Tech Things You Dont Know But Are Too Afraid To Ask.

[Keudn]

Why does everyone hate TN so much? Not trolling or starting a flame war serious question, I have 2 TN panels and yeah the viewing angles aren't good but who cares?! Like seriously is everyone either sitting 3" from their screen or are they like hanging off the side of their chair? And color wise I have used a IPS display (granted it was a low end one) for a few days and it was impossible to get the colors to look as good as my TN screen, they were either really yellow or really blue

[79wjd]

Why does everyone hate TN so much? Not trolling or starting a flame war serious question, I have 2 TN panels and yeah the viewing angles aren't good but who cares?! Like seriously is everyone either sitting 3" from their screen or are they like hanging off the side of their chair? And color wise I have used a IPS display (granted it was a low end one) for a few days and it was impossible to get the colors to look as good as my TN screen, they were either really yellow or really blue

Good IPS displays look much nicer, although, I agree viewing angles are kind of irrelevant (for me anyway)...but in surround gaming, maybe viewing angles would matter... 

[TheGreenRanger]

I was under the impression that having 2 sticks means a CPU can access both sticks at the same time making it run faster, however with RAM being really fast anyways I don't know how much (if any) performance gain there is

 

Using dual lane (2x4) gives you about 5-10% increase in RAM speed, over a single lane (1x8). To work however the dual lane technology needs to be supported from the mobo and the CPU.

 

Interesting, thanks.

Does dual lane introduce stability issues? And if so, how significant?

[chpoit]

What is CFM on a fan?

[79wjd]

Interesting, thanks.

Does dual lane introduce stability issues? And if so, how significant?

No

 

What is CFM on a fan?

The volume of air the fan is able to push in a certain period of time. (Cubic feet per minute)

[chpoit]

 

The volume of air the fan is able to push in a certain period of time. (Cubic feet per minute)

 OK thanks, makes sense

[TheArium]

I've never quite understood what CAS latency indicates on RAM, and whether or not you should actually care... 

[99vw]

I've been wondering about this fibre-optic craze, because the main thing that seems to be going around is that "it's a hundred-year infrastructure, you don't need to upgrade the lines, all you need to do is upgrade the boxes at each end"

I get that fibre-optic is absolutely beastly-fast and efficient, and that it makes 10-gigabit over long distances a breeze, but am I the only one thinking that they are sugar-coating it a little bit as a miracle solution that will never need replacing? Surely there are physical limitations to the fibres?

 

Some of the drawbacks to fiber include a limited bend radius. Fiber can only transfer light where as copper can carry power in the case of (POE)Power Over Ethernet, not that this is normally a issue. Also the cost to test and repair fiber is much more expensive due to the specialized equipment required.

 

If you would like to know more http://www.excitingip.com/978/advantages-and-disadvantages-of-ofc-optical-fiber-cable-communication/

[Speedbird]

I've never quite understood what CAS latency indicates on RAM, and whether or not you should actually care... 

The time between a memory controller accessing an address and the data being available in that memory controller, measured in clock cycles.

 

For gaming on a discrete GPU, 1866 MHz and CL9 is good enough.

For gaming on an APU, 2133MHz should be good enough. I'm running a CL10 kit but I recommend at least CL9 for an APU.

For video editing and 3D rendering, higher numbers start to become important. I'd go for 2400 MHz and CL9.

[Leglessmatt]

how do you use linux?

 

Google everything.

[Norman_the_Owl]

Using dual lane (2x4) gives you about 5-10% increase in RAM speed, over a single lane (1x8). To work however the dual lane technology needs to be supported from the mobo and the CPU.

 

My question: why going with 2/3/4 GPUs doesn't increase its performance 2x/3x/4x times? Is it so hard to make drivers for it, or is there some other limitations?

Sorry If this was asked already, couldn't read all pages.

It's because of PCIE lanes. Less information is movable to and from the CPU. That's why haswell-e is a big deal, they have 40 PCIE lanes now

[KemoKa]

Why does everyone hate TN so much? Not trolling or starting a flame war serious question, I have 2 TN panels and yeah the viewing angles aren't good but who cares?! Like seriously is everyone either sitting 3" from their screen or are they like hanging off the side of their chair? And color wise I have used a IPS display (granted it was a low end one) for a few days and it was impossible to get the colors to look as good as my TN screen, they were either really yellow or really blue

Just for the record, you're not alone. I love TN panels and can't really see why everyone hates them so much. As someone who loves price to performance, and who happens to absolutely adore fast computers (I prefer speed over raw power) TN panels are excellent because in terms of response times they blow away every other competitor with absolutely no problem. I feel as if colour reproduction is more of a thing for more picky gamers and renderers.

I mean,TN panels already render more colours than we can differentiate between with the naked eye anyway. you can't tell the difference between one grayscale value and the adjacent ones, and there are only 256 of those.

I guess the fact that I'm colourblind between blue and purple helps my skepticism of the superiority of IPS panels, but...

[KemoKa]

My question: why going with 2/3/4 GPUs doesn't increase its performance 2x/3x/4x times? Is it so hard to make drivers for it, or is there some other limitations?

