Being a PC System Builder is EASY MONEY... right?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,462 words · ~7 min read
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becoming a pc system builder super easy
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right buy parts on new ag borrow a folding table from your mom
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download pirated Windows to save a buck and put an ad on craigslist i mean how
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could potential customers resist well like anything it's not as simple as it
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looks from the outside puget systems as workstations and gaming computers might
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not be obviously different from any
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other pc but i can pretty much guarantee that
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every one of you will see something inside their auburn washington
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headquarters that you weren't expecting
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our story begins well in the bathroom actually
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i mean what it's a long drive down here from vancouver
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so for real though any system starts with configuration we've all seen that
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stupid post on a forum with like a ten
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thousand dollar machine where you can tell that obviously it was just a list
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of all the most expensive components and every drop down on pc part picker glued
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together and then it's like hey guys is this good for gaming and
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it's just like yeah yeah it'll run crisis or whatever but in
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many cases it would actually be slower
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than a system that costs a fraction as much
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so in what they call the lab puget's
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technicians look at real-world workloads for their workstations like unreal
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engine unity autodesk and adobe premiere
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in after effects to determine what hardware hits the sweet spot for price
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to performance because as we discovered
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when we were trying to measure the benefits of 128 gigs of system RAM here
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reading outdated forum posts doesn't work as a way to configure a system i
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mean adobe after effects went from scaling across multi-CPU xeon systems
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three years ago to now puget just recommends you throw
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in a quad core and call it a day
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and with this knowledge puget designs the purpose-built systems that you can
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find on their site and trains their technology consultants so called because
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they don't get a commission for how much you spend
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and this is also where they find the weird bugs uh one new CPU was crashing
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after about 10 seconds in adobe premiere with the warp stabilizer effect enabled
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well it ended up being a motherboard issue that has since been fixed with a
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new BIOS that anyone can download and if
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you think that's cool it actually gets better instead of protecting all of
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their knowledge and keeping it behind closed doors puget publishes a ton of
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the work that they do in here through the article section of their website it
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was actually a puget article that helped me diagnose the unexpectedly poor video
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encoding performance on my 22 core xeon
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in this video here and today alone matt here released four
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articles about the after effects premiere and photoshop performance of
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skylake x versus threadripper so go check them out if you're a creative
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cloud user next stop the warehouse all
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the inventory that they need to smooth out delivery during periods of
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oh i don't know let's say high GPU demand due to mining get stored along
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this back wall here and if you appreciate simple professional
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design you'll feel right at home here there's a wonderful selection of black
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cases black power supplies black coolers
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and brown coolers with no RGB in sight
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and this cabinet looks
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already done so from there the inventory management
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and purchasing team picks out the components for each system and puts them
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into a bin for the assembly team
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every machine whether it's a basic gaming box a 3d animation workstation or
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a quad socket data crunching tower for scientific research gets hand built by a
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single technician who is responsible for adhering to puget's strict quality
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standards every screw needs to be tightened
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every port needs to be connected and while you won't find any
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hardline water cooled battle stations
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here they do adhere to strict standards when it comes to cable management all of
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this gets checked first by another tech then by qa in the hot room
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so called because even in the winter all the burn-in testing that they do in here
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keeps it pretty toasty how toasty exactly though well
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after being loaded up with an operating system and software that's specific to
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the type of workstation being built for validation at one of the two epic
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16 monitor battle stations in the very
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center of puget's facility each system
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gets its thermals measured through software at idle and full load using
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something like prime95 and fur mark as
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well as through hardware using a fleer
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thermal camera so any abnormal hot spots
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can be located and diagnosed it was
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actually partly puget's testing that determined that many reports of x-299
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motherboard vrm failures were being caused by accidental overclocking due to
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misconfigured turbo boost 3.0 profiles
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it's also in here that acoustics and system benchmarks are compared against
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an internal database of thousands of other systems to ensure that everything
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is behaving normally speaking from experience
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this next bit is one of the most difficult problems for any system
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builder to solve shipping pci slots were originally
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designed for cards that looked more like this
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not for the multi-pound copper monstrosities that are so common today
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that's why puget has their own laser cutter where they fabricate all kinds of
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things vanity plates for motherboards and aio liquid coolers this actually
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kind of sexy looking prototype case and
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perhaps most importantly all manner of support brackets for their
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systems the old way was to stuff them full of
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expanding foam but it turns out that customers would sometimes call them
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years later my system makes a ticking noise and it runs really hot what can i
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do and they'd be like oh uh you should take out the foam that's been in there
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all this time so with braces like this everything is ready to go out of the box
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with no intervention needed from the customer and they look kind of cool too
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every system is packed with care and
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comes with a little booklet chock full of information about puget's team tips
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for getting started like login instructions for Linux systems
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screenshots of the recommended bio settings benchmarks thermals and
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even uh
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baby photos of your new pc but
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don't think for a second that that last one is all about sentimentality it turns
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out that it's an invaluable troubleshooting tool if you call in like
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two years later wanting to put in another hard drive and they want to walk
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you through where to plug everything in
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which i guess brings us to tech support physically to tech support both phone
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support and physical upgrades and repairs are handled here in seattle by a
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team that's trained by the lab folks upstairs to be familiar each one of them
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with both basic hardware diagnosis and at least one software specialty like
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content creation engineering or scientific so if you call
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in chances are there will be someone who knows what you're talking about so at
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the end of the day we wouldn't do a sponsored piece like this with just any
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system builder because it's pretty easy for it to come across as an endorsement
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but we've known these guys for a long time and i'm actually okay with that
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the biggest thing is that puget isn't drinking their own
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kool-aid they don't pretend that their computer
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is made of some kind of magic that makes it perform better than an identical box
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that you built yourself with the same components and they don't refer to
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benchmarking components that work and
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assembling systems as engineering
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they believe that their value is right there in the mission statement that's
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vinyled on the wall and that's something that i can get behind
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit the like
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button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we
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featured at the link below also down there is our merch store which
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has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join there's probably also going to be a link to Floatplane which by the way we were
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joking we're joking he's working on Floatplane he doesn't work at puget
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let's just let's get that covered okay