Installing System Devices

Installing System Devices: Objectives

• Install and configure power supplies and cooling
• Select and install storage devices
• Install and configure system memory
• Install and configure CPUs

Install and configure power supplies and cooling:

• Understanding power requirements of all components and maximum power output is crucial for managing new builds, upgrades, and repairs.
• PC components generate heat.
• Managing heat with cooling systems makes the computing environment more reliable.
• A computer risks component damage and performance reduction if it runs too hot.

Power Supply Units

• The power supply unit (PSU) provides direct current (DC) low voltage power to PC components.
• PSU contains a rectifier to convert alternating current (AC) building power to DC voltage output, transformers to step down to lower voltages, and filters and regulators to ensure consistent output voltage levels.
• The fan in the PSU dissipates generated heat.
• A power supply's size and shape determines system case compatibility, in terms of available room, screws, and fan locations.
• Form factor determines compatibility with the motherboard, in terms of power connectors.
• Most desktop PC PSUs use the ATX form factor.
• A PSU is plugged into an electrical outlet using a suitable power cord, and the PSU must be compatible with the outlet's input voltage.
• A PSU designed for North America (120 VAC) will not work in the UK (230 VAC).
• Facilities such as data centers use high-line voltage for efficiency.
• Most PSUs are dual voltage and auto-switching, but some have a manual switch, and fixed voltage types only accept low- or high-line.
• The input operating voltages should be marked on the unit and documentation.

Wattage Rating

• Power is the rate things generate or use energy, measured in watts (W), calculated as voltage multiplied by current (V*I).
• A PSU must meet the combined power requirements of the PC components which is measured as its wattage rating.
• Standard desktop PC PSUs are typically rated around 200-300 W.
• Enterprise workstations and servers often have units rated over 300 W.
• Gaming PCs require 500 W or better power supplies.

Power Supply Connectors

• Each PSU has power connectors supplying DC voltage to the motherboard and devices at 3.3 VDC, 5 VDC, and 12 VDC.
• Voltage regulators correct the voltage from the PSU to the voltage required by each component.
• The motherboard's power port is referred to as the P1 connector.
• PSUs have Molex and/or SATA device power connectors and 4/6/8-pin connectors for CPU and PCIe adapter cards.
• The ATX PSU standard specifies different connector form factors and has gone through several revisions.
• In the original ATX spec, the P1 connector is 20-pin (2x10).
• Wires with black insulation are ground, yellow are +12 V, red are +5 V, and orange are +3.3 V.
• A modular PSU has detachable power connector cables.
• Reducing the number of cables minimizes clutter and improves airflow and cooling.
• A computer system may have two PSUs, with one acting as a failover redundant power supply which could also be connected to a different grid power circuit.
• A redundant PSU configuration requires a compatible motherboard and is more common on server systems.
• On a server, each PSU plugs into a backplane and can be hot-swapped.
• This allows for the removal and replacement of a faulty unit without opening the case or losing server power.

Fan Cooling Systems

• Components emit heat due to electrical current resistance.
• Without cooling, heat raises component and internal case temperature, causing malfunctions and damage.
• This particularly affects CPUs.
• All CPUs require cooling to maintain acceptable temperatures, even with thermally efficient designs .
• A heat sink is a block of copper or aluminum with fins, which increases the surface area around the component for convection cooling.
• Thermal paste is used to "glue" the heat sink to the chip's surface to ensure heat transfer.
• A thermal pad performs a similar yet less reliable function, as a compound that is solid at room temperature but softens when heated.

Fans

• A heat sink is a passive cooling device, while passive cooling does not require extra energy (electricity) to work.
• Well-working heat sink needs good airflow around the PC.
• Keep "cable clutter" minimal and adapter slots covered by blanking plates.
• A fan improves airflow, which helps dissipate heat, since a fan improves airflow, which helps to dissipate the heat by providing cooling.
• Fans are used for the power supply and chassis exhaust points.
• Fan systems draw cool air from front vents over the motherboard and expel warmed air from the back.
• Most heat sinks are fan-fitted to improve cooling performance.
• The fan's power connector must be plugged into a motherboard fan power port.
• Thermometer sensors are used at each fan to set speed and detect failures.
• Some chassis designs use a plastic shroud or system of baffles to cover the CPU and channel airflow, which are usually attached using plastic clips.
• Both fans and heat sinks become less effective if dust builds up.
• These components, including air vents, should be cleaned periodically with a soft brush, compressed air, or a PC-approved vacuum cleaner.

