It's coming up on 1 a.m.

I have a problem in my life.

Keeps me up at night, keeps me away from my family,

which that's the one that really bothers me.

It's rendering, look at this.

This particular file that I've been working

on right now, nine and a half hours

worth of rendering on this thing.

And I've still got an hour to go.

What do you do man?

I love 4k 60 frames per second footage, I love it.

Prince Rupert, look at me.

The rule of Prince Rupert.

(meowing)

This is a Panasonic GH5, it shoots fantastic imagery,

but the problem is, the camera hardware

is outpacing the computer rendering hardware.

You put that stuff through that computer right there,

it's crunching, like the computer's pegged out, right?

And I'm still spending hours and hours of render time.

I need a better solution.

So I flew to Seattle, there's a guy

named Jon about to pick me up.

He owns a company called Puget Systems,

and they make specialty computers for certain applications.

We're gonna go meet with him.

How's it goin' - Hey how are you?

- Throw stuff in the back?

- Yes. - Awesome.

This is is Jon, he owns a company called Puget Systems,

and you're basically the answer

to everyone's computer problems, right?

- Well, not all the problems.

(laughing)

We don't really ask what hardware do you want.

We ask what are trying to do?

And then we can tell you, what hardware do you want?

- Oh my gosh.

And so you start from there and then

build the hardware based on what they say.

- Right, right.

- What?

Why is that so revolutionary?

- I don't know, it shouldn't be.

- It should be!

You're kinda tucked away here.

It's kind of a nice little area.

- Yeah, we like it.

- [Destin] So do you guys personally believe this?

Is that the deal?

- Personally believe what?

- [Destin] This thing that's on the wall behind you.

- Oh, well I mean we have tattoos of it, so --

- [Destin] You have tattoos of it?

(laughing)

Jon took me into the lab, which is where they test stuff.

His brother Matt and their co-worker William

spend the bulk of their time testing

different combinations of hardware in this room.

What I found hilarious is that when

I would ask a very specific yes or no question

about performance or hardware to buy,

it became very clear that every answer

I received was going to come with a caveat.

- Sometimes, depends if it's right.

- If it's set up right, in supported applications.

- Yeah, for that very specific task.

- Depends on exactly what you are doing,

and the balance between everything.

- [Destin] The caveat there answers because

they've actually collected the data.

They perform a suite of benchmark tests

which are a standardized task you can use

to see how fast or efficient a hardware configuration is.

Over and over they'll run a software test,

swap out a component and do it all over again.

Here you can see Matt's computer is automatically

running an Adobe Lightroom benchmark in the background,

thousands of files are being manipulated automatically.

They'll do this for hours, then they'll change out one

component, in this case a processor,

and they'll do it all over again.

The results of these tests are a graph like this.

In this very specific case, you can see,

testing Photoshop, the data shows

that this intel I9, whatever,

however you say this 8 core processor

is the best you can currently buy.

Which is strange, because it's nearly

a quarter of the price of the most

expensive processor they sell.

So the question is how can an eight core processor

run fast than a 12 core processor?

Because I always thought that more cores

meant it's gonna be faster.

First of all, what does a core mean, in a CPU.

- It's the computer unit that can

execute tasks within your operating system.

And so back before 2005, it was all single core.

And in order to make your computer faster,

you just make that chip faster.

But in around 2005, we were getting

to the point where Moore's Law

was starting to taper off,

and we had to find other ways to make computers faster.

And so now we're more under this new thing, Amdahl's Law.

That talks about, okay, if you have multiple

cores, multiple processors, that all

have to work together, it's measurement of

the efficiency of your software in being able to do that.

- [Destin] What John is saying here,

is that even if you have more cores in your processor,

it only makes your computer faster if the program

you're running is more parallelizable.

That's a word, I looked it up.

- One size fits all computing, those days are over.

It's tailored hardware for the application.

- In the interest of not making this feel

like a commercial for your company,

who else is doing this in the space?

'Cause I asked you if I could come talk about

all this stuff, and you agreed to build a computer for me.

So let's just be clear about that.

There's an exchange happening here.

But, who else is doing this?

