Every time I buy computer parts, or any parts, people always look at me weird for caring so much about “things that don’t matter”. Well, let me tell you size definitely matters. What brought this about? Getting the wrong length CAT-5E cables recently. “Why did you get CAT-5E when..” Shut it. That’s why I ordered a specific size.
Nerd word stuff out of the way:
CAT-5E – This is an ethernet cable. The thing needed to connect a device to your router and your router to your modem. CAT cables come in different types. From 5E and on they are all backwards compatible. What this means is a CAT 6 cable will work with a 5E device and a 5E will work with a 7 device.
What’s the difference? Maximum speeds and lower resistances mostly. A CAT5E cable, which is perfect for what I need, is slower then a 6 or 7. If you can do 1Gbps then get a 7, just make sure you get the right size!
Alright, with the nerd stuff out of the way lets go over my issue first. So, I ordered 3 CAT5E cables recently. They were supposed to be 1M, or 3 FT, long and instead I got 3M, or 9 FT, long cables. Great a free upgrade right? Why is he complaining about this? Well, wrong. Size matters a lot. Despite common belief a longer cable is not always better. You lose efficiency when you travel distances due to resistance and generate heat. Which the heat leads to more loss of efficiency. How? Here we go!
First have we all ever used something that as it got older it got hotter and preformed worse? The answer is yes. The reason many laptops start to fail, tablets, phones, smart watch, etc is because they “get old and overheat”. Well, this isn’t entirely true. What is happening is the cooling solution is getting old and failing. There is also the possibility that dust and such as gotten in and made things worse. So, you may wonder why does my phone getting hot make it slower and run apps worse? This is because when components get hotter they can’t generate as much energy. So, by getting hotter they lose efficiency.
If you notice your phone start to get warmer you can reapply thermal paste you will find your battery and phone will actually live longer. It’ll keep the phone from getting warmer which will allow the internals to operate at peak efficiency. This is what many of my friends do to their laptops. They don’t replace laptops often and instead replace the thermal paste and cooling systems to keep their laptop cooler and lasting longer. I replace the cooling solutions in my desktop every 18 months to make sure my desktop can live as long as it needs to. Helps a lot with performance and keeps costs of upgrade down.
Why does this happen? Well, you have to understand a bit about physics for this. Now, it has been a while since I have taken a physics class so my info may not be 100% accurate but the theory is there and proven.
Before I explain it I want to go into how I first discovered this. Back in college I had to take an introduction to engineering; which was just a civil engineering class. They made us go to events and write about them. I was tired of going to civil engineering events so I wanted to go a computer science or computer engineering event. When I mentioned that I was actually quizzed. After taking this short quiz I was told that I could go to these events. This confused me because all the civil engineering events were shit like a pizza party while learning history of buildings or plans for a park. Almost no teachers were there.
My first computer engineering event was issues of multi core devices. The second I walked in I saw 0 students there. In fact, it was just teachers. I saw my own computer science teachers and they looked at me weird. They even asked why I was here. I saw the computer security teacher who knew me from my robot competition days and even the dean of our department. I very awkwardly find a seat and sit down. 5 minutes before the event and even more teachers pile in. I’m the only student.
I listen to this lecture which opened my eyes on the fact I didn’t understand processors at all. That there’s way more then just L cache and GHz. I’m writing notes and trying to pay attention. Then the speaker, a woman from China, starts to talk about the physics and heat transfer and loss of efficiency. Between never taking a physics class before, her accent, and this high level presentation I was lost from this point on. I understood a little bit after that like making sure you have a single core to rely on because of issues I couldn’t understand and heat=bad not due to death of parts but loss of efficiency.
Now, let’s go over resistance. The longer something has to travel the more resistance it will get. The more resistance it gets the more heat it generates and the less efficient it will be. So what does this mean? Friction! So no matter what everything has friction. When you turn on your laptop or lights despite how instant that may seem there is a resistance slowing it down causing a loss of efficiency.
How does this work? Despite being wrapped up in nice tubes and all this stuff to make sure there’s minimal resistance there will always be some form. Let’s say for my CAT5E cable for every instance a bit of data is transferred it faces a .0000001% loss due to resistance. Notice how I said instance it is transferred. This is because for every picosecond it could move 5000000 instances. If it did then that means every picosecond I lose 5% efficiency due to resistance. Thank god this isn’t the case because that’s awful resistance. Lets say every 1CM moved I lose .05% of data. So if a cable is 1 M I lose 5% of data. Which means my 3M cable makes me lose 15%.