Liquid Cooling Systems

• High-end gaming PCs generate more heat than standard thermal management can cope with which may also be be required for PCs in very hot ambient temperatures.
• A liquid-based cooling system pumps water around the chassis and is more effective and quieter than air convection.
• An open-loop, liquid-based cooling system uses components like a water loop/tubing and pump for coolant circulation and water blocks and brackets to each device to remove heat by convection and are followed with radiators and fans positioned at air vents to dispel the heat.
• Open-loop systems need periodic draining, cleaning, and refilling.
• The fans and radiators should be kept dust-free.
• The system should be drained before moving the PC.

Select and install storage devices

• Non-volatile storage devices retain data when powered off and are also referred to as mass storage.
• Mass storage devices use magnetic, optical, or solid-state technology.
• Fixed disks are mass storage devices installed as internal components.
• Storage devices come in standard widths: 5.25 inches, 3.5 inches, and 2.5 inches and the computer chassis has drive bays to accommodate these sizes.
• 5.25-inch bays have removable panels for removable media devices like DVD drives and smart card readers.
• Fixed disks are typically installed in a drive bay with a caddy where you screw the drive into the caddy, then screw the caddy into the bay.
• Caddies can also allow drives of different sizes to be fitted into the bay, can be used with rails to pull the drive out without opening the case.
• Aside from cost factors that impact mass storage choices are reliability, performance, and use.
• Reliability concerns the risk of total device failure and partial data corruption where reliability and lifespan depend on different technology types.
• Performance is different for reading than writing.
• There are also differences between sequential access and random access and depending on the data throughput or number of input/output operations required, you may need to evaluate performance for the type of data transfer the device will use predominantly.
• Reliability and performance factors can only be evaluated with the application in mind as well as cost.
• Running an OS, hosting a database application, streaming audio/video data, or data backup and archiving have different cost, reliability, and performance considerations.

Solid-State Drives

• A solid-state drive (SSD) uses flash memory technology for persistent mass storage.
• Flash memory excels hard disk drives (HDDs) that use mechanic, especially in read performance, with lower risk from mechanical shock.
• Costs per gigabyte have fallen rapidly and Flash chips may degrade over many write operations.
• The drive firmware and OS use wear levelling to optimize the life of the device by evenly distributing writing on all SSD blocks.

Hard Disk Drives

• A hard disk drive (HDD) stores data on metal or glass platters coated with a magnetic substance.
• Each platter side is accessed by its own read/write head moved by an actuator.
• Platters are mounted on a spindle and spun fast and are divided into tracks, and each track has sectors of 512 bytes; this is called the drive geometry.
• HDDs are now typically added as a second drive or RAID array for data storage, but you might encounter them as main drives in older systems.
• Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)
• Whether it stores system files (OS) or user data, the HDD or SSD's contents may be critical and so to mitigate the risks of using one hard disk, RAID is used.
• If a boot drive fails, the system will crash and if a data drive fails, users may lose access to files and there may be permanent data loss if those files have not been backed up.
• Redundancy sacrifices some capacity but provides fault tolerance where to the OS, the RAID array appears as a single storage resource that can be partitioned and formatted.
• A RAID level represents a drive configuration with a given type of fault tolerance where basic RAID levels are numbered from 0 to 6, with nested RAID solutions, such as RAID 10 (RAID 1 + RAID 0).
• RAID can be implemented in software (operating system features) and hardware (dedicated controller installed as an adapter card; the RAID disks are connected to SATA ports on the RAID controller adapter card, rather than to the motherboard).
• Hardware solutions are differentiated by RAID level support and controllers that support only RAID 0 or RAID 1, whereas mid-level controllers might add support for RAID 5 and RAID 10.
• Hardware RAID is often able to hot swap a damaged disk meaning that the failed device can be replaced without shutting down the OS.

Removable Storage Drives

• Removable storage can refer to a storage device that can be moved from computer to computer without opening the case or to storage media that is removable from its drive.
• HDDs and SSDs can be provisioned as removable storage in an enclosure where the enclosure provides a data interface (USB, Thunderbolt, or eSATA), a power connector, and disk protection.
• Flash memory underpinning SSDs can be provisioned in flash drive and memory card form factors.
• A flash drive is a flash memory board with a USB connector and protective cover and plugs into any spare USB port.
• The memory card form factor is used in consumer digital imaging products and PCs can be fitted with a memory card reader device that fits in a front-facing drive bay and needs to be connected to a USB controller.

