Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 155

Yes, two or more non-piddling graphics cards both working hard is how you roast your computer. You generally want wide video card spacing (many slots in between) and/or blower coolers that exhaust much of the hot air outside the case. Or water cooling. Yes, there's no magic solutions.

One of the problems with SLI and Crossfire is the noise levels, yeah. And temps. And power draw. Not to mention microstuttering. And driver support. This is why you avoid it when possible.

As for airflow, it depends on the case, layout, components you have, what noise and cooling you're targeting, how much you mind cleaning the internals of dust (which gets into heatsinks and reduces performance, so high-airflow setups being better are talking about clean-state conditions), etc. Neutral pressure isn't necessarily the best for what you need. Also, are you assuming equivalent fans on intake and exhaust? For neutral pressure you may need more intake than exhaust if the intake is fighting against doors, drive cages, filters, etc. And some cases are full of holes and will just allow intake from fans to exit without cooling anything.

A few degrees doesn't really matter much. I'd rather use dust filters and/or as few fans as I can get away with to do the job.

It depends on the fan design, but larger sizes (length/width as well as thickness) usually have higher airflow at equivalent rpm. As for the sound produced, that depends a whole lot on the motor / bearing and blade design and where you're sticking it, in addition to the rpm.

Generally four fans is slightly better than two, but that really depends on layout and other factors. Take the classic Antec 300 as an example. It comes with 120mm back exhaust and 140mm top exhaust. There are two 120mm intake positions that are unfilled. Over the years, people have reported adding two 120mm fans as intake and seen most temperatures drop say three degrees (maybe more for drives).

A ring bus (bus being a communications system / lines that transfers data from one component in a board or processor to another; ring being the topology of the network where each node is connected only two its two neighbors and the whole thing loops around so it's a ring) is used in modern Intel laptop / desktop / server CPUs to communicate between the CPU cores, graphics, L3 cache, and system agent. Different stops along the ring can communicate with each other by passing data to their neighbor, who relays it over, who relays it over, etc., until it gets there. It's fairly scalable in terms of design.

The uncore used to be an Intel-specific term for what they called all the stuff in the processor that isn't in the CPU cores proper (or integrated graphics I think). So "un"core. Presumably this is some really dumb yet descriptive name some engineer(s) came up with. In more recent years, they've called it the system agent. This includes the memory controller, L3 cache, different communications interfaces to the rest of the system, power controller, etc. In other words, the parts doing the dirty work behind the scenes.

edit: see below. system agent refers to less of the stuff. also, mobo manufacturers sometimes reuse old names, which is confusing

Modern CPUs have multiple voltages fed to them. The core voltage is the most important one, and that's what you're thinking of. For basic overclocking, you just need to adjust core voltage as needed. More advanced overclocks and optimal tunings may require altering the other voltages as well.

I don't have Haswell and forget which of these get the same voltage. I think maybe all the above get the same voltage and are controlled by the same setting?

You overclock your RAM by getting it to run at a clock rate that's over what the default setting is... same as anything else. Clock rate (frequency) is the main parameter of interest. There are also timings that influence data fetch / write latencies in conjunction with the operating frequency. And to make it stable, you may need to increase the voltage it gets.

The CPU and RAM frequencies are multiples of the DMICLK (previously BCLK). For non-Intel or older systems, you could adjust the BCLK significantly to increase frequencies in fine steps. On modern Intel systems, doing so breaks things quickly, so you're mostly just adjusting multipliers, which results in larger step sizes.