Hot Hardware: Intel announced earlier in the week that they would be taking a huge hit to deal with the widespread Sandy Bridge flaw. Something to the tune of $1 billion or so. Many companies have been quick to react, assuring customers that all of their Sandy Bridge products will be covered under warranty. Now, Puget Systems is doing the same.
Maximum PC: Building quad socket workstations isn't new territory for Puget Systems -- the company's been offering such setups for several years now. However, the boutique builder just refreshed two of its models to offer more capacity, better cooling, and quieter operation. You can configure a Peak Quad Intel Xeon machine with up to 48 CPU cores and the Peak Quad AMD Opteron setup with up to 64 CPU cores.
Easily able to exceed some $100,000.oo++ [plus tax with some of these configurations)
These quad socket systems are very OS specific. One will most likely only run a certain Linux distros or very specific Windows OS version such as Windows Server. Installing any other OS that isn't quad socket compatible will only be a waste.
In most workstation situations a dual socket or single socket will be more than adequate. And for some users out there that have to consider expansion and upgrades, the choice of hardware compatibility (and drivers) is critical. I noticed some readers mention the Mac Pro.
All in all, quad socket systems are only oriented for very specific uses and with very specific OSes. Add on top of that driver support. Best left for people with very deep pockets, budgets and very specific goal oriented computer uses.
Well interestingly enough, Mac Pros are the only computer Apple offers that is actually very hard to build something for the same price that's better. At least if you went to Newegg and started plopping down the parts.
Otherwise, compute wise I think the Mac Pro beats Puget's base system, since all it has for a GPU is a GeForce GT 610.
Man, I remember seeing one of pudget's systems on youtube one time with four water-cooled Opterons. I can only imagine the workload you'd néed to have one of these for...
Also, the trashcan pro can suck it!
Maximum PC: Here we are more than a year after the release of Windows 8 and it still remains a hot topic. The points of consternation among its critics are that Microsoft overhauled the user interface with a focus on touch computing, and then added insult to injury by removing the Start button and Start menu (the Start button has since returned, but without the handy menu). Nevertheless, it's a faster and more secure operating system than Windows 7. What's a user to do? Well, if you're buying a rig from boutique builder Puget Systems, you can have the company give Windows 8 a makeover so that it essentially feels like Windows 7.
Maximum PC: Boutique system builder Puget Systems recently wrote an interesting piece that both gives readers a glimpse of what the company found to be the most reliable hardware of the past year, and makes a case for buying a prebuilt system over going the do-it-yourself (DIY) route. Based on Puget's own data, a prebuilt system is roughly five times less likely to have a hardware failure than one you built yourself.