Optical Drives

• Compact Discs (CDs), Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs), and Blu-ray Discs (BDs) are mainstream storage formats for music and video retail.
• All types of optical media use a laser to read the data encoded on the disc surface and discs are marketed as hard-wearing, but scratches can render them unreadable.
• Optical drives are rated according to their data transfer speed and marketed with three speeds indicating the record/rewrite/read speed.
• Newer drives are generally multi-format, but older may have no Blu-ray support.

Install and configure system memory:

• The CPU works by processing instructions generated by software (processes) in a pipeline, and the instructions are stored in the CPU's registers and cache where small amount of cache, must be supported by additional storage technologies.
• When a process is executed, the image is loaded from the fixed disk into system memory and instructions are fetched into the CPU's cache and registers as required with virtual memory which this process is handled by a memory controller.
• System memory is implemented as RAM devices and RAM is faster than the flash memory used for SSDs and much faster than an HDD, but it is volatile which can only store data when powered on
• System memory or RAM is measure in gigabytes (GB) and determines the PC's ability to work with applications at the same time with the ability to process large files efficiently.
• If there is not enough system RAM, the memory space can be extended by using disk storage, or pagefile/swap space.
• The total amount of addressable memory is referred to as virtual memory or virtual RAM.
• With virtual memory, the OS assigns memory locations to processes in 4 kilobyte chunks called pages.
• The memory controller moves inactive pages to the swap space to free up physical RAM and retrieves pages when required.
• Excessive paging activity slows the computer down, because disk transfer rates are slower than RAM transfer rates.
• The bus between the CPU, memory controller, and devices consists of a data and address pathway; the width of the data pathway determines how much information can be transferred per clock cycle, where a single channel is usually 64bits.
• The width of the address bus determines how many memory locations the CPU can keep track of and limits the maximum amount of physical/virtual memory.
• A 32-bit CPU with a 32-bit address bus can access a 4 GB address space while theory shows a 64-bit CPU could implement a 64-bit address space, but most 64-bit CPUs use a 48-bit address bus allowing up to 256 terabytes of memory.

RAM Type

• Modern RAM is implemented as Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (DDR SDRAM) and stores each data bit as an electrical charge in a bit cell with a capacitor and transistor.
• Synchronous DRAM (SDRAM) is synchronized to the motherboard system clock.
• Double Data Rate SDRAM (DDR SDRAM) makes two data transfers per clock cycle hence generations of DDR technology (DDR2, DDR3, DDR4, and DDR5) increase bandwidth with scalable speed improvements through multiplying the bus speed design and increases the maximum capacity of each memory module.
• A memory module is a printed circuit board with a group of RAM devices that act as single unit in different capacities.
• Each DDR generation sets an upper limit on the maximum capacity.
• DDR for desktop system memory is packaged in a dual inline memory module (DIMM) with edge connector notches to identify and prevent incorrect insertion.
• DDR DIMMs typically feature heat sinks and the DIMM's DDR type must match the motherboard and laptops package their RAM in a Small Outline DIMM (SODIMM).
• Increasing CPU speed and architectural improvements creates a memory bottleneck where intel and AMD developed dual-channel architecture for DDR memory controllers to address this.
• Dual-channel was originally for server-level hardware but now it is included desktop systems and laptops.
• Single-channel memory has one 64-bit data bus between the CPU, memory controller, and RAM devices.
• A dual-channel memory controller has two 64-bit pathways, allowing 128 bits of data to be sent per transfer.
• This requires support from the CPU, memory controller, and motherboard; ordinary RAM modules are required with no “dual-channel” DDR modules
• Error correcting code (ECC) RAM is for workstations and servers and performs a hash calculation that stored as an 8-bit checksum for each data transfer and this extra checksum chip on the module requires a 72-bit data bus; the memory controller should derive the same checksum.
• This process allows single-bit errors to be detected and corrected, if not, then an error is generated and the system halted, and the system is able to continue functioning normally.
• Most types of ECC (registered DIMMs (RDIMMs))use a component to reduce electrical load on the memory controller, which improves reliability.
• Most types of non-ECC memory are unbuffered DIMMs (UDIMMs).
• UDIMMs, there must be considerations to accommodate memory for the system for both the motherboard and CPU, and ECC operation in order to be enabled.
• Most motherboards support UDIMMs (Unbuffered DIMM) or RDIMMs (Registered DIMM) but not both, these types of RAM cannot b mixed on the same motherboard.
• Mixing non-ECC UDIMMs and ECC UDIMMs is unlikely to work.

