MK92 wrote: ↑08 Mar 2026, 04:09
No its not, its another bullshit placebo "tweak", if the problem is power quality you CANNOT "fix" this by changing random bullshit stuff in bios or windows.
When multiple forum members "Report Post" as they did, I pay attention, so I'll reply:
Flame baiting is not allowed in these forums.
It's best to write a non-flamebait rebuttal in a neutral more scientific way, without being mean, by following the Forum Rule.
It's fine to write about the unlikely/longshot nature obviously though.
1. You didn't quote the post you're replying to, so I don't see context.
2. If you meant to reply to the original post at the beginning of the thread, then I'm going to repeat a broken record.
Reminder Item #1
The symptoms in the original post is already a known confirmation, even if it's something like ~1% chance. Just because it's low odds, doesn't mean it's always a placebo.
BIOS settings such as "Spread Spectrum" was invented to try to sort of "frequency hop" away from strong interference. This won't help when your electricity is very dirty but certain BIOS settings (infrequently) can help with certain kinds of dirty electricity. The problem is that the oscilloscope graph of dirty electricity varies infinitely from one person to the next person, location to location, grid to grid, house behaviors to house behaviors, and more.
Super dumbed-down metaphor: In other words, dirty electricity might metaphorically turn a 5-bar signal into a 1-bar signal, but using Spread Spectrum may recover it to a 2-bar signal. (0-bar = computer crash, 1-bar = large amounts of lag/throttling from error correction behaviors, 2-bar = smaller amounts of lag/throttling from error correction behavior, ...etc..., 5-bars = zero performance loss).
Just like thermal throttling, computers will also sometimes randomly erratically throttle/lag doing error correction (Retroactive error correction, forward error correction, Red-Solomon, Low Density Parity Check, Parity bits, etc) on dirty electricity to prevent itself from crashing. Remember... PCI buses now have error correction. USB now have error correction. GPUs now have error correction (retries), GDDR6 will automatically/erratically slow down in some dirty electricity situations, etc.
It's very very hard to track down all of this, just like trying to track down all the noise problems between you and the phone switch office. There's orders of magnitude more miles/kilometers of of electric circuit paths in a modern gaming rig (all wire distances on a chip, on a circuit board, in a RAM chip, etc) than the average distance of a DSL phone line between switch office and a modem, and any interference will degrade signals. Obviously, distances are shorter, but clocks are higher (e.g. terabits per second being thrown around internally), and are subject to the same laws of physics of interference on electricals.
So yes, it FEELS like placebo trying to fiddle. It's not fun to open the car hood if you don't have the troubleshooting equipment that TSMC, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD has. Or heck, a datacenter builder like MicroStrategy or Amazon or Google, all of whom is experienced in clean-electricity systems and low-noise component selection (etc).
Anyway...
The name "Spread Spectrum" found in BIOS, was invented
because of electrical noise. It will not always fix things. But it sometimes does. It's a lottery, a jackpot, a gamble. But sometimes you win. So it's not placebo.
Reminder Item #2
It may be one of the tinier slices in the Famous Infinite Pie Chart, but it's in the chart.
Reminder Item #3
Chief Blur Buster wrote: ↑12 Nov 2021, 22:51
The ‘turn off all circuit breakers except computer” is a useful blunt diagnostic tool, yes.
(Not all EMI is caused by broken wires acting as antennas, but turning off electricity to everything except computer can help determine if it’s a more in-house bad-electricity problem)
Reminder Item #4
Chief Blur Buster wrote: ↑14 Nov 2021, 13:33
Kudos.
This is a scientifically known “bad electricity” problem. I can personally confirm that EMI has been solved this way before.
This is one of the few EMI problems troubleshootable by testing your circuit breakers (turning off the WHOLE house *except* for the power outlets connected to your computer)
Unfortunately it does not solve all possible kinds of EMI, because some people’s EMI problem is caused by interference coming elsewhere.
But, this is something easy enough for users to do. As long as you don’t mind the disruption of turning off your house’s power temporarily by removing or turning off all-but-1 fuses/breakers in your power panel. It’s one of the most useful blunt-force diagnostic tools for people without electrical knowledge.
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