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Technology Tap
Technology Tap
A+ Fundamentals : Power First, Stability Always Chapter 3
What if the real cause of your random reboots isn’t the GPU at all—but the power plan behind it? We take you end to end through a stability-first build, starting with the underrated hero of every system: clean, properly sized power. You’ll learn how to calculate wattage with 25–30% headroom, navigate 80 Plus efficiency tiers, and safely adopt ATX 3.0 with the 12VHPWR connector—no sharp bends, modular cable sanity, and the UPS/surge stack that prevents nasty surprises when the lights flicker.
From there, we shift into storage strategy that balances speed and safety. HDD, SATA SSD, and NVMe each earn their place, and we break down RAID 0/1/5/6/10 in plain language so you can pick the right array for your workload. We underline a hard truth: RAID protects against disk failure, not human error, so versioned offsite backups remain non-negotiable. Real-world stories—including a painful RAID 5 rebuild gone wrong—highlight why RAID 6 and RAID 10 matter for bigger or busier systems.
Memory and CPU round out the backbone. We simplify DDR4 vs DDR5, explain how frequency and CAS affect real latency, and show why matched pairs and dual channel deliver the performance you paid for. You’ll get quick wins like enabling XMP/EXPO, when ECC is worth it, and how to troubleshoot training hiccups. Then we open the CPU: cores, threads, cache, sockets, chipsets, and why firmware comes before hardware when upgrades fail to post. Cooling decisions—air, AIO, or custom—tie directly to performance ceilings, along with safe overclock/undervolt practices and thermal targets under sustained load.
By the end, you’ll have a practical checklist to build smarter, troubleshoot faster, and feel ready for the CompTIA A+ exam: power headroom, cable stewardship, airflow planning, RAID with backups, memory matching, BIOS compatibility, and validation testing. If this guide helps you ship a rock-solid PC, share it with a friend, leave a quick review, and hit follow so you never miss the next masterclass.
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Art By Sarah/Desmond
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Juan Rodriguez can be reached at
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And welcome to Technology Tap. I'm Professor J. Rod. In this episode from WhatsApp to Cores, Building a Stable PC. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Technology Tap, the show where we bridge theory and real-world technology. I'm your host, Professor J-Rod, and today we're building from the ground up the power, storage, and memory in N CPU to form the backbone of every stable system. By the end of this masterclass, you'll understand how to choose efficient PSUs, configure rate arrays for both performance and protection, tune memory for bandwidth and reliability, and select CPUs that keep pace with modern workloads. This episode is your roadmap to build smarter, troubleshooting faster, and passing that Comtia A exam with confidence. Let's get started. Every stable build begins with power. It's the one component most new technicians overlook, yet it dictates everything performance, longevity, and safety. Start by adding your system's total wattage, CPU, GPU, drives, fans, then add 25 to 30% headroom. This overhead ensures your PSU can handle transit spikes, those certain surges in current when GPUs boost or CPUs ramp up under heavy loads. If your rig pulls 500 watts under stress, aim for at least 650. It's better to have extra capacity than risk and stability. Now check efficiency. The 80% certification program measures how much power converts it to usable DC power, and it's into four different categories. Bronze is 82 to 85%, budget friendly, hotter, noisier. Silver is 85 to 88%, mid-range builds, gold is 87 to 90%, ideal for most users, efficient, quiet, cool, and platinum titanium is 90% plus premium servers or continuous workloads. Higher efficiency means less waste, heat, lower noise, and reduced energy costs. Next, consider ATX 3.0, the new PSU standard. It introduced the 12 VHPWR connector, a single 16-pin cable delivering up to 600 watts for next generation GPUs like NVIDIA's RTX 4000 series. It replaces multiple 8-pin connectors and better manages transistance loads. Warning: avoid bending the 12-volt HPWR cable sharply near the connector. Keep at least 35mm clearance to prevent overhead. Choose your cable design wisely. Fully modular, every cable detach, best for airflow and cable management. Semi-modular, fixed core cables and detachable peripherals. Non-modular, all cables fixed, cheaper but cluttered. Now, protect that power. Pair your PSUs with a UPS, uninterruptible power source to guard against blackouts and add a surge protector for voltage spikes. A UPS gives you time to save work and shut down