Install and configure CPUs:

• The central processing unit (CPU), or simply the processor, executes program instruction code and when a software program runs and assembled into instructions that are set for the CPU platform and loaded into system memory.
• The CPU then performs the following basic operations on each instruction: the control unit fetches the next instruction sequence from system memory to the pipeline, the control unit decodes each instruction either executing, or passing it to the arithmetic logic unit or floating-point unit for execution, and then the result is written back to a register, to cache, or to system memory.
• A register is a temporary storage area for the different units within the CPU at the same clock speed as the CPU and cache is a small block of memory at the speed of the CPU that enhances performance and stores instructions and data that the CPU is using regularly.

CPU Features

• The speed at which the CPU runs is generally seen as a key indicator of performance depending on the architectural features.
• Thermal and power performance limit to running the CPU faster and faster.
• Another way to improve execution is improving the operations in the instruction pipeline by doing the most amount of work possible in a single clock cycle which is achieved through simultaneous multithreading referred to as HyperThreading by Intel.
• A thread is a stream of instructions from a software application that which often runs a single process in a single thread except when multi-threaded, where SMT allows the threads to run through the CPU at the same time.
• Since the reduces the amount of “idle time,” the OS it seems as though there are two or more CPUs installed.
• Another approach is symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) by using two or more physical CPUs where the SMP OS will then utilize resources to run with available processing.
• This approach is not dependent on software applications being multithreaded to deliver performance benefit, though a multi-socket motherboard is costly and often more present for servers and high-end workstations than desktops.
• CPUs in each socket must be the same models and specifications and support SMP.
• Improvements in CPU fabrication techniques have led to to multiple cores for compute resources.
• A single-core CPU has a single execution unit, and register, while a dual-core CPU is essentially two processors combined in the same package and this means that there are two execution units and sets of register and each core will also have its own cache, and access to a shared cache.
• This is referred to as chip level multiprocessing (CMP).

CPU Socket Types

• With advances in CPU architecture designs to include multiple cores, the CPU market advances quickly beyond to multicore packages of eight or more processors.
• Multicore and multithreading are designated by nC/nT notation, where an 8C/16T CPU with MT has eight cores, but processes double in the amount of simultaneous threads.
• To expand usage and maximize efficiency, a computer can run multiple operating systems making each achieved OS a virtual machine (VM).
• Intel's Virtualization Technology (VT) and AMD's provide processor extensions to support virtualization, also referred to as hardware-assisted virtualization and this makes VMs run much more quicky.
• This makes the VMs run much more quickly but these extensions are typically featured a models in each processor range.
• CPU packaging refers to the CPU's form factor and it is connected to the motherboard.
• Intel and AMD use different socket types that prevent an AMD CPU install to a motherboard designed for Intel and vice versa.
• All CPU sockets use a zero-insertion force (ZIF) mechanism to prevent risk for bending or breaking fragile pin contacts since it does not require pressure to be applies when inserting the CPU.

CPU Types and Motherboard Compatibility

• Rapid turnover of models because that is the nature of the CPU market.
• Vendors release a CPU design with architectural improvements and quite often with a new socket design.
• Referred to as a CPU's generation, the manufacturer releases several models such as Intel and AMD.
• Motherboard compatibility is limited to the same generation of CPUs that supported by the board’s CPU socket and chipset.
• Limited is the opportunities to upgrade CPU models while keeping the same motherboard, as there is limited such upgrades within the same generation that offer value, brands, and market segments for different target segments such as desktops, servers, and mobile.

Desktops

• Desktops are shorthand for a basic PC used at home or the office.
• Deriving when the computer cases were designed to sit horizontally on a desk, the use of desktop refers to the vertical tower configurations, or all-in-one with a wide range performance levels from budget to gaming PC.
• Whereas workstations relate to business PC, or a network client for businesses and context of PC workstation refers to a high-performance PC used for software development or graphics/video editing.
• Class-class PCs has similar components server-class computers.
• Server-class computers manage workloads and operate to greater reliability standards than what types of desktops.
• Multi-socket server motherboards allow multiple CPU packages to be installed.
• Each CPU here has multiple cores, and additional support for multithreading the giving the server the raw processing power servers needed to service requests over high amounts of client systems.
• Smartphones, tablets, and laptops prioritize power and thermal efficiency, with less amount of focus of pure performance.
• Some use ARM-based CPUs, in this scenario both Intel, and AMD have mobile CPU models generations in each platform using socket form factors to desktops, additional devices mobile devices are soldered to the motherboard, without the accessibility to upgrades or replacements.