4 ms·

Puget Systems Most Reliable Hardware of 2025

141 points by zdw 9mo ago

BadBadJellyBean 9mo ago
I always wonder how many system crashes that we put on the software or the OS are actually just sub optimal components. Computers are so complex and so fast that just a little bit of instability can probably lead to data corruption.
- ortusdux 9mo ago
  The optimist in me hopes that the bullwhip effect will lead to cheap ram in a few years, and that the glut allows for the wider adoption and support of ECC memory.
  - cmxch 9mo ago
    I’d just like to see a repeat of the glut of HBM-backed processors like the Xeon Max 9480 that dipped as low as 900/cpu, about 2000ish all in, and with bandwidth that compares favorably to a 3090.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  Not just wholesale crashes, but all sorts of misbehavior. For example, cheap WiFi/BT/ethernet can wreak havoc on your connectivity and out of spec USB peripherals can cause all sorts of problems. Both can bring sleep/power saving problems. Most people using computers aren't technical enough to be able to discern these things, however, and many buy the cheapest thing on the shelf and so these subpar components persist.
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago
  Maybe. But then again, as someone who dual boots, I see one of the OS crashing and giving an alround worse experience then the other, on the same exact hardware, while the other just chugs along. Now, I'm not someone good at maths or physics, so maybe, somehow, it's actually more likely than not that the worse OS gets to run when there's worse solar activity going on or whatever else has en effect on my hardware, which also doesn't seem to affect memtest for some reason. But the likelihood can't be that high. Can it?
  - toast0 9mo ago
    It could easily be flakey hardware and different drivers. Not necessarily better or worse, but one driver cause the hardware to ocassionaly fail in exciting ways, like DMA to the wrong address if jusy the right access patterns happen. If you've got an IO-MMU and everything aligns properly, devices can't DMA to the wrong place anymore, which might make it easier to track things down.
- pickle-wizard 9mo ago
  It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.
  - LoganDark 9mo ago
    Maybe when quality hardware has problems, the owner knows how to deal with it, but when no-name hardware has problems, the owner has no clue how to build a computer
- kg 9mo ago
  Sometimes it's both. I had some crazy data corruption problems that turned out to be a one-two punch of a buggy anti-cheat driver from a game I was playing and a defective M.2 SSD slot on my motherboard. Without the combination of both factors everything was fine, but when I played the game with that slot populated, the disk in that slot started getting corrupted and failing to respond to requests from the OS (eventually hanging the system). Wild troubleshooting adventure.
  - johngossman 9mo ago
    My sympathies. I've had to track some of those sorts of things down and sometimes you wonder about your sanity.
- johngossman 9mo ago
  I've been building computers for my friends and I for 25 years and the two worst "random stability" issues I had were high quality but aging PSUs.
  - 12_throw_away 9mo ago
    Yup. When building "upcycled" PCs out of used second-to-last-gen components, I learned very quickly to only ever use brand-new, high quality PSUs ... the alternative is insanity
    - jonathanlydall 9mo ago
      My anecdotal experience over the last 15 years of personal PCs. I've had one case of Corsair memory which went faulty after a year (was replaced without question by the supplier) and around 3 PSU failures. However, on the 3 times I've done upgrades (typically motherboard + RAM + CPU) in that time I've been able to keep my existing PSU without stability issues. So I wouldn't say it's "insanity" to keep your current PSU when upgrading, but based on your experience if I had stability issues it may be the first thing I test.
      - reeredfdfdf 9mo ago
        Yea, I've ran bunch of office PC's with nearly 20 year old components 24/7 without any stability issues (acting space heaters doing CPU intensive tasks in winter). No need to replace a quality PSU until you start having issues.
- kalleboo 9mo ago
  Even Linus Torvalds has said that Windows probably has a worse reputation for stability than it ought to simply due to people having bad RAM.
  - keyringlight 9mo ago
    Given the number of computers now it's practically a certainty. One of the big challenges with diagnosing non-ECC RAM is that you can't directly measure it so you're left trying to eliminate issues elsewhere first and measuring symptoms or stress testing to determine if RAM is the most likely failure, meanwhile the system literally can't remember correctly. And that's if you're actively looking to diagnose, as opposed to accepting some gremlin in the machine.
    - thfuran 9mo ago
      I think it's crazy that we still use non-ECC RAM.
mrweasel 9mo ago
Maybe they just don't really use anything else, but I just love that the most reliable memory is just Kingston ValueRAM. No fancy heat spreader or packaging, not even a black PCB, just chips on a classic green circuit board.
- encom 9mo ago
  Finding consumer hardware that isn't riced to the max is getting hard. I wish pcpartpicker had a checkbox to filter out anything with RGB lights. Or one to filter out things marketed towards 13 year old boys - but that might be harder. Preempting the inevitable comment: "just turn it off". That doesn't always work. I bought a mouse once, I think it was Razor, that required their electron slop-ware to control the lights. And if you didn't keep the software running, the lights would default to on. I had to take it apart to desolder the LEDs and throw them in the trash. And of course, like all mice I've seen, the screws were under the teflon feet, so I had to mangle them slightly to get in there. It was a decent mouse otherwise, but screw that nonsense.
  - vladvasiliu 9mo ago