safely and gracefully. Essential for office and lab environments. Keep your system power states too. RAM powered, quick uh resume, hibernate, RAM safe to disk, zero power to use. Hibernate sleep combines both safe combines both safe tuning power loss. Choose sleep for short breaks, hibernate for longer downtime. Finally, cooling. Heat is the enemy of electronics. Follow this airflow rule. Front bottom intakes, rear top exhaust. Apply thermal pace sparingly, a P-size dot in the center spreads evenly under pressure. Don't put it like if you're making a sandwich and you're putting mayonnaise on it. That's not how it works. Let's not do that, guys. Liquid cooling handles heavy loads quietly, but check for pumps and that if and fittings regularly because it might leak. Story time. A student once paired a 4090 GPU with a 500-watt bronze PSU. Random reboots plagued every gaming session. After upgrading to a 750-watt gold ATX 3.0, stability was instant. Remember, power isn't where you're where you cut corners, it's where you invest in reliability. Storage devices and RAID. Let's start. Let's store some data. Storage determines not only capacity but also speed, safety, and system behavior. Three main storage type HTD, spinning platters, slower, cost efficient. SSD, flashbase, silent, faster, shock resistant. NVME, PCIE interface, extremely extreme speed for OS and active files. But drives are only half the story. How do you organize defines performance and redundancy? That's where RAID, reductant, redundant array of independent disks comes in. Let's explore each RAID level, its mechanicalisms, advantages, and disadvantages. RAID zero, stripping. How does it work? Data splits across two or more drives for parallel read writes. What does that do? What's the advantage? Maximum performance. Ideal for large sequential read writes, 100% capacity utilization. Essentially, you're using two drives to act like one. So that each one takes turn reading and writing. So it performances it performs really fast. Disadvantage. No redundancy. If one drive fails, all data is lost. Rebuild impossible. Backup mandatory. Best for scratched disk or temporary rendering spaces for non-critical data. RAID 1, mirroring. How it works. Data duplicating on two drives. What's the advantage? High fault tolerance. Survive one drive failure. Easy recovery, just replace the failed drive and rebuild. Disadvantage: 50% capacity efficiency, one drive's worth of storage, slightly slower rights. Best for OS drive, small business servers, mission critical boot volumes. The one thing about mirroring is you're paying for two drives, but you're only ever going to use one. So you have four two terabyte drives, you had eight terabytes of space. You're only always going to use four. That's the bad thing about mirroring. But the good thing is you have a backup. Survives one drive failure, efficient use of space. What's the disadvantage? Slower rights. Parity is calculation, so it's slower. Long rebuilds, increased risk of a second failure, which you have another drive that fails, you're going to have total loss. Best for file servers, media archives, environments, balancing speed, and safety. Now, in the CompTIA books, in the in the instructions, in the data, and all the stuff that you find from CompTIA, they will tell you that if your raid dies, wait until it's downtime to replace it. In my experience, I replace it right away. Because you never if you have rate five, because you one drive already died. Who knows when the other one might die? So you change it right away. You don't, you know, if it dies on Tuesday, you don't wait till Saturday to change it. Right? You want to change it now. So, and the literature tells you wait, you don't really want to wait. Alright, rate six, stripping plus dual parity. Here's how it works: two parity blocks stored across four or more drives. The advantage here is two drives can fail. Right? Safer during rebuild. The disadvantage is slower rights due to dual parity, reduces usable capacity, best for mission critical storage, large arrays, enterprise Nas or network attached storage. RAID 10, striped mirrors, one plus zero, high works, mirrors pairs of drives and then strips those pairs. Advantages it combines the speed of a RAID zero with a redundancy of RAID one. Fast rebuilds, only mirrored ones are affected. Excellent performance and fault tolerance. Disadvantage again, you have four drives, you're only really using two, right? 