Sorry If this was asked already, couldn't read all pages.

The problem there is that you have the PCIe bus communicating with two GPUs at the same time, so it takes a lot longer for the GPUs to allocate which individual task needs to be done where. It still happens almost instantaneously, but it still diminishes the end performance, and the more GPUs you have, the less your return will be.

Look up the law of diminishing returns. it's a fundamental law of economics. Applies to literally everything along the lines of striping.

[vlado88]

The problem there is that you have the PCIe bus communicating with two GPUs at the same time, so it takes a lot longer for the GPUs to allocate which individual task needs to be done where. It still happens almost instantaneously, but it still diminishes the end performance, and the more GPUs you have, the less your return will be.

Look up the law of diminishing returns. it's a fundamental law of economics. Applies to literally everything along the lines of striping.

 

Thanks that makes sense.

Is it possible some kind of dual/quad channel technology to be made for this? I imagine that if its possible someone would have don it already, but i still have to ask...

[vishal04cesc]

why does flash make computers heat up?

[Dragoneye3769]

Why do people still say RAM speeds in megaherz? 2400MHz? More like 2,4Ghz! And what are chipsets and what do they do? X99, X79?

[KemoKa]

Thanks that makes sense.

Is it possible some kind of dual/quad channel technology to be made for this? I imagine that if its possible someone would have don it already, but i still have to ask...

That is basically what Crossfire and SLI are. You need a chipset and processor that can handle accessing multiple sticks of RAM at the same time for quad channel in the same way the processors need to be built to handle accessing multiple video cards at the same time.

It's a bit more complicated than that because the technologies are fundamentally different, but to be honest, RAM is affected by the same law of diminishing returns. Quad channel is not exactly twice as good (because fast is not the right word) as Dual channel. It's almost twice as good, and you get a gigantic performance increase off of it, but you aren't completely doubling performance or anything.

[harrynowl]

why does flash make computers heat up?

Because you're decoding something, which means the CPU needs to do that work.

[Spoilt]

I've been wondering about this fibre-optic craze, because the main thing that seems to be going around is that "it's a hundred-year infrastructure, you don't need to upgrade the lines, all you need to do is upgrade the boxes at each end"

I get that fibre-optic is absolutely beastly-fast and efficient, and that it makes 10-gigabit over long distances a breeze, but am I the only one thinking that they are sugar-coating it a little bit as a miracle solution that will never need replacing? Surely there are physical limitations to the fibres?

 

Fiber optics sends data via light pulses. Which means that data is can be transferred at light speed. The only limitation on speed is how fast the boxes on each end can process and modulate the pulses. Other limitations are the fact that the fiber itself is not 100% transparent so the distance is not as far as it potentially can be. Also, its more fragile and you can't bend it excessively.

[CyberHusky88]

Good IPS displays look much nicer, although, I agree viewing angles are kind of irrelevant (for me anyway)...but in surround gaming, maybe viewing angles would matter... 

I just got an IPS panel, and it looks MUCH nicer than my laptop's TN panel, I used to edit my backgrounds to give them a deeper feel, once I got my TN panel, I realized that my backgrounds were already nice and deep, I just had a crappy panel. For me changing to an IPS panel is like changing to an SSD, if you haven't done it, you won't notice the difference at first, but once you get into it, you won't be able to go back.

 

I don't have a surround gaming set-up, but I do still use multiple monitors for programming, and the viewing angles are really nice to have when you have multiple monitors, I have to constantly adjust my laptop monitor if I shift even slightly because I use it as my secondary monitor, and it's at an odd angle. So if you are only using one monitor the viewing angles aren't that important, but once you start using 2 or three, it becomes a bigger deal.

Also, if you have people of greatly varying heights using a shared computer, say someone 5' 6" and someone 6' 2", having those viewing angles would be really good for them so they don't have to constantly change the angle of the monitor when they use it.

[Rohit Jackdaw]

OK this is going to so sound utterly stupid, but I am totally confused with this as there are so many different ways and ugh everyone says the other is bad But How do you correctly apply thermal paste/compound. I have seen more than 10 different ways of doing it all claiming which one is better i trust Linus and Logan with the pea technique but is it really the best?

That depends on the CPU. Usually Line for Intel and Dot for AMD. It varies with the CPU Thermal Interface Material. AMD has it on the middle on most CPUs so dot but still some pf their chips will be different. Go to a Arctic silver website and there you can see different methods for different CPUs. TIM material matters a bit but mostly depends on CPUs.

My question is what is actually mining on CPU and GPU ? I saw Linus' video about Bitcoin and others but still I don't know what or how to do it.

[MrDucco]

they faster and allow more data to transfer at a time than 8x lanes

[RickA]

Why do you plug your monitor cable into the graphics card instead of your motherboard

[kkxlynx]

How to dual boot Mac OS X and Windows 7/8? 

[79wjd]

Why do you plug your monitor cable into the graphics card instead of your motherboard

Because the graphics card is the component doing the work.