    Just get the logitech competition. I've had multiple G series mice, they all have on-board memory. I have a cooler master which behaves the same. You can program them from a VM, then toss that away and the mouse remembers its settings, even multiple "profiles". You don't have to put up with electron slop-ware or whatever the crap dev platform du jour is. They just work.
  - cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
    The closest I've seen to this are the ASUS ProArt cases/components, which lean toward a modernized, stealthy workstation vibe, as well as some cases from botique Chinese manufacturers like Streacom and Jonsbo/Jonsplus which also go for a sleek but more professional and subdued aesthetic. The downside is that they're not cheap.
    - mrweasel 9mo ago
      For motherboards Asus also have their CSM (Corporate Stable Model) series. A few of these are even on green PCBs. https://www.asus.com/Microsite/CSM/ https://www.asus.com/Microsite/CSM/
skobes 9mo ago
My main home PC is a Puget Serenity workstation from 2017. It has been rock solid and outperforms much newer laptops. And it has almost zero fan noise which is a priority for me. Unfortunately it looks like they may have discontinued the Serenity model, at least I don't see it on the website anymore.
- kg 9mo ago
  I've been using Puget workstations for like 10 years now and the builds are really reliable. The one time I had issues with a build (not their fault - defective parts), they went the extra mile and rebuilt it after normal troubleshooting failed. They do a lot of careful thermal testing and for the inside of their builds they often cut special acrylic dividers, flowguides, supports etc to manage airflow and make sure nothing comes loose like a heavy GPU.
- theevilsharpie 9mo ago
  Fractal still sells a Serenity workstation[1], but it's essentially an off-the-shelf AMD Ryzen-based system, installed into a Fractal Design Define 7 Mini case, with a Noctua tower air cooler and case fans replacing the stock cooling. They have a variety of photos showing their customized fan setup in various configurations.[2] It's a reasonably well-built system, but $3,500 USD is hard to justify for a basic system with an 8-core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and no discrete GPU, especially given that it's using parts that you can just purchase and assemble yourself. I know that prices of some components have increased significantly, but not by THAT much. [1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/more-workstations/quiet-operation/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/more-workstations/qui... [2] https://www.pugetsystems.com/parts/photography/Additional-Cooling/Case-Fans-Upgrade-Kit-PWM-Ramping-9489/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/parts/photography/Additional-Co...
- erfburfl 9mo ago
  [dead]
fmajid 9mo ago
Puget is a specialist seller of high-end workstation, so their component choices are certainly a cut above what the average PC seller uses.
- 0x1ch 9mo ago
  Yeah, very well respected system builders based in the PNW. They've had some motion for a long time, but it's nice to see someone local mentioned.
rpcope1 9mo ago
I am not surprised at all to see the W series Xeons with very high reliability. I know they tend to be pricier than AMD, and maybe not as fast, but I can't recall the last time I managed to kill an E3/E5/W series Xeon in the last 15 years, no matter how hard they're worked. Intel pooched it with the i-series core parts, but the workstation xeons have always been really reliable and more thrifty with power especially at idle than AMD.
amelius 9mo ago
Did they manage to get USB to work reliably, because ime that's always a gamble.
sergiotapia 9mo ago
I always dreamed of owning a Puget Systems computer. They seems a cut above the rest. Either them or a Falcon Northwest. What other builders exist at this level of premium quality?
- binarycrusader 9mo ago
  I ordered a custom Ryzen 9950X3D workstation in a full-size tower from Puget last year with 192GiB of RAM before the memory craze happened and I've been quite happy with it. Zero reliability issues and excellent performance. Coincidentally, I also ordered a custom Tiki-based gaming system from Falcon NW for a family member and that's also been amazing. I think I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two system builders, but Puget definitely has the edge for workstations since they offer Full-size towers and other hardware that Falcon NW does not. Conversely, Falcon NW offers custom cases and the very best of hardware for gamers with unheard of customization options like custom paint jobs.
cmxch 9mo ago
Can at least vouch for the (Sapphire Rapids) Xeons. With the right cooling, you can throw absurd TDP generating loads and they just keep on chugging along. With octochannel memory, an 8480 can be slightly indistinguishable from an older GPU if used that way.
camillomiller 9mo ago
They don't sell Macs, so I guess Apple Silicon chips woulnd't make the list anyway, but would be interesting to see reliability compared to the Intel ones. In my experience CPU are nonetheless a very low percentage of failures in consumer hardware these days, regardless of the designer.
- storus 9mo ago
  I had two M3 Max 128GB RAM/8TB SSD that had GPU issues (the second one was likely a refurb so probably returned by somebody else) and am now waiting for the third one. M3 Ultra 512GB RAM was rock solid so far though.
blargthorwars 9mo ago
We've had quite a few large Samsung SATA drives fail or start to fail. 4TB and up seems especially suspicious. Not back to spinning levels of badness, but we had a 3% failure rate. Previously, two years ago, it would have about an order of magnitude less.
icegreentea2 9mo ago
Wow, 2.5% failure rates for customer CPUs? I just... I dunno, I just mentally binned CPUs (as a solid state object, and one of the highest value add components to a system) to have failure rates in the ~1% range. I know the effort it takes to get asymptotically closer to 0% failure rate, and so this is more of a misread (on my part) on what the market tolerates and the vendor's pricing/value strategy. Cool!

