Doing various experiments about overclocking, I discovered a potentially deadly bug in the BIOS of my Asus ROG Zenith Extreme; beware, it is very dangerous, and could really kill your CPU and/or motherboard, so keep an eye – or, better, both, open!

When it happens: if you load the 4GHz overclock profile, the temperatures read are way lower than the real ones – and when I say way lower, I mean something like 40°C! Yes, sometimes on idle temps are below zero!!! So, if you don’t know it, you continue to push your sistem, fans will never know that CPU temp is too high and stay at low speed, CPU will continue to operate at very high temp and if you are lucky, the system will just switch off; if you are unlucky Read more

As the max temperature of my (overclocked) CPU was a bit higher than expected – at least, following some data found on the net – I tried to find out why it happened… and, guess what? There were two (actually, three) main reasons:

• alternate fans: I used not the original fans, because I had two ones with red LEDs that I wanted to use… they worked well, BUT… their speed and air flow were not up to the task, so I switched back to the original Enermax ones – that are faster – and max temps went down by two or three degrees
• push or pull? The default setup is push – it means that fans push hot air from inside the case through the radiator, then out of the case; the pull option is to take the fresh air through radiator from outside the case, and release it inside the case; I went for a third option, pushing fresh air from the outside, with fans on top of the radiator instead on bottom, like in the first row, second column of the following image; temp went down another few degrees

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O U want 1 2? Just pay me top $$$! 😀 😀 😀
Or, simply, shop for the parts – eventually replacing one or more with others – and build it up! My advice is, make your homework first – find out what your next computer should (mainly) do, then go for the right one; beware! “The ResolveR” is aimed to video editing, and it’s good for a lot of tasks; but, if you need a computer mainly to surf the web and simple office task, you better off spending a fraction of its cost, and spend the rest to get a nice vacation with your partner! Or, if you want to play games, then you can get better results using a CPU with less cores, and getting a single powerful GPU.

If, after reading this, you are still convinced to spend an awful amount of money to get an “ultimate restoration workstation”… well, follow some more advices: Read more

Those are links that helped me to take my decisions; I guess they could be useful to anybody who thinks about building a new computer, or to upgrade some of the actual hardware. Read more

Human beings have long term, and short term memory – and I had problems with the latter… well, where was I? Oh, yes, human beings have long term, and short term memory… 😀 Computers are the same, with HDDs/SSDs for long term memory, and RAM for short term; so, let’s discover what I needed.

First, long term: I had quite some HDDs, full of previous projects, many in various progress from barely started to almost finished; the bigger ones will be used for the new workstation – one 2TB and two 4TB Seagate Barracuda. For the SSD, I got a small S3+ 120GB, and it will be used temporarily to store OS and programs.

Next step will be Read more

The heart is the most important “stuff”: without this, even well functioning brain, lungs, kidneys etc. could not be alive… and, in a computer, the heart is the PSU – power supply unit. A quite underrated component, often chosen mostly by the remains of the budget. But I had a bad experience with one of them, so I was ready to give it more importance than before – because, well.. it IS important, very much!

First of all: do you know how much power do you need? It is not a simple question, but luckily there is a very simple tool to find the right answer: a power calculator! Read more

Must decide which organ is a GPU… first, both lungs and kidneys are (usually) coupled in human beings (and other mammals), so, maybe, I must be forced to use two GPUs… Read more

I had a body (the case) and the brain (CPU); then, I needed a nervous system (the motherboard). ThreadRipper socket is called TR4, and it is NOT compatible with Ryzen AM4 socket, so I needed a, guess what? more expensive, dedicated motherboard, an x399.

There are not so many models available, in comparison to other sockets, but yet there are enough to be undecided… Read more

Let’s start with the kind of computer I wanted – or needed?
I thought about pre-built one, possibly a workstation – big, tough, durable, with selected hardware… all good things, but at premium price – a lot more of the sum of the parts prices… yes, I know that they should earn some bucks to put all the pieces together, but hey, a grand (sometimes), really?

It seemed I was forced to build my first custom made computer – pardon me, my first HEDT (High End DeskTop) – that is, a nice acronym to call a powerful (and usually expensive) computer… Read more

So, after decided I badly needed a new computer – a workstation, perhaps? Or a not-yet-identified “thing” that lately I knew be an HEDT (High End DeskTop)? I had to decide what I actually needed!

Let’s start with the CPU: it must be powerful, big, fast, with a lot of cores and threads, and be power hungry! 🙂 But mostly, it should be FAST… Read more