Matt Bach, Puget Systems, How to Build an Awesome PC

January 5, 2020 Technology 00:54:24 0 Comments

Puget Systems is based in Seattle and specializes in building high quality, custom-built desktops, workstations, and servers. OWC Radio Host, Cirina Catania, talks to Matt Bach, Senior Labs Technician, for an in-depth conversation about the latest trends in computing and how to get the perfect hardware for your workflow.

Puget Systems emphasize customization with a laser focus on understanding each customer’s specific needs and offer personal consulting and support that they believe is becoming quite rare in the industry. Puget Systems’ goal is to provide each client with the best possible computer for their needs and budget.

We spoke about building PC’s for video production, gaming and other high-end needs!

For more information, please visit: https://www.pugetsystems.com/

For more information on OWC, see below and visit MacSales.com to find your perfect workflow solution!

For more about our host, Cirina Catania, visit cirinacatania.com.

If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and tell all your friends about us! We love our listeners. And, if you have ideas for segments, write to OWCRadio@catania.us. Cirina is always up for new ideas!

In This Episode

  • 00:32 – Cirina introduces Matt Bach, senior lab technician of Puget Systems.
  • 05:53 – Cirina asks Matt the common causes of Premiere Pro crashing on PCs.
  • 10:37 – Matt describes the competition of Intel and AMD when it comes to CPU performance.
  • 16:24 – The things you have to consider in building your system unit based on your work demands.
  • 23:02 – Matt’s recommendation for an essential and sufficient CPU for general use. 
  • 28:27 – What is the difference between a CPU and a GPU?
  • 33:03 – What are the advantages of upgrading your SSD, and what is the most recommended brand? 
  • 41:40 – Matt shares Puget System’s interesting clients and partners they work with.
  • 46:20 – How can Puget Systems help you make your computer a fit to your workflow needs and preferences.
  • 53:22 – Visit Puget Systems’ website pugetsystems.com to check out how you can make your own machine.

Jump to Links and Resources

Transcript

This is Cirina Catania with OWC Radio. I have been talking with Matt Bach at Puget Systems is their senior labs technician. And he has written lately this amazing series of technology articles that caught my eye, and I think I want to get real geeky with him for a minute. Sit back, relax and listen in as we kind of do a deep dive into what you need to do and what you need to look for when building the best computer for the type of work you do. Before we really get into that, Matt, can you tell our listeners, what is Puget Systems? Where are you? What do you do? And who do you do it for?

Yeah, so Puget Systems is a workstation manufacturer. So we build computers, and we’ve been around for close to 20 years, we’re just south of Seattle. So we’re in a big tech hub near Amazon, and Microsoft and all those kind of guys. And yeah, we really focus on high-performance workstations, but at the same time workstations that just work. There’s a lot of companies out there that really push the overload like really, really push the overload and get into like overclocking and crazy parts that they put into their computers. And we take things a little bit step back, we’re a lot more about reliability, stability, and just getting the exact right components for what you’re doing. I mean, like you mentioned like we do all these hardware articles. And that’s not just for fun, it’s because that’s what we actually need to do ourselves in order to figure out like, oh, what processor should we sell for a Premiere Pro user, or a DaVinci Resolve user, or After Effects user because they all act just a little bit differently.

So how long have you been at the company?

I’ve actually been here for going on 17 years, I believe. My brother is actually the company president. So he started it in our parent’s garage, and I got involved pretty early, well, I was still in high school. So I’ve been through quite a few different architecture changes and processor launches and software updates. And it’s been really fun to see how things have changed.

We all get software updates every now and then. When it comes to major updates, make sure you don’t move to a major update without at least completing the minor ones first. Click To Tweet

I love this, you were in our booth at NAB this past April, and it was fun to watch you guys working. And Larry O’Connor, who owns OWC started out when he was 15 I believe it was in his garage. So these garage stories are kind of fun, there are some brilliant people sitting in garages. I actually was thinking about you guys this morning because I’m in the middle of a move, and I’m building a studio in the garage. And so we’re gonna have a lot in common within the next month. So let’s talk for a minute about some of these articles that you’ve written, I see a couple here. What is the best CPU for video editing, and what is the best CPU for photography? How are they different, and why are they different?

Yeah, so actually, these are a little bit unusual of articles for us. Usually, we don’t have it quite so broad even as this as video editing and photography. Then we have other ones coming soon for, more like 3D or game dev. Normally, we actually dial it all the way down to the specific application, so it’s like, how does this processor perform in Premiere or After Effects or Resolve? And it’s because each one of these applications is just a little bit different from how Premiere Pro is going to use your system. It’s just a little bit different than After Effects and, I mean, they’re both made by Adobe, they both do similar things, but if you were just to take a normal video clip, same clip and pop it into one of those applications versus another, it’s still going to use your computer differently. So the right parts really come down to not just like what you do, if you are a video editor, what applications are you using? And then you can dive in even deeper and get down into like, what codecs are you using because, again, how it uses the computer is different, even depending on your codec.

I’ve never thought about that. To be honest with you, I go to the store, buy a computer, add stuff to it, and increase the memory. But I’m primarily Mac-based, so you guys are PC based.

Yeah. Well, and I think we have a very similar philosophy, I think to Apple, I mean, Apple is all about, it’s computers that just work. And that’s really what we try to follow as well. It’s obvious we’re on the Windows side. There’s more choice on the Windows side, and if you’re buying a MacBook or the new Mac Pro from Apple, you don’t have as many options on CPU. So usually you’re going to spend more money, you’re going to get better performance. But as soon as you move over to PC, now it’s no longer, you’ve got a handful of CPUs to choose from, now you’ve got hundreds, and it’s across both Intel and AMD, but they both make bunches and bunches of CPU. So how do you figure out which one is actually going to be right for you? And so that’s why we have to do all this testing to really just figure it out because so many of these products like even if there are already reviews out there from those great review sites like Tom’s Hardware, Antec, and a whole bunch of others, but they oftentimes are going to focus on gaming. And if After Effects and Premiere Pro, use the processor differently, just think of how much different something like gaming is going to be compared to Premiere.