141 points by zdw 9mo ago

I always wonder how many system crashes that we put on the software or the OS are actually just sub optimal components. Computers are so complex and so fast that just a little bit of instability can probably lead to data corruption.

ortusdux 9mo ago
The optimist in me hopes that the bullwhip effect will lead to cheap ram in a few years, and that the glut allows for the wider adoption and support of ECC memory.
- cmxch 9mo ago
  I’d just like to see a repeat of the glut of HBM-backed processors like the Xeon Max 9480 that dipped as low as 900/cpu, about 2000ish all in, and with bandwidth that compares favorably to a 3090.
cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
Not just wholesale crashes, but all sorts of misbehavior. For example, cheap WiFi/BT/ethernet can wreak havoc on your connectivity and out of spec USB peripherals can cause all sorts of problems. Both can bring sleep/power saving problems. Most people using computers aren't technical enough to be able to discern these things, however, and many buy the cheapest thing on the shelf and so these subpar components persist.
vladvasiliu 9mo ago
Maybe. But then again, as someone who dual boots, I see one of the OS crashing and giving an alround worse experience then the other, on the same exact hardware, while the other just chugs along. Now, I'm not someone good at maths or physics, so maybe, somehow, it's actually more likely than not that the worse OS gets to run when there's worse solar activity going on or whatever else has en effect on my hardware, which also doesn't seem to affect memtest for some reason. But the likelihood can't be that high. Can it?
- toast0 9mo ago
  It could easily be flakey hardware and different drivers. Not necessarily better or worse, but one driver cause the hardware to ocassionaly fail in exciting ways, like DMA to the wrong address if jusy the right access patterns happen. If you've got an IO-MMU and everything aligns properly, devices can't DMA to the wrong place anymore, which might make it easier to track things down.
pickle-wizard 9mo ago
It has been 25 years, but back in college I had a job refurbishing and repairing PCs. Most problems were caused by cheap no name hardware. Most the quality hardware rarely had problems.
- LoganDark 9mo ago
  Maybe when quality hardware has problems, the owner knows how to deal with it, but when no-name hardware has problems, the owner has no clue how to build a computer
kg 9mo ago
Sometimes it's both. I had some crazy data corruption problems that turned out to be a one-two punch of a buggy anti-cheat driver from a game I was playing and a defective M.2 SSD slot on my motherboard. Without the combination of both factors everything was fine, but when I played the game with that slot populated, the disk in that slot started getting corrupted and failing to respond to requests from the OS (eventually hanging the system). Wild troubleshooting adventure.
- johngossman 9mo ago
  My sympathies. I've had to track some of those sorts of things down and sometimes you wonder about your sanity.
johngossman 9mo ago
I've been building computers for my friends and I for 25 years and the two worst "random stability" issues I had were high quality but aging PSUs.
- 12_throw_away 9mo ago
  Yup. When building "upcycled" PCs out of used second-to-last-gen components, I learned very quickly to only ever use brand-new, high quality PSUs ... the alternative is insanity
  - jonathanlydall 9mo ago
