Week 3 Posting - Flashing BIOS

Flashing your BIOS was a term I used to hear my more tech-savvy friends say, but I never understood what they meant. When searching for PC parts, I also read user reviews about updating your BIOS, and some motherboards may require you to flash the BIOS. I would ignore any motherboard with a review like that since it was way out of my league. So, you can imagine my joy when I learned that it doesn't mean I'm forcefully running current into a chip with a stun gun to torture it into becoming a blank slate so I can update it. Seeing that newer motherboards can directly access updates via the internet is such a relief. I plan to use one of my old PCs, which I no longer use, and see what I can do about flashing the BIOS just for the experience. 

Week 2 Posting - Motherboards

     Learning this week that motherboards can have multiple channels and that the number of slots doesn't correlate to more channels was something I never knew about. Your motherboard might have only two slots for RAM, but that doesn't mean it has only one channel; it only has one slot for channel one and another for channel two. It has made one part of choosing a motherboard simpler to understand, and now I know what to look for in RAM slots in the future. 

    Also, I learned that your motherboard needs to support overlock if you intend to overclock your PC, which I just learned of. I assumed the only thing that mattered was ensuring your CPU could overclocked and that the motherboard had nothing to do with that. Explaining how the channels worked for the graphics cards took a lot of work to understand. Still, now I know that 2.0 vs 3.0 won't affect the video card's performance. 

Week 1 Posting - Introduction to the IT World

 Hello to everyone in the IT world! I've always been interested in how new video cards seem to be coming out each week. New video games are starting to demand more out of your video card which forces you to upgrade all the time just to keep up. The way video cards were being used for crypto mining always fascinated me as well. I want to know exactly is going on under the hood of a video card and why so many versions exist, such as 3060, 3070, 3080. 3080 TI. What are the differences in the jumps from the tens, and what does the TI versions add as well, and the fact that you can use multiple videos card at once on a single PC seems crazy to me.  All I seem to notice is that the bigger the number the better the performance, and it's something I've always wanted to learn more about due to my love for PC gaming.