That’s really interesting because when I was using PCs back in the day, the only name of the game for CPUs was Intel. And the benchmark we used to use was, if it was good for gaming, it’s probably good for what you’re going to use it for because gamers always had the best of everything. So I think that what has happened, tell me if I’m wrong, is that video editing has gotten much more specific. And like you’re saying, you need to really think about the application. So let’s talk about Premiere Pro for a minute because I have heard a lot of people having trouble with it stuttering or disconnecting on them. What causes that? And is that perhaps they’re using the wrong CPU? What what would cause that?

Usually, things like stability when you have problems, it’s usually either one of two things, and sometimes the latest versions of the software don’t have all the bugs worked out. We usually advise people don’t ever move to a major update, wait until that first at least minor updates after that. So sometimes, it’s just that, and sometimes, especially on the PC side, it can be hardware issues. A lot of the people that we work with are at least new customers to us, they have existing computers from other brands, or maybe they built them themselves, and it’s often just little things that they don’t get exactly right that can cause more instability than people expect. And it’s not usually like the CPU, it’s usually things like the power supply, or the speed of the memory they are using is too fast for the CPU that they ended up deciding to put into the computer. So it’s not usually the major things that determine whether the system is gonna be stable or Premiere is going to crash more often, it’s those little details. And those are really hard to figure out as someone who’s like a DIYer or who is going and buying a computer from I don’t even know like a mom and pop store down the street because they want to support local business. But you never know whether they have gotten all those little details right. And like you said before like that’s one of the things with Apple that’s so great is, you know that it’s going to be consistent quality and the hard thing with PC side is you need to find those companies that are going to put an emphasis on things like reliability and stability, rather than trying to get an extra one or 2% performance because at the end of the day, if you’re going to be playing back sequence in Premiere Pro and you’re getting 48 FPS versus 47 1/2 are you going to notice? No, but you’re going to notice the Premiere crashes. 

Selling a physical product is just one part of our business. What’s bigger than that is we provide help and service.

Yeah, you are. You talk about in this one article about the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. I love it when there are all those numbers after the names. Panasonic does that with their cameras, and I can never remember what cameras work, there are so many numbers after the camera, but okay. Talk about the AMD Ryzen, how is that different from the previous versions of the AMD CPUs so we can get super nerdy here depending on how long you want to talk. I’m really curious, and you know what, while I have, I am totally going to take advantage of your brain.

Okay. So right now is superduper interesting actually, because for years and years and years Intel has been dominant when it comes to pretty much everything on the CPU side, whether you’re gaming or a video editor, photographer, it was pretty much just Intel. And then a couple of years back, AMD started to make some really good improvements to their products. And I would say that, even a couple of months ago, it was often AMD and Intel were kind of on par, which then usually on like a workstation, you would still go with Intel, because like the platform is more established. Other little things that they have like Thunderbolt can be officially certified on Intel platforms but not on AMD. So there are just these little things that push you towards Intel. So AMD still like there’s a lot of enthusiasts and DIYers who went AMD, but mostly on the workstation side, you went Intel. But now, with these latest processors from AMD, they have two different lines, they have their Ryzen line and then their Threadripper line. The Ryzen line is more consumer-based, and then the Threadripperline is more geared towards, like high-performance computing, just really beefy kind of workstations. And they made some really, really, really nice improvements in this last generation. And some of these products just launched very recently. And so we’re starting to see now that if you go through what is the best CPU for video editing and photography, you’ll see that it’s almost always that there’s at least 50% in AMD then about 50% Intel. So it’s very interesting right now because there’s a choice, it’s no longer buy this one thing, and you’re good. Now as well, you could buy that one, and there are pros of A, B, and C, or you can buy A and D, and then there are pros of C, D, and E. And that’s great for most people, I mean, the fact that there’s competition is always good because they’re now going to be competing on price. They’re going to be competing on getting the latest technology out. But it does again, the part thing with PC is choice already, and now we’ve effectively doubled the number of CPUs that could be good for you. So it’s exciting because it’s helping everything. But it’s also a little, and I don’t want to say frustrating for us, because it’s not, it’s exciting. But it makes it a little bit difficult for us. Okay, what is the right processor for you? Because now we can’t just say, okay, you want to have Intel and then okay, more expensive is going to give you more performance, and we just have to figure out whether that increase in price is worth the increase in performance for them. Now, it’s, we got to go either way.

It’s great that competition is as great as it is because brands are now competing on price. That’s a huge advantage for the consumer. Click To Tweet

Well, it’s kind of like, the specs are kind of like dominoes. You pick one thing, and then that’s gonna affect things like the cooler and the motherboard and what kind of RAM you put in, right?

Yes, absolutely. And there’s a certain point where also things like your video card, I mean, video cards are being used more and more to actually do some of the heavy liftings. And a lot of these applications, like in Premiere Pro, they list all of the GPU accelerated effects is what they called, it’s got a little icon in the effects panel, it’s like a little play with three lines or something, it’s kind of hard to explain over talking. But so each one of those effects will use the video card, and it’s things like Lumetri color. It’s now offloaded onto the video card, and a lot of blurs are being done on the video card now, and that takes a load off of the CPU. And so it’s a balancing act even now. So there’s a certain point where you can get a more powerful video card, but it’s not going to do anything for you because the CPU is your bottleneck. So now it’s not only pouring all your budget into the CPU, now it’s pour most of your budget into the CPU, but you have to really make sure that also the video card is up to snuff for what you’re doing.