    My anecdotal experience over the last 15 years of personal PCs. I've had one case of Corsair memory which went faulty after a year (was replaced without question by the supplier) and around 3 PSU failures. However, on the 3 times I've done upgrades (typically motherboard + RAM + CPU) in that time I've been able to keep my existing PSU without stability issues. So I wouldn't say it's "insanity" to keep your current PSU when upgrading, but based on your experience if I had stability issues it may be the first thing I test.
    - reeredfdfdf 9mo ago
      Yea, I've ran bunch of office PC's with nearly 20 year old components 24/7 without any stability issues (acting space heaters doing CPU intensive tasks in winter). No need to replace a quality PSU until you start having issues.
kalleboo 9mo ago
Even Linus Torvalds has said that Windows probably has a worse reputation for stability than it ought to simply due to people having bad RAM.
- keyringlight 9mo ago
  Given the number of computers now it's practically a certainty. One of the big challenges with diagnosing non-ECC RAM is that you can't directly measure it so you're left trying to eliminate issues elsewhere first and measuring symptoms or stress testing to determine if RAM is the most likely failure, meanwhile the system literally can't remember correctly. And that's if you're actively looking to diagnose, as opposed to accepting some gremlin in the machine.
  - thfuran 9mo ago
    I think it's crazy that we still use non-ECC RAM.

mrweasel 9mo ago

Maybe they just don't really use anything else, but I just love that the most reliable memory is just Kingston ValueRAM. No fancy heat spreader or packaging, not even a black PCB, just chips on a classic green circuit board.

encom 9mo ago
Finding consumer hardware that isn't riced to the max is getting hard. I wish pcpartpicker had a checkbox to filter out anything with RGB lights. Or one to filter out things marketed towards 13 year old boys - but that might be harder. Preempting the inevitable comment: "just turn it off". That doesn't always work. I bought a mouse once, I think it was Razor, that required their electron slop-ware to control the lights. And if you didn't keep the software running, the lights would default to on. I had to take it apart to desolder the LEDs and throw them in the trash. And of course, like all mice I've seen, the screws were under the teflon feet, so I had to mangle them slightly to get in there. It was a decent mouse otherwise, but screw that nonsense.
- vladvasiliu 9mo ago
  Just get the logitech competition. I've had multiple G series mice, they all have on-board memory. I have a cooler master which behaves the same. You can program them from a VM, then toss that away and the mouse remembers its settings, even multiple "profiles". You don't have to put up with electron slop-ware or whatever the crap dev platform du jour is. They just work.
- cosmic_cheese 9mo ago
  The closest I've seen to this are the ASUS ProArt cases/components, which lean toward a modernized, stealthy workstation vibe, as well as some cases from botique Chinese manufacturers like Streacom and Jonsbo/Jonsplus which also go for a sleek but more professional and subdued aesthetic. The downside is that they're not cheap.
  - mrweasel 9mo ago
    For motherboards Asus also have their CSM (Corporate Stable Model) series. A few of these are even on green PCBs. https://www.asus.com/Microsite/CSM/ https://www.asus.com/Microsite/CSM/

skobes 9mo ago

My main home PC is a Puget Serenity workstation from 2017. It has been rock solid and outperforms much newer laptops. And it has almost zero fan noise which is a priority for me. Unfortunately it looks like they may have discontinued the Serenity model, at least I don't see it on the website anymore.