50% capacity, higher cost, double drives, best for database, virtualization, heavy I.O. workloads. The key reminder with RAID is RAIDs protect against hardware failure, not human error. Deleting a file, RAID won't save you. Always maintain external or cloud backup. Storytime. A design firm trusted RAID 5 alone. One drive failed, then another during the rebuild. Ten years of work gone. They switched to RAID 6 plus nightly cloud backup. Protect data twice, redundancy and backup. Segment 3, memory mastery. Memory is your system's workplace. Fast temporary storage for active data. The CPU fetches from RAM thousands of times faster than disk. RAM generations DDR3 point DDR3 1.5 volts up to 200 2133 MHz. That's a legacy system. We don't usually do DDR3 anymore. DDR4, 1.2 volt up to 3600 MHz, mainstream standard, and DDR5 1.1 volt 4800 to 8400 megahertz. Do 32-bit sub channels on DIM PMIC. Each has unique notches. You cannot put a DDR3 into the DDI5 slot or vice versa. It would not work because they won't fit. Performance depends on frequency and latency. Higher megahertz equals more bandwidth. Lower CLs is a faster first axis. True performance, latency divided by frequency times 2000. The lower the number, the better. Channels multiply throughput, single channel 64-bit is baseline dual 128-bit dual bandwidth and quad 256-bit servers and workstations. Use match pairs in color coded slots. Mismatch modules drop to single channel or flex mode reducing speed. So you might have four slots and they're color-coded red, black, red, black. You put one in the red, the other one has to go in the red if you only have two. If you only have two uh RAM chips. Now if you have two four and two eight gig, you put one eight gig in the red, the other one has to go in the red, and the other two go into black. You can't mismatch. It has to be match pairs. Exactly match pairs. ECC versus non-ECC, error correcting code detects and correct single bits, non-ECC, no error correction, ECC D support from CPU and motherboard, ideal for servers, unnecessary from home PCs. Never mix ECC and non-ECC together. Now the reason why it's not necessary from home PC is two things. One, they are more expensive. ECC chips are more expensive. Two, if your server if your workstation crashes because of a memory issue, just reboot it. Most of the time that will fix it. For a server, you have like X number of people connected to it. You cannot be rebooting that server all the time. So you want to get the server ECC, error correcting code RAM chips, so you can correct it on the fly, and you don't need to reboot. You don't need to put these on workstations. It doesn't make sense. You're only wasting money. Four factors for RAM chips, they're DIM for desktops and so DIMs for laptops. RDIM and LR DIM are servers buffered for stability at high capacity. Enable XMP on your Intels or XPO for AMD profiles and BIOS to reach rated speeds automatically. Unsupported boards may fail post right when they first start up. Troubleshooting. Random freezes, reset the RAM. Blue screen of death, run M test86. Boot issues, try one stick at a time. One time I bought new RAM sticks, and before you just put them in and you turn it on, and the box will automatically recognize it. This time it took me like a good minute of just sitting there with a black screen on before the RAM actually kind of like connected and the machine turned on. But yeah, it was weird. I thought I thought I got bad RAM for a while from Dell. And then I waited like one minute and it just turned on. Just the first time. It doesn't happen after that. It was just like I guess it needed to see to connect with the bios and update and see you know notice that the motherboard that it that it changed, I guess. Story time. A workstation upgrade from an 8 gig to 16 gig with mixed brands. No dual channel, no performance gain. After installing a match to a match to 8 gig kit, rendering speed up 25%. Matching matters. So you got to match. Good. Memory takeaway capacity equals multitaxing, multitasking speed and latency is responsiveness. Channels equals bandwidth. ECC is reliability. Next, CPU architecture and performance. The CPU is your system's brain, executing instructions, crunching numbers, and coordinating every process. Inside every processor is an ALU for math and logic. A CU directs operations, a register, tiny high-speed storage, and cache L1, 2, and 3 lightning fast memory tiers. Cores are independent processing unit. Threads are virtual lanes created by simultaneous multi-threading or Intel's hyper threading. More cores equals better multitasking. Higher gigahertz equals better single thread speed. The CPU pipeline handles fetch, decode, execute, right back. Bottom chips uses branch predictions and out-of-order execution to keep those pipelines full. Instruction sets X86 or X64 complex instructions for desktop ARM risk simplify simplify power efficient mobile and embedded. Cash hierarchical L1 is 32 to 64 kilobits per core fastest. L2 256 kilobytes to one megabytes per core. L3 shares up to tens of megabytes. More cash reduces trips to RAM, boosting performance, sockets and compatibility. Intel has the LAN grid array, pins on the board. AMD has the pin grid array, pins on or pads on the CPU. Always match socket, chipsets, and BIOS versions. Chipsets defines the