Well, this is like walking into a restaurant. You have ever been to a restaurant like- what restaurant is that- where you walk-in, and got this ten-page menu, and by the time you start ordering your lunch, you’re confused. There’s a lot of moving pieces to all of this. I like that you guys do a lot of benchmark testing, and you put the results up. So those of you who are listening if you’re near a computer go to pugetsystems.com. But if we go to the homepage landing page for Puget, you’ll see some of the benchmark testings on each of these articles.

And there’s a filter down the left side, so you can if you just want to see the articles that deal with Premiere Pro, you can see those. A lot of our benchmarks we actually allow people to download. So at the moment, as we’re recording this, actually Puget for Photoshop is the top article, and that is actually linking to our benchmark for Photoshop so you can download it and run it on your own system. And then you can compare the results on your system to what we put into our articles, and we’re trying to do that because I mean, us having our own information is great, and we publish it is great. But seeing how these latest 10, or 20, CPUs from Intel and AMD compared to each other doesn’t really tell you how much faster is going to be compared to your existing computer. And there’s really no way for us to do that effectively, except by putting a benchmark out there. Now you can run it on your computer. And we’re really trying really hard to make these accessible to people and make them cross-platform. So some of them are Windows only at the moment. But a lot of them work on Mac, our Photoshop benchmark premiere After Effects, those three all work on Mac now and we’re trying to get more and more of them to work on Mac as well because I mean, computers, whether it’s a Mac or a PC, it’s all just a tool to let you do what you want to actually do, and it’s finding the right tool for the job. And performance isn’t the only thing that goes into that decision, but it’s definitely a big part. So knowing how different computers will perform, whether it’s Mac or PC or what really helps. You make those educated decisions because a lot of these computers are very, very expensive. And if you’re gonna be dropping $5,000-$10,000 on a computer, you want to know what you’re getting. 

Absolutely. I like that you have the benchmarks available for Photoshop, Lightroom Classic, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and DaVinci Resolve, among others, because we bounce between all of those programs when we’re working creatively. So it’s kind of nice to see if you plug those in and you run them. I’m assuming that if you do, I will go in here and I would do Photoshop, and I do use Premiere Pro occasionally, I’m just not as conversant in it, but I would do Photoshop Premiere Pro, After Effects and DaVinci and run each of those just for fun and kind of see what the numbers are telling me about what’s under the hood. This is really cool. The holidays are coming up, so people are gonna be buying new equipment. And that’s another reason I wanted to talk to you guys because you really are the experts, plus for me, it’s fun to talk to people who work on the PC side because I’m not as current on that. So talk to me about how 4K,6K, 8K, and I know everybody talks about this on a creative level. And we talk about how much memory you need, how much processing speed you need, and how much storage you need. On your side of things, when you’re putting these systems together for people, what kind of things are you looking for? So say, if I told you Okay, I’m making a film for Netflix, and then we’re shooting it in 8K, what other questions would you ask me in order to build a system for me, that would really work great?

So actually, the first thing usually that our consultants would ask because I mean, we have configuration things on our site that you can go in and configure things yourself. But almost always, we actually want to talk to people because of exactly what you’re asking here like what are the things we would ask. The first thing I would actually ask is well what kind of camera are you shooting. Because a lot of 8K people are using RED cameras and RED cameras, they actually really heavily use the video card because they’re shooting RED raw and the debayering process, turning the raw sensor data into usable video is all done on the video card, and then moving even more stuff to the video card soon, too. So, someone who’s using RED, we would probably actually turn down the CPU a little bit to stay within their budget. Then, give them a beefier video card, normally a really high-end video card, something like an Nvidia 2080 Ti, which is somewhere around $1,000. Usually, that’s not actually going to be that math much faster in Premiere or After Effects than a video card that’s half the price, except when you’re using something like RED because of all that debayering being done on the video card. So you really want to make sure you’ve got a beefy GPU for that. So that would be one of the first things we ask is just like what codec are you using. 8k isn’t quite enough, so once we figure that out, it does come down to a lot of details. And actually, where I like to start is not even on kind of fun things like what CPU should buy, almost always, it starts with what I kind of call the foundation thing. So it’s how much storage do you need, and how fast the storage has to be, Like with 8K, you should really have an SSD, a solid-state drive for you to store all your media on. And then after that, figuring out how much and that’s different for everybody. I mean, do you need a day’s worth of footage stored? Are you only recording things in chunks? Or is it going to be days and days and days with multiple cameras, in which case you should probably look into like network-attached storage. But once you figure that out, there are some simpler things that we can do like you said 8K, and then we can figure out how much RAM you need. And for us with RAM, so RAM is system memory. It’s a temporary storage, and we usually say for 8K, we’d want to use 128 gigs of RAM. And then you can have that for 4K, to 64 gigs, and if you’re only doing HD, you can go all the way down to 32 gigs. But 8K definitely needs a lot of RAM. And with storage and RAM figured out, that’s kind of again those foundational things you need to have that, or it doesn’t matter how powerful your CPU is going to be. But then after that, then you can get kind of more fun things. GPU is usually fairly straightforward. If you’re using RED, you go with a fairly high-end GPU, if you’re not, well, then you just need to have a video card that has enough video memory. So memory that’s built into the video card to handle the footage that you’re using. And then the CPU is where you can really dial in because there’s a lot of granularity in CPUs these days, like $150 price jumps between models, and like we said before between Intel and AMD. But usually, for something like 8K, we would make one of two recommendations, they would either be the Intel X series from Intel or the AMD Threadripper. And what’s interesting is actually because AMD just launched the Threadripper CPUs recently and they are absolutely amazing, like insanely amazing versus the previous generation, Intel actually cut the price of their X series CPUs in half. So that changed up a lot of what we recommend. Intel is no longer the more expensive but more powerful option Now, they are a little bit less expensive and almost as powerful option. So it’s almost been flipped on its head recently.