kg 9mo ago
I've been using Puget workstations for like 10 years now and the builds are really reliable. The one time I had issues with a build (not their fault - defective parts), they went the extra mile and rebuilt it after normal troubleshooting failed. They do a lot of careful thermal testing and for the inside of their builds they often cut special acrylic dividers, flowguides, supports etc to manage airflow and make sure nothing comes loose like a heavy GPU.
theevilsharpie 9mo ago
Fractal still sells a Serenity workstation[1], but it's essentially an off-the-shelf AMD Ryzen-based system, installed into a Fractal Design Define 7 Mini case, with a Noctua tower air cooler and case fans replacing the stock cooling. They have a variety of photos showing their customized fan setup in various configurations.[2] It's a reasonably well-built system, but $3,500 USD is hard to justify for a basic system with an 8-core CPU, 32 GB of RAM, and no discrete GPU, especially given that it's using parts that you can just purchase and assemble yourself. I know that prices of some components have increased significantly, but not by THAT much. [1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/more-workstations/quiet-operation/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/solutions/more-workstations/qui... [2] https://www.pugetsystems.com/parts/photography/Additional-Cooling/Case-Fans-Upgrade-Kit-PWM-Ramping-9489/ https://www.pugetsystems.com/parts/photography/Additional-Co...
erfburfl 9mo ago
[dead]

fmajid 9mo ago

Puget is a specialist seller of high-end workstation, so their component choices are certainly a cut above what the average PC seller uses.

0x1ch 9mo ago
Yeah, very well respected system builders based in the PNW. They've had some motion for a long time, but it's nice to see someone local mentioned.

rpcope1 9mo ago

I am not surprised at all to see the W series Xeons with very high reliability. I know they tend to be pricier than AMD, and maybe not as fast, but I can't recall the last time I managed to kill an E3/E5/W series Xeon in the last 15 years, no matter how hard they're worked. Intel pooched it with the i-series core parts, but the workstation xeons have always been really reliable and more thrifty with power especially at idle than AMD.

amelius 9mo ago

Did they manage to get USB to work reliably, because ime that's always a gamble.

sergiotapia 9mo ago

I always dreamed of owning a Puget Systems computer. They seems a cut above the rest. Either them or a Falcon Northwest. What other builders exist at this level of premium quality?

binarycrusader 9mo ago
I ordered a custom Ryzen 9950X3D workstation in a full-size tower from Puget last year with 192GiB of RAM before the memory craze happened and I've been quite happy with it. Zero reliability issues and excellent performance. Coincidentally, I also ordered a custom Tiki-based gaming system from Falcon NW for a family member and that's also been amazing. I think I would be hard-pressed to choose between the two system builders, but Puget definitely has the edge for workstations since they offer Full-size towers and other hardware that Falcon NW does not. Conversely, Falcon NW offers custom cases and the very best of hardware for gamers with unheard of customization options like custom paint jobs.

cmxch 9mo ago

Can at least vouch for the (Sapphire Rapids) Xeons. With the right cooling, you can throw absurd TDP generating loads and they just keep on chugging along. With octochannel memory, an 8480 can be slightly indistinguishable from an older GPU if used that way.

camillomiller 9mo ago

They don't sell Macs, so I guess Apple Silicon chips woulnd't make the list anyway, but would be interesting to see reliability compared to the Intel ones. In my experience CPU are nonetheless a very low percentage of failures in consumer hardware these days, regardless of the designer.

storus 9mo ago
I had two M3 Max 128GB RAM/8TB SSD that had GPU issues (the second one was likely a refurb so probably returned by somebody else) and am now waiting for the third one. M3 Ultra 512GB RAM was rock solid so far though.

blargthorwars 9mo ago

We've had quite a few large Samsung SATA drives fail or start to fail. 4TB and up seems especially suspicious. Not back to spinning levels of badness, but we had a 3% failure rate. Previously, two years ago, it would have about an order of magnitude less.

icegreentea2 9mo ago

Wow, 2.5% failure rates for customer CPUs? I just... I dunno, I just mentally binned CPUs (as a solid state object, and one of the highest value add components to a system) to have failure rates in the ~1% range. I know the effort it takes to get asymptotically closer to 0% failure rate, and so this is more of a misread (on my part) on what the market tolerates and the vendor's pricing/value strategy. Cool!