Top hardware tips

Sometimes you come across a neat bit of information that surprises you, and sometimes you need to state the obvious for friends who may not be as up to date with hardware as you are.

Either way, sharing hardware tips is a great way to make sure every gamer makes the right decision when purchasing new hardware. With this in mind, here are some hardware tips that you may or may not know:

Cheap cooling doesn’t mean bad cooling

A widely-known fact, that gamers don’t seem to latch onto straight away, is that cheap cooling doesn’t always mean bad cooling.

One of the star coolers on the market at the moment, the Cooler Master Hyper 212, retails locally for under R350 and is one of the best CPU cooling options available.

Tested by big-name sites such as Tom’s Hardware, the Hyper 212 offers fantastic performance, keeping up with high end air coolers and even some all in one liquid cooling systems costing over 3 times as much. It might not fit perfectly in with your design scheme, but there is little else that challenges the Hyper 212 for the price/performance cooling crown.

Cooler Master Hyper 212

PS/2 over USB for keyboards

Something that has been known for ages (and is ignored by most gamers) is that keyboards respond quicker over PS/2 than over USB.

While this doesn’t sound right – after all PS/2 has been around for longer than some of our younger readers, while the latest iteration of USB is still in its infancy – its true, due to the design of each interface. SteelSeries has an interesting explanation on their website which reads:

“[Using the PS/2 connector] will give you total freedom with no limit to the amount of simultaneous key presses and, equally as important, using the PS/2 may just improve your overall gaming experience. The reason is that when you use a USB keyboard, your computer is actually using CPU time polling your keyboard.”

“The higher the polling rate, the more CPU time is used to perform the polling. And because of the built-in debounce rate found on any quality keyboard, any polling rate above 200Hz is simply a waste of CPU time and really just a result of pointless marketing hype. Unlike USB keyboards, a PS/2 keyboard isn’t polled at all. The keyboard simply sends a signal to the computer as key presses are made, which causes a hardware interrupt, forcing the CPU to register the signal.”

So there you have it, time to dig up those old USB to PS/2 connectors.

PS/2 to usb adapter

Cheaper SSD’s are actually an option

You really want that cheap SSD, but you’re worried that the unknown branding/something so cheap is bound to go wrong in your PC.

Well here’s a newsflash: even the cheap and nasty SSDs aren’t so cheap and nasty when compared to traditional hard drives when it comes to things like throughput and seek time. This is due to the nature of SSDs with no mechanical parts, something common with all true SSDs. What’s more, the cheap options aren’t from unknown brands.

Take the OCZ Agility 3 60GB SSD drive on special for Rebeltech for R628.

It’s not the latest generation offering, nor is it part of the high-end series of Vertex drives, but that doesn’t mean the performance is disappointing. The drive is also coupled with a warranty to ease any fears you may have about the low price, so if you’re interested in a cheap drive now is the time to buy.

If 60GBs feels a tad restrictive, Rebeltech also have the Team S2 120GB SSD for sale at R999. Less than R1000 for 120GBs of SSD goodness, that’s under R8.40 per GB – a bargain if there was one.