hardware terrifies me
So, the other day my computer was really struggling to keep up with streaming, only keeping up with about 10-15 fps on average and hitting 100C, the maximum operating temperature of the CPU. I’ve been having trouble with it for a while, and I know it’s not great and I had been meaning to fix it for a while, but I had never got around to it.
On stream, I talked about how I figured that I just needed to get a bigger case because my current case is a tiny mini-ITX case called the NCase M1 which only measures 307mm x 157mm x 237mm with a volume of 12.7 liters on account of my perhaps financially concerning fixation with building small computers.
However, a friend insisted that we could fix this problem without spending any money! So, we re-applied the thermal paste and adjusted the fans to change the airflow, and ran prime 95 to see if things were better. And, thankfully, they were. I can now easily stream at 60 FPS without hitting 100C while vtubing, running FL Studio through its paces, and playing DOOM: Eternal all at the same time. This is an unrealistic workload, but we did do this. I’m still bad at DOOM. However, when I got back home and tried transcoding a video… everything on my computer crashed. What did I do wrong? Did I break one of my expensive components? 😱
Thankfully, my friend was still available to inform me about what the likely cause was. You see, as it turns out, the fact that my CPU always had to throttle on high workloads likely masked another problem: the settings for my RAM were not set correctly in the BIOS. Before, the throttling slowed the CPU down enough that the incorrect timings were fine. But, now it was not fine. Things crashed all the time the moment I tried to do anything involving a lot of memory operations.
The auto-detected XMP profiles did not produce a stable system nor was the “gear” set correctly. I don’t really know what gear is really, but apparently DDR5 ram won’t work on gear 1; I had to manually change the gear up to 2, except it’s actually called “Memory Controller : DRAM Frequency Ratio” in my BIOS and not the similarly named “BCLK Frequency : DRAM Frequency Ratio” setting. Also, the advertised 6000MHz speed of the ram did not result in a stable system, so I had to reduce the speed of the ram a bit as well.
After tweaking the settings around for a few hours, I finally settled on some settings that passed a full memtest check. Honestly, it’s incredible to me that my friend was able to help me. I mean, come on, my computer looks like this:
Hardware is terrifying. Hopefully I won’t have to think about it as much next time.