Our end goal is to let you get your work done however that has to happen.

Yeah, that’s called competition, right?

Yeah. Which is great. It’s good for everyone. I mean, the fact that Intel could cut their price in half just tells us a lot of what we need to know about how much margin they have built into those products before and how much they feel they have to make those price cuts in order to stay competitive.

He talked about the RED camera, what about if you’re shooting 8k on the Sony?

So I believe Sony’s, they shoot in H265 or HD VC, and that’s true for most other cameras. I believe, too, that there’s a handful of 8K ones out there. I think they all do HD VC is how they record. And honestly, that’s really, really, really tough. I mean, H264, or H265 is not an editing codec, it’s going to be really bad on anything. We actually, as part of our Premiere Pro benchmark, we have an 8K H265 test, and nothing we can throw at it is going to have it be at all reasonable. So for those kinds of cameras, something with either a proxy workflow or a transcoding workflow, is just what you have to do. And so that point, what you’re looking for is the type of system that’s going to be able to transcode that as fast as possible. So you can either get those transcoded files or proxies built faster as quickly as possible, because like, that’s not an optimal workflow. I mean, ideally, you just want to drop your footage in and go. But it’s necessary in those cases, kind of a harkening back to the days where that was the way you did everything. I think Avid still even recommends that they recommend transcoding most things to DNS.

It’s funny because I do hear editors talking still using the terms offline and online, and I think the 2020 equivalent is proxies and full-res, that’s interesting. When I pick a camera, I pick it for the look, and I pick it for reliability. And from the DP standpoint, I’m not really thinking about things like the computer systems that my editors are going to be using. I just assume that whatever computer they have is going to be perfect for what I need. So this is really interesting to me. So I love the benchmark. What about compatibility? If they come to you and they’re running Premiere Pro, and they want to do some Photoshop work, they’re like a generalist. Is there something that is sort of almost an entry-level version of all of this? 

A lot of it comes down to budget. The cool thing is now, with these latest CPUs. I guess it takes us back about a year or two years ago, there were times where if you bought this CPU, specifically from AMD, typically it is really good at some things, but it’s really bad at other things. And the cool thing is right now with these latest models, you no longer really have that you have CPUs that are really good at some things, and pretty good at other things. So you no longer are giving up a whole bunch. And so the nice thing is that now, you can’t make a super terrible decision on a lot of things, so a lot of it will come down to budget and how much you have to spend. You did mention entry, though, I would say for a lot of entry-level systems. The AMD Ryzen stuff is really, really terrific for a lot as it’s not always the exact right choice. One of the main reasons we actually stick with Intel when AMD and Intel are close is that until the motherboards have certified Thunderbolt support, we do a lot of work with people who have mixed Mac and PC workflows. So they’ve got some systems on Mac, some systems on PC, and when you’re dealing with Mac Thunderbolt is huge. So many people have just tons of external drives that are on Thunderbolt or tons of extra other devices, and being able to use those devices still on PC is a major benefit. So there is definitely a reason to go with what’s called the Intel Core 9th Gen CPUs, but for a lot of people that don’t have that Thunderbolt need these Ryzen CPUs from AMD are just really really solid options.

It’s more convenient for a lot of people today because there's a lot of options in the market. It's no longer buy this one thing, and you're good. Click To Tweet

Well, I think a lot of us because of the storage solutions that we’re using a lot of companies are going to Thunderbolt 3. I have a question that’s completely off the wall. How do you go from a piece of hardware that is Thunderbolt 3, with no option to daisy chain it? How do you downgrade it to Thunderbolt 2 or another version that runs on an older version of Thunderbolt? I have that problem. I have a couple of things that are new that I absolutely love and they’re SSD drives, and they’re enclosed, and they have a thunderbolt 3, connection that’s a male Thunderbolt 3, I have not been able to find a female Thunderbolt 3, to male, Thunderbolt 2.

There should just be Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapters. 

No. I have them and that they go. They’re made to upgrade from 2 to 3. But I cannot find a cable that will downgrade from three to two using a male. Anyway, think about that because I will call you again in about a week and maybe you’ll have the answer. And if you could find the answer to that, you will be our hero because several of us are looking for this. We can’t find them.

Yeah, I can ask our service staff probably. 

Yeah. And they say well, go to Apple and just buy their Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2. Well, they do not understand that what I have is I have a male Thunderbolt 3, that I need to connect to a female Thunderbolt 3 with a male Thunderbolt 2 on the other end. So I’m going downhill, not uphill.

I’m sure it exists, it should because one of the nice things with Thunderbolt as far as storage goes is it’s actually pretty direct to the what is called as the PCIe lanes on the motherboard. It’s like what your video card actually attaches through. It’s actually using that same interface just externally. So it shouldn’t have any problems downgrading, so it should just be a matter of finding the exact right adapters.

Yeah, I don’t know that people are making these cables because they just assume that once you go up, you’re just gonna stay there. But I have a lot of older equipment that I have a lot of 20 to 24TB RAIDS that have information and media on them that I need, and I can’t run them. That’s a very selfish question, but I’m the host.

