 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 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 $10,000 machine where you can tell that obviously it was just a list of all the most expensive components in 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's 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 Because as we discovered when we were trying to measure the benefits of 128 gigs of system RAM here, reading outdated forum posts doesn't work as a way to configure a system.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. 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 gets 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 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 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 Furmark, as well as through hardware using a FLIR thermal camera so any abnormal hotspots 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, 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 BIOS settings, benchmarks, thermals, and even 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 Float Plane, which by the way, we were joking. We're joking. He's working on Float Plane. He doesn't work at Puget. Let's just, let's get that covered, okay?