of my research in making this call, I took a look at our operating system sales over the last few years. I found the data interesting, so I thought I’d share that data, as well as my thoughts!
Removing Instapak Foam
How to remove the Instapak Foam from your computer.
How accurate is ResellerRatings.com?
The website ResellerRatings.com has been around for a very long time, and is the de facto standard for checking out just about any online retailer in the industry. It provides a place for unbiased reviews of companies by people who have purchased in the past. However, in the last few years it has become increasingly easy to get a 9/10 score or better. Can the scores still be trusted, or has ResellerRatings.com become nothing more than a marketing platform? If so, how is that possible if the reviews cannot be affected by the companies being reviewed?
Are Extreme PCs Going Away?
On Monday, Jason Perlow at Tech Broiler wrote about a $16,000 PC we had built, which has recently been making its way around blog headlines. He commented that “Extreme PCs” are no longer relevant, and asked his readers whether these types of PCs, along with build-your-own homebrew PCs were going extinct. It’s been interesting to read through the reader comments, and I wanted to add some perspective of my own.
How SEO Built Our Business
This isn’t a normal thing for me to blog about, but I’ve had the desire recently to share more about Puget Systems behind the scenes: what makes us tick, what we value, and how we do things. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is something that we have been particularly strong at. I want to talk about the misconceptions about SEO that are out there, talk about why we are strong at it, and why I’m not worried about sharing these secrets to our competition!