Kudos to Intel Support

Back in 2014, I got myself a pretty tricked-out PC (for its time). The funny thing is, this is the first PC I ever built that had multiple component failures over the course of 3 years of normal usage (no overclocking).

First, the PSU died. I replaced that quickly and everything went back to normal. Then later on, the GTX 770 which I bought as part of the build died. That GPU is currently sent back to the manufacturer (Palit) and awaiting their decision on the replacement.

Third, and the topic of this post, is that the Intel i5 chip died. This is the first time in all the years that I have been using Intel that the CPU ever died. I’ll skip the part about troubleshooting to isolate the problem, but suffice to say, when it seemed like the CPU was faulty, I was actually skeptical. Never heard of anyone having a dead CPU before. But, in my line of work, dead CPUs are somewhat rare, and it happens only to AMD CPUs, not Intel Xeons.

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Wireless, AC, and Routers

I am by no means a networking guru, but I do work in the IT industry so I know some things more than the average person.

One good example is this – If you connect to your wireless router at 300mbps, it does NOT mean you will get 300 mbps speed. It means you can get “up to” 300 mbps, best case. Real life situations often cut this speed by 50% or more. Why? Because of all the electromagnetic signals being generated by everything around you – your phone, your TV (worse still if CRT TV), fridge, microwave etc.

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Upgrading to 1 Gbit Plan

Recently I was contacted by Starhub to re-contract my home internet line. It was then that I realised that 1 gbps seem to be the “norm” these days, and did not see any lower speed plans on offer.

The entire upgrade is a story for another time, but it did force me to get a new router – the Netgear R7000, because the one given by Starhub, the DIR 850L, is just not powerful enough. The R7000 was my choice because it was geared for media and gaming activities – the 2 most important things I do on the Internet 🙂

Now, the one given by Starhub should be fine for most people. Downlink (WANLAN) is a respectable 750-850 mbps. Uplink (LAN-WAN) is the issue. I only managed to get 350 – 550mbps on it. Worse still if I enabled some other settings that were “OFF” at default state. If I enabled enough of these settings to depart from the “factory default”, the router plods along at 400 mbps downlink, and 250mbps uplink.

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Rants and Ramblings of a Typical Kiasu Singaporean