IOs, PCIE lanes, USB ports, overclocking. Check manufacture, CPU support listings before upgrading. Cooling solutions. Air coolers, reliable, affordable. AIO liquid coolers, great thermals, low noise, custom loops, maximum cooling, high maintenance. Overclocking increases frequency for performance but raises heat and voltage. Test with Prime 95, ascend bench and keep temps under 85 degrees Celsius. Undervolting, lower voltage for quieter, cooler systems. Common issues, no post, check EPS, A-Pin, reset CPU, update BIOS. Thermal trotting, repaste, fix airflow. Incompatibility, were wrong socket or outdated firmware. A student installed a 13 gen Intel CPU in a 600 series board. Fan spawns, no display, BIOS updated, fixed it. Firmware first, hardware second. Installation recap, lift retention arm. This is for the CPU, right? When you're installing a CPU, lift retention arm, and uh align triangle marker, place CPU gently, lower the lock, apply P-size paste, mount cooler event, boot, verify temps, and core counts. And the retention of the arm, that's uh that's the that's a there's something called there when you're lifting the arm. I forgot what that was called. If anybody remembers, email me. But there's when you're lifting a retention arm, there's it's not called retention arm, it's actually called something else. I can't think of it. But if anybody remembers, email me, professorjrod at gmail.com. Man, I I can't think of it. Alright. CPU takeaways, cores, multitask, cash accelerates, architecture defines efficiency, and coolie system sustain performance. Compatibility checks prevents headaches. Alright, now I'm going to give you four Comtias style questions. I'm gonna read them and then read them again, and I'll give you five seconds to answer them. Alright, question one: which PSU standard introduced the 12 volt HPWR connector supporting up to 600 watts? A ATX 2.4, B ATX 3.0, C EPS 12 volt DSFX. Here's the question again. Which PSU standard introduce the 12 volt HPWR connector supporting up to 600 watts? A ATX 2.4 B ATX 3.0 C EPS 12 volt or DSFX? I'll give you five seconds to think about it. 543 21. Alright, the answer is B ATX adds 12 volt HPWR for high transistance GPUs. Alright, next question. Which ray level offers a maximum speed but zero redundancy? A ray zero, B RAID 1, C RAID 5, D Ray 6. Which array level offers a maximum speed but zero redundancy? A RAID 0, B RAID 1, C RAID 5, D RAID 6? I'll give you five seconds to answer. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And the answer is A ray 0 strips data only. One failure equals total loss. Alright, next question. A workstation needs speed and fault tolerance with four drives. Which rate is best? A rate one B rate five, C rate six, D, rate ten. I'll read it again. A workstation needs speed and fault tolerance with four drives. Which rate is best? A rate one, B, rate five, C, rate six, D, rate ten. Now this is this is uh actually a good question because what you need to solve here is two things. You see the and is in the middle. So you need to solve need speed and fault tolerance. So whatever answer that you choose, it has it has to cure both issues that you're that it's asking for, which is speed and fault tolerance. Now, out of these four, which one does both speed and fault tolerance? And there's only one D Ray 10. Ray 10 describes stripping and mirroring or performance and protection. That's how you have to look at it when they give you an and question. You have to look at it. Well, what are they? I gotta meet whatever they're asking before the and and after the and both conditions must be met. Or if there's more, you know, at least two, right with the word and. But yeah. All right, last question. After installing a new CPU, the PC powers on but no display. What's most likely the cause? A bad RAM, B, insufficient PSU, C outdated BIOS, D faulty GPU. After installing a new CPU, the PC powers on but no display. What's the most likely cause? A bad RAM, B insufficient PSU, C outdated outdated BIOS or D faulty GPU. Now think about it. I'll give you five seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. Alright. So it's a the clue is new CPU. So right, so it's not gonna be the RAM because it's not, and it's not gonna be a faulty GPU. So you you you left with insufficient PSU and outdated BIOS. And the answer is C outdated BIOS. Newer CPU often require a BIOS update to recognize the microcode. So all right, well, there you have it, guys. I hope you like this chapter on CPU and hard drives, specifically RAID. RAID is a big topic on the Compteya exam. So I hope uh I taught you a lot. And until next time, keep tapping into technology. This has been a presentation of Little Cha Cha Productions Art by Sarah, music by Joe Kim. We are now part of the Pod Match Network. You can follow me at TikTok at Professor Jrod at J R O D, or you can email me at Professor Jrodj R O D at Gmail.