| Why Choose A Platypus PC? |
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Our custom computers are designed and tested to provide a seamless computing experience. Our custom PCs are built around the idea that if you build right you can build to last. So many outdated computers end up in landfills and storeroom shelves and are becoming and environmental hazard. Our custom computers are built to perform beyond today's software boundaries, to provide the ability to operate software of the future. Additionally our custom PCs are built on the ASUS family of motherboard platforms, with the capacity to upgrade into the years to come.
Why a Water Cooled PC?
The obvious advantage of building a water cooled PC is the increased cooling capacity of your system. Today's high end systems generate a lot more heat that can be damaging to its components. Not just damaging, but heat can actually reduce the performance of your PC - slowing down processing, and causing intermittent errors that can affect your stored data. Liquid dissipates heat four times faster than air, keeping your components much cooler, and can extend their lifetime. The thermal conductivity of water is roughly 25 times that of air, giving liquid cooling a huge advantage in heat transfer over air-cooling.
Typically with a liquid cooled computer you may be looking to overclock your computer, which will provide increased performance gains. You can rationalize that the ability to overclock a component to a level that competes with a more expensive component such as a processor or video card; gives value back out of your liquid cooled setup. So while liquid cooling is more expensive, you can reason that your what you are paying for is the increase in performance of the components you are purchasing or already have. Furthermore, liquid cooling provides the capability to overclock the best parts available to even higher levels not attainable by an air cooled PC.
Another benefit of a liquid cooled PC is noise reduction. Today's manufacturers produce radiators designed and optimized for low speed fans providing high performance at very low noise levels. Such applications are commonly used in sound studios and other environments where noise level is a concern, as well as individuals who just prefer a quiet PC. A positive side effect of eliminating all those fans is that it doesn't require pulling fresh air into the case to keep it cool. I say fresh air, but actually that air carries lots of dust with it that coats everything in the case. Anybody that has opened up their case after a year knows what that looks like. Liquid cooling your computer won't eliminate dust, but it will help reduce the time needed between cleanings. (Make sure to clean your computers regularly, air cooled or liquid cooled!)
The one benefit of a liquid cooled PC nobody really talks about is the visual appeal. If you're thinking about investing into a liquid cooled computer, you probably spend a significant amount of time on the computer, either working or for personal use. To spend that much time with something it makes sense to have something that is interesting to look at. Automobiles are essentially tools to get us from one location to another, for work or personal use, and you can see the value in having one that is visually pleasing if you're going to spend a significant amount of time using it. If you spend 8 hours or more starring at a monitor, it's nice to have something interesting to look at from time to time.
At Platypus PC we strive to offer the best customer support to be found anywhere, whether you have a product/pricing inquiry or decide to change a component option during the build process, we recognize the multitude of options available and the many decisions that must be made to put together a system that will meet your current computing needs and offer options for future upgrades that prolong the life and value of your system instead of the limited, designed to be obsolete in the near future approach taken by virtually all major vendors and even some custom builders.
All builds have their limits and you often sacrifice one aspect of your "build options" to gain more value elsewhere. For example, consider a system designed for high-end gaming. A common, money is no object approach, would be to simply build a system using the components with the most performance in each category. Although this clearly offers the ultimate in gaming performance, it does so at a premium. A more common approach often used by gamers is design the build around the processor and video card(s) as these two components are responsible for the bulk of the system graphical performance. Components such as RAM, and hard drives tend to be less critical in determining graphical performance and using mid to mid-high end components here will offer gaming performance that is close to if no the same as that offered by a system comprised of nothing but the best components available in every category.
Additionally, a premium component in any device category tends to offer a nominal increase in performance over the "second best" component in the same line for a disproportionate increase in cost. For example, Intel's newest cpu technology is the core i7 series of processors. The highest performing member of the series is the Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 965, which sells for roughly $1,000 USD at most retailers. The second member of this family is the Core i7 940 and commonly priced around $550.00 USD. Both are quad-core processors that are built using the same 45 nm (nanometer) manufacturing process, offer identical amounts of L2 and L3 cache, and vary slightly in the QPI and clock speeds (3.2ghz|6.4 GT/s for the 965 and 2.93ghz|4.8 QT/s for the 940). This particular comparison involves two attributes that vary so a simple 1 variable comparison/optimization is not possible. Even so, the 10% clock speed difference and QPI difference between the chips does not warrant the 100% increase in cost for the 965 extreme edition for most builds. Components that differ in only one specification are even simpler to optimally select for your particular build requirements. The performance/price trend that exists in this comparison is observed for nearly all component categories. Component performance and cost beyond a certain product, if not the entire product line is exponential in nature: Every increase n performance is less in magnitude, and more costly than the previous increase.
This trend is not an absolute, unbreakable relationship between performance and cost, but it is a very rare product that offers the best performance attainable at the best performance/price ratio. The 2nd or 3rd product in most component lines often will offer real world performance that is indistinguishable from the top-end component that commonly sells for more than twice as much money. If you benchmark the components to quantify the difference, you will see the same exponential trend for most components. Additionally, numerical differences that can be measured with various benchmarking software, can still be insignificant in being representative of performance in regards to a given application. That is, this numerical difference, while demonstrable with benchmarking software, doesn't functionally exist for an application and won't be noticeable to the user. A 100fps difference between two video cards in a game is not noticeable and if functionally a non-issue to the user if the slower component still delivers 400 fps in a particular application. The ever-present law of diminishing returns will still apply, however. There are many other similar decisions that should be made to get a product that delivers the unique performance and options you need, at a great value. You can customize to your heart's content and pick what you want and how to configure it or ask us for recommendations as well as any mix in-between.
We enjoy corresponding with our customers and/or interested parties and will be happy to answer all inquiries throughout any phase of the process, from questions and quotes, to build changes and shipping.
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