PC hardware is ripe territory for mythbusting, considering the number of misconceptions you still come across. Long-standing beliefs, outdated knowledge, and new complexities combine to give rise to these myths. On the flip side, people often mistake legitimate facts for myths if they sound counterintuitive. Enthusiasts may be adept at separating fact from fiction, but the majority of users are not. They may very well assume some things to be false when they have been true for years. And these facts aren't limited to CPUs and GPUs; they span across RAM, SSDs, coolers, fans, motherboards, and power supplies. Maybe you've been wrong about one or more of these PC hardware facts, too.

More fans can be worse for your PC's cooling

Quality over quantity

It may sound logical to populate every fan slot in your case with a fan to "maximize" the airflow inside it, but that's not how things work in the real world. Beyond a point, more fans can actually worsen your PC's airflow. This is because what matters more is the fan configuration, which determines if your case has positive or negative pressure. Most users should opt for positive pressure, which simply means that more air goes into the case than what goes out. This reduces the dust deposits inside the case and expels hot air through all available exits. To achieve positive pressure, all you need are 2–3 intake fans and 1–2 exhaust fans, and this includes your AIO radiator or air cooler.

Stuffing your case with, say, 9 intake fans and 4 exhaust fans might seem like a good idea, but it's bound to create problems. First, you have to contend with unnecessarily higher noise levels. Second, and more importantly, too many fans increase the likelihood of turbulent airflow, since the intake-to-exhaust path stops being seamless. Multiple intake and exhaust streams fight against each other instead of being in synergy. This defeats the core purpose of optimizing airflow, and gives rise to more problems than it solves.

Your SSD will leak your data if left unpowered for long

Not 100% non-volatile, is it?

SSDs are often considered long-lasting storage media due to the lack of moving parts. Unlike spinning hard drives, the chances of mechanical wear are pretty slim. Still, they have a limited number of write cycles due to the way NAND flash stores data. What's more surprising, though, is that SSDs left unplugged for extended periods can start to leak charge, which can lead to data loss. SSDs are non-volatile, but they can't ensure voltage integrity if you keep a drive unplugged for over a year, using it as cold storage. A loss of voltage can threaten data integrity and make it unreadable when you plug the drive back in after a long period of no power.

This is why people prefer hard drives for archival storage. Creative professionals or data hoarders need to store copious amounts of data on large drives, which they don't want to keep plugged in when not needed. Hard drives are better suited to this use case since they don't leak charge if kept unplugged for extended periods. The conventional hard drive may be outdated as primary storage, but it's still relevant for cold and secondary storage, not to mention NAS devices.

Four RAM sticks can be worse than two

When less is more

More RAM is always better, except when it isn't. You'd think installing four 16GB DIMMs for a total of 64GB of DDR5 RAM would make everything feel smoother than running two of the same sticks for 32GB of RAM. Well, it would help workloads that can eat tons of memory, such as video editing, 3D rendering, and virtualization. However, gaming will most likely feel worse compared to running 32GB of DDR5 memory. This boils down to RAM stability when populating all four slots of the motherboard. Due to the excessive strain put on the CPU's memory controller, running four sticks often forces users to use JEDEC speeds instead of the maximum speed their kit is rated for. The controller can manage only so much, limiting the frequency to ensure stability.

Hence, running four sticks of RAM can actually be worse than running two, since the extra capacity does nothing for gaming. If you already had 32GB of memory running at 6,000MT/s, using 64GB of RAM at, say, 5,200MT/s can introduce a noticeable performance penalty. If memory frequency and latency matter for your primary use case, i.e, gaming, then populating two slots is always going to be better than populating all four of them. Alternatively, you could choose a 2x32GB kit for 64GB of total memory without using all the slots, which usually combines capacity with maximum rated speeds.

