Computer hardware - Topics

Skew between pairs in a bundled cable corrupting wide parallel transfers How much RAM a machine needs before swap starts to hurt The last physical servers: what still runs on bare metal and why What RTS and CTS actually do on an RS-232 link Prebuilt versus assembling: the warranty argument cuts both ways Telnet and SNMP version one survive on production gear because nothing else speaks to it Mixing two RAM kits that each work alone and refuse to work together Rack power density planning for GPU servers A BIOS update that drops support for a CPU the board already accepted Choosing parallel over serial links for a short backplane run NVMe versus SATA: the speed difference a person can actually feel Firmware in an SSD decides between a sudden death and a warning Case airflow: three intake fans and one exhaust beat the reverse layout A machine that reboots at random: power supply vs RAM vs thermal Soldered RAM makes the laptop bought today the laptop kept for six years A repair shop blames the part and the part vendor blames the shop Line coding choices for a 10 Gbps backplane trace A workstation GPU costs ten times a gaming one for the same silicon Buying a used mining GPU: what a year of full load does to the fans What a MAC address table overflow does to a switch in a busy meeting room Second-hand server CPUs are cheap and the motherboard hides the real cost