Joined 15 years ago
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
Also, they addressed the inventory size in the fine article. Maybe the snark isn't warranted?
My Puget Systems workstation for example has a simple AIO for cooling with some Noctua fans and a Fractal Design 7 XL full tower case.
The Tiki system I ordered for a family member from Falcon Northwest does have a custom case, but almost everything else is fairly standard inside. The super small form factor was important to them.
Could I have built either of these systems myself? Absolutely -- I've done that for at least prior 20 years or so, and I've built dozens for employers, but it sure was nice to buy one that just worked this time instead of having to having to fiddle with memory sticks or find exactly the right bios settings for stability, etc.
I'm well aware of the premium I paid but I can honestly say it has been incredibly nice to have a workstation that just works without having to fiddle with bios updates or hardware. I also don't really have the time to spare so I was entirely willing to trade funds for time.
I've been pretty darn happy with the Puget Systems custom workstation I ordered last year before the memory craze started (especially since it has 192GiB of DDR5).
I also ordered another family member a custom "Tiki" system from Falcon Northwest and that has also been quite excellent from what I've seen and they've told me.
Now is obviously not the most economical time to order a new system, but when it is appropriate (and for what it's worth) I think those are two great system builders.
But also, I don't care if it's a tired argument--this isn't about how things are, it's about how we want them to be. I don't want to live in a state action-coerced society.
As far as I'm aware, dwAllocationGranularity returned via GetSystemInfo determines the MEM_RESERVE alignment and size. Yes, in practice this is always 64KiB but may not always be true in the future.
Additionally, dwPageSize returned via GetSystemInfo determines the alignment and size for MEM_COMMIT which in practice is 4KiB or 16KiB.
Put differently, while an application might be stuck with allocation-granularity reservations, the actual commit is in units of page size, right?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/memory/reser...
Page protections are also based on page size afaik, for example: https://www.softwareverify.com/blog/leaking-memory-with-virt...
Or the way I read it, you might be stuck with a dwAllocationGranularity reservation, but the actual commit increment is in units of dwPageSize.
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.