PCIe 5.0 and 3.0 SSDs are basically identical for gaming

All that sequential speed doesn't do a thing

When the world moved on from hard drives to SSDs, the 550 MB/s read/write speeds of SATA SSDs felt like a giant leap compared to the 150 MB/s achievable on spinning drives. Then PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSDs took this a step further with 3,500 MB/s speeds, further improving gaming load times, OS boot times, and general system responsiveness. However, gaming performance hit a wall with PCIe 4.0 SSDs, even though they doubled the sequential speeds to around 7,000 MB/s. With PCIe 5.0 SSDs making the jump to around 15,000 MB/s, the upgrade was basically cosmetic. Today, you'll struggle to tell the difference between a Gen3 and Gen5 SSD in gaming. For all practical purposes, the two drives are identical for most users.

Gaming is dependent on random speeds, not the sequential speeds printed on the SSD box. Once Gen3 SSDs removed storage as the bottleneck for gaming, further improvements with Gen4 and Gen5 weren't going to move the needle. Technologies like DirectStorage were supposed to make high-speed storage relevant for games by allowing a more direct link between the SSD and GPU, but adoption has remained low and challenging. Besides the premium pricing, Gen5 SSDs are also plagued with high thermals and bulky coolers (on high-end models). They make sense for productivity users, but anyone using their system for gaming and basic work should simply buy a Gen4 SSD (Gen3 drives don't save you money anymore).

Your CPU never really runs at its boost clocks

It's a theoretical target

If you bought a high-end CPU expecting it to run at the rated boost clock whenever you launched a game or edited a 4K video, then you set yourself up for disappointment. CPUs have a base and boost clock speed, but the latter is an "up to" frequency that the chip has been rated to achieve under ideal conditions. And these conditions are almost impossible to create in your setup. Despite your CPU's boost clock being rated at 4.8 GHz or 6 GHz, it will almost never touch those numbers. A lot of factors need to work perfectly for that to happen. From the right workload and cooling hardware to the thermal and power limits of your CPU, everything needs to come together to make those boost clocks possible. And even then, your CPU will likely never sustain that frequency; it'll only touch it for a brief moment, if at all.

Moreover, the boost clock advertised by the manufacturer is for a single core, but modern CPUs almost always leverage multiple cores for any workload. The more cores your CPU is running, the harder it becomes for any single one to achieve the rated boost clock. This is why the maximum boost clock you'll observe for your CPU will always be a few MHz lower than the advertised single-core number. The closer your CPU gets to the boost clock, the higher the likelihood of it hitting the power or thermal limits set by the motherboard, resulting in automatic lowering of the clock speed to keep the chip from throttling. So, the boost clock of your CPU should always be considered as a theoretical peak rather than a sustainable frequency.

Undervolting will actually increase performance

The additional thermal headroom does the trick

Undervolting is the process of reducing the amount of voltage being supplied to a component to obtain lower thermals and power consumption. Usually preferred for CPUs and GPUs, undervolting is done with the aim of balancing performance and thermals, with users often maintaining the same performance despite lowering the voltage. This is possible because manufacturers often leave breathing room when tuning the voltage-frequency curve, allowing you to "trim the fat" and remove excess voltage from the equation. The surprising part for some people is the potential increase in performance by undervolting the CPU and GPU.

The reason is that by lowering the supplied voltage, you expand the thermal headroom the CPU or GPU has to automatically boost clock speeds. Since it takes longer to hit the thermal limits, it can sustain higher frequencies for longer, helping boost performance. This usually manifests in the form of improved 1% and 0.1% lows in gaming, providing a smoother experience. Combined with lower temperatures and fan noise levels, this makes undervolting a no-brainer. It's essentially a free performance boost for your PC without the need to manually push the clocks higher (overclocking).

PC components often behave contrary to popular opinion

Due to the way multiple components depend on thermal and power limits, and the way they interact with each other, their behavior can seem counterintuitive. This is why installing more RAM can hurt gaming performance, upgrading your SSD can be inconsequential, and undervolting can increase performance. The average PC user often makes decisions based on what "seems" true instead of what actually happens. Enthusiasts try to educate others on forums, but some facts can still sound like myths for years.