Knowledgebase

We have collected various nuggets of useful information both from within our own site and outside from our partners, supportive bloggers, review sites and community sites that we think provide excellent and accurate information. It takes more than a little experience and knowledge to build a custom extreme performance PC and no single source of information is enough. We are humble enough to admit we too have learned a few things from a few committed hardcore enthusiasts out there in the big wide web.

We hope it adds to your gaming and professional experience of using your Cryo Performance PC.

Technical Articles and Guides:

Date	Title	Description
3/7/2008	Memory Guide (RAM)	So DDR2 or DDR3, and do I need high or low latency surely its the clock speed that dictates how fast it runs?
3/7/2008	Processor Guide (CPU)	Which to choose, ATI or nVidia, SLI or not, dual, triple, quad?
8/7/2008	Storage Guide	Choosing the right disk type and configurations.
8/7/2008	Cooling Systems Guide	Keeping your Cryo PC well cooled is more complicated than you might think.
15/7/2008	Operating System Guide	What should influence your choice of Windows Vista, XP, 32 or 64 bit. Of course you might prefer MacOS or Linux! That's for another article.
18/7/2008	Graphics guide (GPU)	What does it do, and do i need it? Now all changed with the integration of Havoc and Aegia into the ATI and nVidia cards respectively.
3/11/2008	PC Performance Troubleshooting and Optimisation	Some great tips to help you tune Windows XP and Vista to get the best out of it, and also find out what might be the cause of your performance problems. A mini performance tuning guide. There are a few simple things you can look at and change that will make a surprisingly large difference.
9/12/2008	'Guerrilla Overclocking' Primer	Our guide to how to do your own rapid overclocking on your Cryo PC and how to get the best out of it. You could even try it on another brand of PC but watch those voltages and temperatures carefully.
	Articles coming soon
soon	Cryo Overclocking templates	Overclocking kick start guides for your favourite custom extreme gaming pc motherboards based on nForce 680i, X38, X48 and P35 chipsets. If you want a fast track start this is your best starting point but do take care and remember to make changes one step at a time, its a marathon not a sprint!
soon	Motherboard chipsets	Just what is the difference between X38, X48, P45 and nForce 790i??
soon	Upgrading graphics	Should you choose a new card, a new pc, or add another graphics card (Crossfire/SLI)? How do I know where the bottleneck is?

Selected external article links:

Anandtech Core i7 Nehalem review - as ever good analysis and a good round-up of the architecture and design changes, and their impact. Anand own testing shows Core i7 965 processors producing a very significant step up in performance with the new cache, memory controller, bus and Hyper Threading features.

OCForum Overclocking guide - one of the best forums with one of the best articles from the ground up 'How to Overclock', enjoy... (Thanks Frank!)

nVidia ESA standard - the holy grail for holistic PC hardware monitoring and management, unfortunately as ever standards require vendors to take them up before they become useful standards.

The new nVidia GTX 200 GPU - is the newcomer revolution or evolution. The architecture is most definitely an evolution there are no radical changes but none-the-less there are some significant theoretical performance improvements. The link takes you to a good article from Toms Hardware, we agree with many of their findings and are still recommending the 9800 GX2 for the best value-performance ratio for the time being. The lack of DirectX10 support also seems rather bizarre. However drivers are being updated and improvements are being seen.

Please feel free to recommend your blogg, or personal favourite site or sticky post somewhere?

Cryo Performance Computing has decided to release a number of distributable Technical Articles under the Creative Commons Licensing Scheme. End users are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform any work from this site identified as CC material, subject to the following conditions.

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Full licencing arrangements are available by clicking the Creative Commons link adjacent to such articles within this site.