Becoming a PC system builder super easy right buy parts on Newegg
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' 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 there, Auburn
Washington headquarters that you weren't expecting
[Intro] Song: Lazlo Supernova
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 Crysis 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 technicians look at real-world workloads for their workstations like Unreal Engine
Unity, Autodesk and Adobe Premiere and 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 a 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Reading outdated forum posts doesn't work as a way to configure a system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 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
One new CPU was crashing after about 10 seconds in Adobe Premiere with the warp stabiliser 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
Oooo~
This cabinet looks
Alrighty then
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 strict quality standards.
Every screw needs to be tightened
every port needs to be connected and
While, you won't find any hard line
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 burning 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 Furmark as
well as through hardware using a FLIR 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
X299 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? Uhhh
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 to 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 BIOS settings
benchmarks thermals and
even ah
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. I'm actually ok 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 vinyl on the wall
And that's something that I can get behind
So thanks for watching guys if you dislike 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
It's probably also going to be a link to Float plane, 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