Or is this just you.

- Well I mean, I can't say that there's nobody else

doing this, but the reason that we focus so hard on this,

is that we see, there's such a void.

You'll see a lot of places, that'll do gaming machines

and consumer machines, but this world of work stations

is like where server meets consumer,

and it's kinda this blend in the middle,

and we don't see a lot of people going after it,

and that's why we are.

I could take you out the warehouse and you could see

like how we actually put things together,

do quality control and image computers and what not.

- So this is the actual box, I spec-ed out with William,

being built right now.

- Yeah.

- Okay, and so this is the housing.

- Nice little dolly you got going on here.

Anyone can assemble a computer.

Just like Legos, the hardware is built

to click together so you can do it yourself.

But there's a huge difference in assembling a computer,

and integrating a well running system.

According to system's engineers,

all physical components in the world

interact with four different interfaces.

These four interfaces are spatial,

material, information, and energy.

A spatial interaction is how they physically

connect together, like Legos clicking together,

or like with screws or something.

A material interface would be some type

of mass that's being moved back and forth

between different sub-components, like moving hot air,

or fluid through a system.

They interact with information by well,

I mean this is obvious, it's a computer,

data, moving around, right?

One of the more interesting interfaces in

a computer system is energy.

You have electricity and heat transfer

you have to deal with.

I just realized that that's what you are.

You're computer systems engineers.

Obviously, you're name says systems,

but systems engineering is about

integrating all these different components

and seeing how they work together.

And if you change one thing, it effects everything else --

- Oh yeah, oh yeah.

- Are familiar with the fied of systems engeineering?

- Well, I mean I'm empathizing with

what you're saying right now.

Like some example of that,

almost all modern computer hardware

does thermal throttling.

So you're probably not gonna break something

if you don't cool it adequately.

But you're not gonna get the full performance out of it.

And so it isn't enough just for us to see

is this computer stable, because it might be stable

but not running at full speed.

So that's why it's so important

that we actually understand what

the computer's gonna be used for.

And that we benchmark it, and we know

that it's providing the performance as expected.

- [Destin] Oh, so that's why the benchmarks

last six hours, because you have to hit steady state.

- [Jon] We have to let it all heat up, and yeah.

- [Destin] Oh, so it's not just like processor

steady state, power draw, it's thermal steady state.

If you wanna check out how they test these interactions,

go see the behind the scenes video on the second channel.

What's going on here?

- This is our --

- [Destin] You have a laser engraver.

- Yeah, we have a couple.

This one we use for etching logos onto things.

- [Destin] What the heck dude?

Are you about to do mine?

- [Jon] Yep.

- [Destin] Really?

- Uh-huh.

- [Destin] So you planned all this.

- Yes, this was planned.

- [Destin] This was planned.

Look at you, being all fancy schmancy.

In summary, I have personally fallen

into the trap a time or two where I went to a website,

and bought the most expensive machine

I could afford at the time, thinking

that that would buy me time.

Do not do this.

In my case, I need to edit, and I wanna sleep.

(whimsical music)

Can you put this in the...

- Ooh.

- So does this mean you're gonna get

to eat dinner with us a lot more?

- Heh, yeah.

You have the honor, who's gonna do it?

- [Boy] What?

- [Destin] Who's gonna hit the button?

I can't even hear it, can you?

That's the license agreement.

You're supposed to read that entire thing.

- C'mon, I don't have time.

- We're getting everything ready for you Dad.

- I just like lookin' at the back, there's just

so many boards.

(laughing)

- Okay, we have now optimized a computer

for rendering capabilities, I'll tell

you the benchmark numbers here in a second.

But now, it's time to optimize the bed for sleep.

Okay, syncing two cameras up.

Here's how it works.

You're smart, you know how the internet works,

you can tell if people are trying to sell you something,

or if they actually use it, so just listen

with your smart brain, and you'll hear

what the deal is here.

This video is sponsored by Casper, which

is stinkin' awesome because I like to sleep.

This is a Casper mattress, the way

it works is you order it online,

casper.com/smarter preferably.

They ship it to your house, you open the box,

it inflates, it's a really cool process to watch.