We get a lot of questions about Thunderbolt, and those kinds of things are honestly why we are here. The computers we sell is the physical product, and like we put a lot of work into making sure it’s exactly the right thing, it’s stable, and it’s going to be reliable. But a lot of the value of a company like us is the fact that we are here to help you with those things. We’re here to help you figure out what Thunderbolt adapter you should be using. We’re here if Premiere keeps crashing, and you’ve gone to Adobe support and haven’t gotten an answer. Our end goal is to let you get your work done however that has to happen. 

For people listening in who may not know, what is the difference between a CPU and a GPU?

Probably the best way to describe it is to go back in time a little bit. Ten or 15 years or so ago, we still had CPUs and GPUs, and they were very specific about what they did, and the CPU does all like the number crunching. So pretty much anything like you was going to transcode a file in Premiere Pro or add an effect that’s using the CPU to actually do all the calculations behind the scenes to actually render those effects. The GPU, all it did was it took that information, and it drew it onto your monitor. So that’s all it is. So the CPU did the number crunching GPU drew things onto your screen. And as we’ve advanced, the GPU has actually taken on more and more things. So it started off a lot of times and like gaming. So there was a lot of like physics calculations, they needed to figure out how destruction works. And that was really good on the GPU. And so it started moving more and more things over to the GPU. And now we’re starting to see that on the professional side as well. And it just comes down to how they work. CPUs have a small number of cores, but they’re fairly beefy cores. So you can kind of think of those like sports cars. So they are really, really fast. But you can’t really move a lot at the same time. So like you mentioned, you’re moving right now, if you move using only sports cars, it will take you a long time, because you’d have to be taking a ton of trips. It doesn’t matter that that car can go 100 miles an hour. GPUs, on the other hand, they have a huge number, of course, thousands and thousands of cores. But each one of those cores is a little bit slow, and so you can kind of think of those kinds of like a semi-truck. So they are not as fast to like to get down the road. But you can pile tons and tons of furniture and packages and dishes and everything into them. So you only have to take one trip. And so it comes down to what are the kind of calculations that the computer is having to do. Whether it’s best to be done on the CPU really fast versus the GPU, tons of storage, or tons of cargo, I guess, I should say. And they’re starting to find out that there’s a lot of things that are really, really good on the GPU. So Adobe, Blackmagic, all of these guys are starting to tailor a lot of their software over to the GPU. And that’s why we’re seeing things being offloaded from what was traditionally done on the processor, and the CPU is now being offered loaded onto the GPU. So it’s really not you need a ton of one or the other starting to be a balance between the two.

Sounds like minestrone soup, isn’t it? What about the Blackmagic cameras? If you’re shooting Blackmagic raw, what would you consider putting into a system that was primarily shooting with Blackmagic cameras?

So most codecs, the only one that’s really different, honestly, in terms of like, what hardware is best is RED. And that’s just because this isn’t the GPU for the debayering. Everything else, it’s really just the beefier the CPU, the better the playback performance and the transcode or the end the exporting is going to be. There is a point, though, where a higher-end CPU isn’t going to give you any better playback performance, and it’s actually fairly low. It’s around mid-level of the Intel X series or upper end of the Ryzen series from AMD, which are about the same price points actually. About that level, you’re actually not going to get any better in terms of like lifelong playback, in most cases. So at that point of view, if your CPU is just getting you better export times, which for some people, they don’t care, I mean, if they’re going to be editing a 10-15 minute video for YouTube, like, who cares if it takes five minutes instead of four. But if you’re doing like Netflix and trying to export these two-hour long feature films, well, yeah, a little bit faster export time, that adds up anyway, it might be fast enough that it’ll finish the export before you leave for the day. So you can check it over, and maybe do a second export and let it run overnight.

Yeah, it does make a difference when you’re doing the long-form. I have a question for you about the drives. I love SSD drives because they’re so fast, they’re very expensive, but I think they’re worth it because they are so fast, but what I get scared of with them and tell me if I’m wrong. When an SSD drive crashes, it’s very difficult to recover the information, if not impossible, to recover the information on it. The old spinners had their problems, too. You were mentioning SSDs and how much you’d like them. What’s the reason for that? From somebody who builds these systems, why would you encourage SSDs?

So there’s a couple of different reasons. I mean, you touched on performance. And that’s a huge thing. I mean, a lot of it is not even like the copy performance. Like the copying file onto the drive, SSD is so much faster, but it’s about its snappiness. Traditional hard drive, that’s a spinning disk, and then there’s like an arm that moves around, and it actually has to physically move to get to your data, and that takes time. So these are just faster, all around because of that. But it’s actually the other reason we really highly push on it is that these are actually more reliable. So we do a huge amount of tracking internally like, every time we sell a part, we track it, and if we have to RMA send it back for repair or fixing, or it fails in any way, we track that as well. And one of our articles I’m trying to figure out when this was in August, so not even that long ago, we did a whole analysis of what’s our failure rates on different parts, and SSDs were absolutely amazing. They are the least failing part of our computers, specifically Samsung. Yes, we are really married to Samsung right now, because they are so amazing. I know there’s a bunch of other brands, a lot of them are probably just as good as Samsung, but when we’ve only had like, one or two fail in the last couple of years, it’s really hard for us to try anything else because you can’t get much better than a crazy, insanely low failure rate. The failure rate was point two, 6%. One in every 400 had any sort of problem over the last three years. Conversely, hard drives, they were almost at 1%, so one in a hundred. And so that’s one of the main big reasons why we push the SSD, and specifically, Samsung SSD is because they’re just less likely to have problems. And I do want to qualify that a little bit that is like in a workstation, and workstation lifespan is usually three to five years. If you’re talking about archiving footage, or archiving projects, platter drives are better for that. As long as you get drives that are designed for that, they have ones that are designed for cold storage or archival, things like that in those cases you wouldn’t want to go platter.

