As we move more and more of our workstation systems to Xeon CPUs, we sometimes get asked why we are using server CPUs instead of the “faster” Core i7 CPUs. In this article we will be going over what makes Xeon E5 and Core i7 CPUs different and whether one is actually faster than the other.
With hundreds of CPU models available, it can be a daunting task to determine which CPU will give you the best performance in Lightroom. In this article we will be examining the multi-threading capabilities of Lightroom CC and Lightroom 6 to determine whether a CPU with a high frequency or a CPU with a high core count will give you the best possible performance.
With hundreds of CPU models available, it can be a daunting task to determine which CPU will give you the best performance in Photoshop. In this article we will be examining the multi-threading capabilities of Photoshop CC to determine whether a CPU with a high frequency or a CPU with a high core count will give you the best possible performance.
Despite Intel directing the Xeon processor line toward specific types of computers – primarily servers and workstations – there has been some confusion over when they are the appropriate choice versus a more mainstream processor. I’ve had gamers ask about Xeons because they thought they were more powerful, and likewise I have had businesses ask about running servers on Core i7 processors. So when does a Xeon make sense, and what do they really bring to the table?
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.
We recently published the article Multi-headed VMWare Gaming Setup where we used VMWare ESXI to run four virtual gaming machines from a single PC. The setup worked great and the article was very popular, but one limitation we found was that NVIDIA GeForce cards cannot be used as passthough devices in VMWare ESXI. We received feedback from some readers that GeForce cards should work in Linux with KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) so we set out to make a GeForce-based multiheaded gaming PC using Ubuntu 14.04 and KVM.
The first computer I purchased arrived at my home with two operating systems: DOS and Windows 3.1. Most full-fledged programs ran in DOS, including nearly every game in the early 1990s. Besides pool, the game I played most during my college years was called Links Golf which ran in DOS. Without Links I’m convinced my GPA would be at least a half grade higher. I offset my Links addiction by installing WordPerfect for DOS which allowed me to write reports from home instead of the school’s computer lab
Virtual desktops with NVIDIA GRID offer a great way to provide users with tons of computing performance without the need for each user to have their own individual PC. We took the time to setup and use a virtual desktop for a variety of applications to see if we think virtual desktops will be the future of computing or if they will simply be another niche technology.
The long-awaited dogfighting module for Star Citizen, dubbed Arena Commander, has been released to backers of the game in its pre-beta form. It only has a few ships, a pair of maps, and a handful of game modes at this point… but is it the first part of the Star Citizen game to really be playable. It is also the first chance we have to fly ships, seeing how the physics handle and how they look in their natural environment. A lot of people have been waiting many months for this, and many will be looking at performance of this module as a gauge to see whether their computers can handle Star Citizen.
Maya 2014 does not have any specific features or effects that are GPU accelerated, instead almost everything that looks 3D uses the GPU in some manner. You still need to balance a powerful video card with a good CPU and RAM combination, but the video card you use for Maya is an extremely important part of the performance equation. In this article, we will look at a number of workstation cards to see just how important a role the video card plays in the performance equation.