Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech quickie click the subscribe button then enable notifications with the Bell icon so you won't miss any future videos it's been a while but tech quickie is striking back with episode 5 of avoiding common PC building traps which will hopefully save you from disaster even more effectively than a dead tauntaun or that now-infamous video with the lid strong anti-static wrist strap speaking of which let's tackle one thing those folks were roundly criticized for using too much thermal paste now although there's a fairly widespread belief that using too much thermal goop will have a catastrophic effect on cooling performance the truth is that unless you go really overboard it actually won't be too different from what you'd see with a proper amount of thermal paste that is as long as you install the cooler on top correctly with suitable mounting pressure your heatsink should simply force any excess goo to flow out the sides but we're not saying that's not a problem any extra thermal paste that gets on to the motherboard or stuck in the CPU socket can wind up shorting it out some thermal compounds are both non conductive and non capacitive so they shouldn't damage anything but many others contain metal to assist in heat transfer and are electrically conductive or capacitive and besides even if you use a non conductive thermal paste let's say containing a material such as ceramic leaving your build looking like you burst a tube of toothpaste on it it's just really bad form and thermal paste tends to be quite difficult to clean up so remember in most situations a grain of rice two pea-sized amount is all you need and if you're ever unsure many manufacturers actually provide guidance for this as well speaking of avoiding electrical shorts it's a good practice to build upgrade or repair your PC on an anti-static surface especially if you're doing your building in a dry environment this doesn't have to be anything fancy though and a wooden tabletop or even a cardboard box like the one that your motherboard came in should do you fine if you're still concerned though you can improve your static management in a number of ways for your tabletop you can get anti-static mats that clip to a metal ground such as the grill on your plugged in but powered off power supply and for your person you can get anti-static wrist straps just slip it on and clip the end of it to your plugged in but powered off of course power supply this along with common-sense things like not working on a carpet and touching metal now and then to discharge any static build-up is enough for most people if you're in a professional environment though and you want to take it to the next level you may also want to consider anti-static flooring that is grounded to a nearby electrical outlet tip number three never actually used to be a problem but these days it's not uncommon to get a nasty shock after spending a ton of money on a CPU and motherboard only to find out your brand-new system won't boot you see sometimes a newer generation of processor will actually use the same motherboard socket as the previous generation but may require a UEFI BIOS or firmware update in order to communicate properly so be sure to check specifically what CPU generations any motherboard you're interested in buying supports and which firmware version is required if you do end up needing to flash the BIOS to get your new processor working some boards may actually require you to have the older gender on hand in order to perform the update so if you run into this make sure you ask a friend or the techs at the store to get you jump-started so to speak some manufacturers have worked around this however by including a feature on their motherboards that allows you to update the BIOS with a USB Drive and no CPU installed pretty clutch while we're on the subject of CPUs for the love of all that is holy don't push down on them when you're installing them processors from both AMD and Intel are designed to gently drop into the socket with only gravity to aid them there is no force necessary on the user's part as the retention arm beside the socket will hold the CPU in for you on LGA sockets where the pins are on the motherboard pushing down on the CPU can bend them and they are very difficult to repair and as for more traditional PGA sockets where the pins are on the CPU well actually if it's aligned correctly pushing down won't hurt it the issue is that if it's not aligned correctly then you can absolutely mangle your CPUs pins rendering it inoperable finally here's something important about a different connector yeah I'm not two slot although many people associate MDOT too with superfast nvme SSDs that use your computer's PCI Express interface much faster than SATA m dot 2 is really just a type of physical connector and MDOT two drives that use the SATA interface also exist so if you really want that extra storage speed you need to pay close attention to both the compatibility of your system and to the drive that you're shopping for because you don't want to pull the trigger on what you think is a super good deal only to find out that it's not any faster than your old SATA SSD from five years ago so do you guys have any tips that you haven't seen us mention yet if you do share them with the community down in the comment section and stay tuned for episode 6 of avoiding common PC building traps now with more Ewoks or not we could just leave out the Ewoks all the Ewoks are you worried about a data breach exposing your financial information to CD cyber criminals then check out privacy com slash tech quickie for a free easy to use service that hides your credit card number privacy calm creates a virtual card number that's locked to which ever online store you're shopping at so even if that store gets hacked attackers can't use your card elsewhere and if they try you'll get a push notification so you'll never be in the dark cards are so simple to 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