We would have to spin them every once in a while, or they get stuck.

SSDs too technically, they will lose the data if they don’t get powered on. I don’t know how often it is. It’s like once every five years or something like that. Don’t hold me on that, but it’s only an amount of time. 

This whole idea of performance in production and post-production, and your near cache stores and your networking and then going to your permanent archiving and storage, it’s a problem for all of us because I keep talking about how our media has grown like kudzu over the last few years. It’s really a problem. Many people are moving back and forth Mac to PC, PC to Mac, and you handle primarily PC. So what advice would you give to somebody that’s been on a Mac up to now? And because of what they’re going to be doing, they think the PC might work better for them. What do you tell them to prepare in order to make this transition of their workflow?

Yeah, so we actually do that a lot. Because like you said, there’s a lot of people jumping between one and the other. A lot of the people we deal with in post-production aren’t one or the other. They are not on a pure Mac platform anymore, and they’re not on pure PC, so it really is bouncing, and that bouncing can be tough. But I would say that the number one thing that we hear the most complaints about is actually just keyboard shortcuts. It’s such a simple thing. But really good editors use keyboard shortcuts constantly, and it’s just a little bit different on Mac and PC. I mean, Mac, you’ve got the control option and command keys on windows that are usually directed as ctrl Windows+alt. And it’s just training yourself to be slightly different, even just like copying files around, instead of cmd+C, cmd+V, copy and paste, now it’s ctrl+C and ctrl+V. And instead of using your thumb to put us command, now you’re using your pinky to press ctrl. And it’s really just awkward for a long time. I tell people, you can use a Mac keyboard on PC and download some programs that like remap the keys, so it’s kind of the same, but usually, I just tell people that it’s annoying, but just deal with it for about a week, and you’ll find that your muscle memory takes over really quickly. And then it’s really not that bad to jump between those two. So that’s honestly the number one thing that we hear the most complaints about because once you get into Premiere or After Effects, the application is the same as it’s the same look. It’s the same effects, and it’s the same workflow. So really, the only thing that’s different once you’re in there is those keyboard shortcuts. The other thing, that’s always a big concern is storage. We talked about Thunderbolt earlier, but the actual connection is only part of it because you have on Mac, they’re formatted for Mac. So I think it’s HFS Plus, if I’m not mistaken, with the format for Mac and PC can’t read those drives. And at the same time, what you usually use on the PC side is called NTFS, and Mac can read that, but it can’t write to that drive. So you have this problem all the time with external drives where you’ve got to move data between computers, but neither of them talks to each other. And for that, there’s a couple of different solutions we recommend to people. One is there are applications that you can purchase for pretty inexpensive, like 20 bucks or something. One of them is called Paragon. And it lets PCs read Mac formatted drives that let Mac read PC formatted drives. The one caution we always get with those is, those are not perfect. So they are great for if you just want to like copy a file, they’re perfect for that. I don’t think I would ever recommend someone actually working off an external drive going through that extra layer from Paragon or one of the other applications. And that’s just because it seems like every once in a while the drive will just drop for a split second. And that causes Premiere to throw a bunch of offline media errors, and then you’ve got a real link media and all that, and it’s not usually the best experience for that. The best thing we always tell people for storage is actually starting moving away from external drives and move to network-attached storage. There are tons of different brands out there. We’ve been doing a lot recently with Luma Forge, they make the jellyfish, and those you don’t have any of those cross-platform issues. You can read it on one computer, whether it’s Mac or PC, and it all just works. It’s definitely a lot higher cost to entry, so it’s really hard for either small studios or individuals to make that move. But if you really need it and need it to be up and reliable, that’s usually what we tell people to start thinking about when you could make that move over to network-attached storage from Thunderbolt or other external devices?

At the end of the day, all you need is a beefier CPU, better playback performance, faster transcoding and exporting.

People get so attached to their workstation, whether it’s PC or Mac, it is a different language, and you get used to it, and you get comfortable, and you get fast, and you don’t have to worry about some of these details. Yeah, the thought of switching for me, I do have people ask me, “Can you help me fix this?” and I say, “What platform are you on?” if they tell me pc, I say, “Well, maybe had you asked me 15 years ago, I would have been able to help you but forget it. Now. I don’t speak PC anymore.”

That’s one reason why we feel that all these benchmarks and stuff we do are so important. Because if you are on Mac, and you’re looking at, a PC and you look at it, and it’s only going to be 5% faster, well, then no, that’s not worth the hassle of learning a slightly new way of working and those keyboard shortcuts and all that, like five percents not worth that, if you look at it, and oh, hey, for my budget, I could get 20-30% more performance, which then it comes down to Okay, is it worth a little bit of effort on my part, to figure all that stuff out? In order to get that higher performance? Or am I going to be more productive without that performance? But sticking on a platform, I know, and I’m familiar with it.

So what kind of clients do you work with now? Can you give us an example of some of the systems that you’ve built recently and the companies that you work with?

Sure, yes, for some of them. You always have to be careful of who we’re working with and who our customers are. And we’re really big on keeping information that people want private. But we do a full range, we work with individuals, like YouTubers or people that are just editing home movies. Like we go down to that level, we go up to large studios, a lot of really interesting ones that aren’t even in the post-production fields. One of the ones I always love talking about the most is a company called METECS, and they’re a contractor for NASA that does astronaut training in VR. So they train the astronauts in VR on our systems. That’s an amazing, really cool thing that they’re doing. But it’s not really post-production, but it’s really cool. But we do a lot of work, especially with YouTubers actually seem to be a lot of fun for us to work with, even on the marketing side, and that’s because they’re always doing something interesting. So there’s a couple that we’ve done a lot of work with recently. Corridor Digital is one they do a lot of YouTube VFX stuff, but then just other interesting ones. Like Smarter Every Day, it’s a YouTube channel, and he just tries to learn and says basically his mission of learning new things, and so we get to work with him. But we do have a whole section on our website under that publications tab that we talked about earlier. That is, like case studies, SF film, San Francisco Film House, is one we’ve worked with recently, and they do education and work, and those people are a lot of fun for us to work with. But yeah, a lot of the bigger ones we can’t really talk about too much because they want to keep things private.

