becoming a pc system builder super easy
right buy parts on new ag borrow a folding table from your mom
download pirated Windows to save a buck and put an ad on craigslist i mean how
could potential customers resist well like anything it's not as simple as it
looks from the outside puget systems as workstations and gaming computers might
not be obviously different from any
other pc but i can pretty much guarantee that
every one of you will see something inside their auburn washington
headquarters that you weren't expecting
our story begins well in the bathroom actually
i mean what it's a long drive down here from vancouver
so for real though any system starts with configuration we've all seen that
stupid post on a forum with like a ten
thousand dollar machine where you can tell that obviously it was just a list
of all the most expensive components and every drop down on pc part picker glued
together and then it's like hey guys is this good for gaming and
it's just like yeah yeah it'll run crisis or whatever but in
many cases it would actually be slower
than a system that costs a fraction as much
so in what they call the lab puget's
technicians look at real-world workloads for their workstations like unreal
engine unity autodesk and adobe premiere
in after effects to determine what hardware hits the sweet spot for price
to performance because as we discovered
when we were trying to measure the benefits of 128 gigs of system RAM here
reading outdated forum posts doesn't work as a way to configure a system i
mean adobe after effects went from scaling across multi-CPU xeon systems
three years ago to now puget just recommends you throw
in a quad core and call it a day
and with this knowledge puget designs the purpose-built systems that you can
find on their site and trains their technology consultants so called because
they don't get a commission for how much you spend
and this is also where they find the weird bugs uh one new CPU was crashing
after about 10 seconds in adobe premiere with the warp stabilizer effect enabled
well it ended up being a motherboard issue that has since been fixed with a
new BIOS that anyone can download and if
you think that's cool it actually gets better instead of protecting all of
their knowledge and keeping it behind closed doors puget publishes a ton of
the work that they do in here through the article section of their website it
was actually a puget article that helped me diagnose the unexpectedly poor video
encoding performance on my 22 core xeon
in this video here and today alone matt here released four
articles about the after effects premiere and photoshop performance of
skylake x versus threadripper so go check them out if you're a creative
cloud user next stop the warehouse all
the inventory that they need to smooth out delivery during periods of
oh i don't know let's say high GPU demand due to mining get stored along
this back wall here and if you appreciate simple professional
design you'll feel right at home here there's a wonderful selection of black
cases black power supplies black coolers
and brown coolers with no RGB in sight
and this cabinet looks
already done so from there the inventory management
and purchasing team picks out the components for each system and puts them
into a bin for the assembly team
every machine whether it's a basic gaming box a 3d animation workstation or
a quad socket data crunching tower for scientific research gets hand built by a
single technician who is responsible for adhering to puget's strict quality
standards every screw needs to be tightened
every port needs to be connected and while you won't find any
hardline water cooled battle stations
here they do adhere to strict standards when it comes to cable management all of
this gets checked first by another tech then by qa in the hot room
so called because even in the winter all the burn-in testing that they do in here
keeps it pretty toasty how toasty exactly though well
after being loaded up with an operating system and software that's specific to
the type of workstation being built for validation at one of the two epic
16 monitor battle stations in the very
center of puget's facility each system
gets its thermals measured through software at idle and full load using
something like prime95 and fur mark as
well as through hardware using a fleer
thermal camera so any abnormal hot spots
can be located and diagnosed it was
actually partly puget's testing that determined that many reports of x-299
motherboard vrm failures were being caused by accidental overclocking due to
misconfigured turbo boost 3.0 profiles
it's also in here that acoustics and system benchmarks are compared against
an internal database of thousands of other systems to ensure that everything
is behaving normally speaking from experience
this next bit is one of the most difficult problems for any system
builder to solve shipping pci slots were originally
designed for cards that looked more like this
not for the multi-pound copper monstrosities that are so common today
that's why puget has their own laser cutter where they fabricate all kinds of
things vanity plates for motherboards and aio liquid coolers this actually
kind of sexy looking prototype case and
perhaps most importantly all manner of support brackets for their
systems the old way was to stuff them full of
expanding foam but it turns out that customers would sometimes call them
years later my system makes a ticking noise and it runs really hot what can i
do and they'd be like oh uh you should take out the foam that's been in there
all this time so with braces like this everything is ready to go out of the box
with no intervention needed from the customer and they look kind of cool too
every system is packed with care and
comes with a little booklet chock full of information about puget's team tips
for getting started like login instructions for Linux systems
screenshots of the recommended bio settings benchmarks thermals and
even uh
baby photos of your new pc but
don't think for a second that that last one is all about sentimentality it turns
out that it's an invaluable troubleshooting tool if you call in like
two years later wanting to put in another hard drive and they want to walk
you through where to plug everything in
which i guess brings us to tech support physically to tech support both phone
support and physical upgrades and repairs are handled here in seattle by a
team that's trained by the lab folks upstairs to be familiar each one of them
with both basic hardware diagnosis and at least one software specialty like
content creation engineering or scientific so if you call
in chances are there will be someone who knows what you're talking about so at
the end of the day we wouldn't do a sponsored piece like this with just any
system builder because it's pretty easy for it to come across as an endorsement
but we've known these guys for a long time and i'm actually okay with that
the biggest thing is that puget isn't drinking their own
kool-aid they don't pretend that their computer
is made of some kind of magic that makes it perform better than an identical box
that you built yourself with the same components and they don't refer to
benchmarking components that work and
assembling systems as engineering
they believe that their value is right there in the mission statement that's
vinyled on the wall and that's something that i can get behind
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like
button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
featured at the link below also down there is our merch store which
has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
join there's probably also going to be a link to Floatplane which by the way we were
joking we're joking he's working on Floatplane he doesn't work at puget
let's just let's get that covered okay