thanks for watching Techquickie 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 Techquickie 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
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