I can’t blame them for that. Is there anything I haven’t asked you in terms of some of the most recent technology changes you’ve had to deal with?

Right now, the biggest thing is that there’s a huge shakeup on the CPU side with the stuff that AMD has launched. The one thing I will say is, I mean, it is the holiday season right now. And so you might be looking for purchasing a system. You might actually want to almost give a raincheck on those kinds of things, because of all of these things that just launched, usually, the first month or so after a major launch, like this is a little rocky. Just like major versions of Premiere Pro updates or anything, there are always bugs to work out. And so I would say if you can hold off just a little bit, a few weeks or maybe wait until January quarter one, that is probably a good idea. If you can’t wait because you’ve got a budget, you got to use it, go for it, obviously, better to use it than lose it. But otherwise, you might want to wait just a little bit. You can always talk with our consultants, they can help out exactly what you need for all those different things, whether you should wait or what you need is fine and just go for it now.

Selecting computers is more convenient for a lot of people today. There are a lot more options in the market and chances to customize. It's no longer buy this one thing, and you're good. Click To Tweet

I get impatient when I decide I want to get something and kills you, doesn’t it? Okay, I’m curious if I went into your garage or your equipment room today, you personally, not the company but you Matt Bach, personally, how many old computers do you have in there?

Oh, actually not that many, to be honest.

I keep them. I can’t get rid of them. They’re like old friends.

No, we do a lot of like recycling old computers or donating to different charities. Often, a lot of the time I get to that point, it’s like bringing it in and making it either recycled, donated, or whatever. I used to be really bad about keeping old stuff, and then I realized, man, I haven’t used this, and now it’s so slow compared to like, my phone. So I’ve started being better about getting rid of those. It probably helped that I moved about four years ago and had to deal with all those. So now I don’t want to deal with that again next time I move.

Well, I’m dealing with it right now because I’m in the middle of a move. But I look at them, and I think, oh, should I get rid of this? And I just can’t do it. Isn’t that terrible? And I don’t think I’m a string saver. I don’t know. Well, this has been awesome. It’s really nice to talk to you. I would like you, and this is maybe a silly question. But this is radio, so we can’t see anything. But when you’re thinking about putting together a computer, can you take us on the roadmap of what goes into making a computer? If you’re putting all the pieces together, what goes in there?

Well, the entire roadmap of how we operate as a company, honestly, starts with the work that I personally do in our labs department. And that’s all of the testings that we talked about all the benchmarks, and we do that to figure out, okay, there are hundreds of CPUs out there, which ones are the right ones for different workflows, and then we take those, and we put those into what we call our solutions. And those are our workstations for individual software packages. And that’s where like, it really started to hit a lot of the public side, and at that point, so if you were actually looking for a computer, you would go there. Oftentimes, people do ask to configure computers. But a lot of the time, we just have a Contact Us form on there. And those are being used so much because there’s no way we could have anything insight that actually covers everybody’s workflow because everybody’s slightly different. So that’s when you would be talking with one of our consultants, and they would really drill down into what applications are using what codecs are using and what do you hope to use in the future? Like, are you just editing HD now, but in two years, we want to be editing 4k or 8k? So there’s a lot of back and forth with our consultants and our clients of what you actually need for what you’re doing. And then at that point, once someone actually pulls the trigger and purchases the system, it’s about a, it’s now a seven to 10-day build time. So we get all the parts, and if we don’t already have them in stock, our production department does a huge amount of work doing the actual assembling of all the parts. They do a lot of testing to make sure all of those parts are stable and working as they’re supposed to. And we catch a lot of small things like it could be anything like we look for any sort of defect, it could be a physical blemish, like just a scratch on it, where it’s like, no, someone’s spending 5,000-$10,000, they shouldn’t have a scratch. Or it’s not giving an as good performance as we expect. So it’s a lot of work that goes into that to make sure that when you actually receive the system, it is going to be as perfect as can be considering that UPS or FedEx is probably gonna be rolling it off the back of their truck. But so it’s all of that work. There’s a lot of communication that goes on during that entire process. It’s not a black box; you’ll actually be getting like emails and updates of who did what and when what they did. And a lot of the actual service that we provide to our customers is actually after you even get the computer, I mean, you get the computer, you set it up, you get working. But what do you do when there’s a slight problem? I mean, sometimes it’s an actual hardware problem, sometimes it’s Microsoft Windows, sometimes it’s Adobe, and we really want to be essentially your first port of contact on any issue. It doesn’t matter if it’s about our computer or not, because we can loop in our Adobe support contacts, or our support contacts that are other companies and get you either a workaround to get you back up and running or get an actual fix rolled in whether it’s replacement parts or software update or driver update or whatever to get you back up and running as fast as possible

That’s awesome. We didn’t even touch on motherboards. I’m probably gonna wear you out here. What about motherboards? What do you look for? I guess that’s putting the patchwork quilt together, isn’t it? 