Again these are theoretical numbers but the point still stands. Because my data has to move further along it is facing more resistance causing in more data loss. Now CAT6 and 7 cables are much better with lower resistance then CAT5E. However, at 1M the data loss would be so minimal I wouldn’t care. To be honest even at 3M it is pretty minimal. Resistance is still pretty low on 5E cables. So why do this? Because it has always bothered me how no one seems to notice or care about this. Sure going from 1M to 3M isn’t a big difference. However, say the seller sent me a 10M cable, which has happened before. I would be out 10x the data due to resistance. At which I would’ve gone with a CAT6 cable. Sure the cable would’ve costed more but the data loss would not be as much compared to a 5E over that distance.
Another fun thing about cable length that matters is how much heat they make. If anyone has a really long, I mean REALLY long, extension cable without a thick wire I am sure you’ve burnt it out or know someone who has. Why does this happen? Well, as resistance builds up that loss of energy it has to go somewhere. Energy can’t just disappear. It turns into heat. Which the heat then causes extra loss of energy as the wiring becomes less efficient because it is getting hotter and hotter. So now at 1CM what would’ve been .05% could be .08% due to heat which could raise to .1% and so on until the cable burns out. Which is what happens to those extension cables. The energy keeps storing up building up until it has built too much and just fries itself.
This is also why if you use an energy usage tool and you compare an extension cable usage to just plugging it into a wall the extension cable uses more electricity. This is because the resistance leads to loss of efficiency which requires more electricity to pull through. If your phone needs 5 watts to charge and the extension cable is heating up well your phone is still sucking out 5 watts. Which then leads to the extension cable pulling more electricity from the wall. However, before you go dumping cables let it be known unless you’re pulling massive amounts this is pretty minimal. Sure your phone needs 5watts but really after a few hours the extension cable is maybe pulling like 5.3 watts for your phone. The people I’ve seen who have blown these cables were using them for mini fridges and such. Which pull a lot of energy.
So, what type of cable should I get for an extension cable? Well, the thicker the cable is the better it will be at moving the heat across to prevent it from heating up so much leading to less loss of efficiency. My dad used to work in construction. He had this massive extension cable with the thickest wire I ever saw. We used it for our window AC unit. The old one we used before actually burnt up. This thick monster he brought from work? Didn’t give a fuck. It took all the heat and resistance and didn’t even care one bit. Not only getting a thicker cable but learn what type of energy you will be using. If you need electricity get cables and extensions that are amazing at transferring it. Pay extra for a higher quality wiring with less resistance. Just learn what is being used for the transfer and what materials cause the less resistance.
What if I can’t? Well, hub up is my opinion. So I used to have a really long HDMI cable that used to get insanely hot. I ditched it and bought a splitter and combined two cables half the size of the long one. The new cables were no where near as hot. The splitter absorbed the heat. I went from no gaming past 1 hour to all night sessions. Just think of data like bridge routers. If you are having shit wifi connection buy a extra router or two and use them as bridges. This way you lose minimal data via wifi. You can do this same with cables when they need to extend long distances if you can’t get the higher quality cables to make sure they don’t burn out.
Here’s the kicker. This entire post is about cables. However, microchips, resistors, CPU, GPU internals, and so much more all follow these same principles. Once things get hot they lose efficiency. Once things get too small they lose it too, but we are getting better tech here. Remember the Wii U? Remember how Nintendo said they were selling the console at a loss when the PS4 and XB1 were way stronger and needed to only sell 2 games to be a profit. Then the Wii U needed to sell 2 games and a pro controller? Why did that happen? Well, to keep the Wii U cool because of its small form factor it needed custom parts. This made it much more expensive. To where if you made the Wii U the size of the XB1 it honestly would’ve been super cheap to produce.
The issue with smaller parts isn’t that they can’t produce results. It’s that they can’t produce results for long. I am sure you can make a 5CM CPU that can do 6 GHz. However, it’ll generate so much heat it’ll just die. The issue with the Wii U was they needed small parts for its small form factor. They also needed to make sure these parts didn’t overheat which costed a lot into R&D. Then they needed to get a proper cooling solution and one strong enough to handle this. Which the Wii U had a tiny fan to boot.
If you haven’t noticed this is the inverse issues cables have. Cables create more heat the longer they go while CPUs, RAM, etc generate more heat the smaller they are. This is because you are jamming more components inside a smaller area that all generate a lot of heat. Which is why you have noticed Apple starting to increase the size of their phones. They need to keep heat from building up as their phones get more powerful. For components it is less resistance and more so putting so much next to each other. Like if you open up a CPU and see its innards you will see tons of tiny components jammed next to each other. These things also need to breathe. They make a lot of heat. Which is where external cooling solutions come in.
However, hardware is an entirely different discussion one I don’t understand nearly as well as cables. It’s very complex and for hardware I just say make sure you reapply your thermal paste every 18 months.
Before I go! So, heat = loss of efficiency then cold = more? Wrong. If things get too cold you also lose it too. If you were to take a CPU and managed to keep it at 0 C for too long, without worry of condensation, you will harm the CPU. Cables and components all need to be at the right temperature.
-Waiting to get made fun of Joshua