Comment by skobes
5 hours 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.
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/qui...
[2] https://www.pugetsystems.com/parts/photography/Additional-Co...
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.