My general recommendation for people that are kind of building their own, because I mean, honestly, if you’re buying a prebuilt computer from us, or Dell or HP or Apple is you’re not going to have to make that decision on the board. Most companies are not going to give you a huge amount of choice, because there are more motherboards out there than there are CPUs. So I think a lot of the time, it just comes down to the features you need. If you want an Intel 9900K CPU, you need to have a motherboard that’s going to support it. So some things are just obvious like that. But oftentimes, like when we’re personally looking for different boards, it’s things like Well, does it have Wi-Fi built-in? Because built-in Wi-Fi is always going to be better than an add on card? Or does it have Thunderbolt? How many USB ports does it have? Is there a layout for the PCIe slot? How would you put in video cards or like a video monitoring card? Is that appropriate for what you’re going to be buying? Because if you’re like editing in DaVinci Resolve and you want to put in three video cards, not every motherboard is going to be able to accept that. So a lot of it comes down to those kinds of things, and we have the hard duty for our own systems of we don’t want to carry a whole bunch of motherboards, we want to have like one per platform. So we have to find that perfect motherboard, which there are not very many perfect motherboards. But one of the things I would advise against is going cheap on your motherboard. There are some pretty darn inexpensive boards, and some of them are decent. But your motherboard is what connects absolutely everything in your computer. It is one of the most complicated parts that’s going in your board and actually from our failure rates, which I was talking about earlier. I think one in 20 motherboards we have to replace or RMA during our production process. And so you can imagine the quality difference between like a $50 motherboard and a $200 one, and I usually tell people somewhere around $150 is about as bare minimum as I would ever go personally in my own computer.

That’s actually why I asked you that question because that’s sometimes the first thing to go, isn’t it?

Yes, by far, it’s about a factor of two on the next highest failing parts in a computer is going to be your power supply or video card.

Well, I sure would love to be a fly on the wall over there while you’re putting these systems together. It’s fascinating. It really is just fascinating. You have to be so proud of what you’re doing.

Oh, absolutely. I’ve been here for a long time, and I still build the company into what it is. And the fact that our company, our whole goal is to help our customers and really the community at large. That’s why we put our benchmarks out there for free. It’s just really nice, and just knowing that that philosophy behind a company is going to become a successful company, rather than trying to get a couple extra hundred bucks here and there from a customer who ended up being unhappy. We were really big on repeat business for us. Most of our business is repeat people coming back or word of mouth.

I know that about you guys. It’s true. I have heard that. So getting ready for the holidays, are you gonna take time off or are you just gonna keep building computers?

Oh, I’m actually very lucky. I’ve got a decent amount of paid time off that I haven’t used this year. So I’m actually going to be taking off, I think, starting next week through the end of the year. I’m very fortunate that I get to do that. 

That’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate your time. I’ve kept you on for a long time, and I could talk to you forever. This is really interesting. And thanks for helping everyone. And honestly, if you’re going to build your own system, talk to Puget first because I feel that you guys could do it just as effectively in terms of the budget and much more effectively in terms of the processing and the reliability. So thank you so much. And where do you want people to learn more about Puget Systems?

It’s just pugetsystems.com, that’s got our website. There are tons of resources on there that you can look around at. 

Thank you so much for your time, Matt. I’ve been talking with Matt Bach, senior labs technician at Puget Systems. And he’s been going under the hood on how these computers are built and what different parts and different systems you can use to make your system work the best. Thank you so much. Happy Holidays, everybody. You know what I tell you get up off your chair and go do something wonderful today. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you.

Checklist

  1. Do some research before purchasing your machine. Find out what specs are recommended for your profession so you don’t have to keep replacing your computer parts.
  2. Make sure you get a good quality PSU. A power supply unit converts main AC to low-voltage regulated DC power for the internal components of a computer. Without a suitable power supply, your machine may not work properly. 
  3. Consider the speed of your memory. Faster RAM speeds allow your processor to access the data stored on the hard drive more quickly, giving your system a boost in processor performance.
  4. Invest in video cards. The higher the quality of your video card, the better video resolution you’ll have.
  5. Invest in a graphics processing unit. Their primary purpose is to seamlessly render 3D graphics.
  6. Don’t forget about getting a good quality motherboard as well. It’s the part of your machine in charge of making sure all components are working seamlessly.
  7. Make sure your RAM space is greater than the amount of space the data and programs need. RAMS higher than 8GB are highly recommended, especially for video production. 
  8. Include SSD and HDD on your list of priorities for higher performance. Programs load faster, files load faster, and data transfers faster.
  9. Decide which software fits the demands of your job. There are a lot of options out there nowadays and you don’t really need to buy all of them- just the ones you need. 
  10. Check out Puget Systems for more information and guidance on how to acquire a powerful working PC.

About OWC

If you work in tech and haven’t heard about MacSales.com, you’ve might have had your head in the sand.! Other World Computing, under the leadership of Larry O’Connor, has expanded to all corners of the world and works every day to create hardware that makes the lives of creatives and business-oriented companies faster, more efficient and more stable.  Go to OWCDigital.com for more information.

Here’s the company’s official mission statement:

At OWC, we’re committed to constant innovation, exemplary customer service, and American design. 

For more than 25 Years, OWC has had a simple goal. To create innovative DIY solutions to give you the most from your technology.  

Beginning with 100% compatible memory upgrades, reliably exceeding Apple’s maximum RAM specs, OWC’s product offering has grown to encompass the entire spectrum of upgrade and expansion possibilities, all with a focus on easy, DIY setup and installation. 

Our dedication to excellence and sustainable innovation extends beyond our day-to-day business and into the community. We strive for zero waste, both environmentally and strategically. Our outlook is to the long term, and in everything we do, we look for simplicity in action and sustainability in practice.

For us, it’s as much about building exceptional relationships, as it is about building exceptional products.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Subscribe Now