How to replace iPhone 5 battery

At two years old and at the end of its contract, my iPhone 5 should have been destined for the kitchen drawer. Visits to countries as unforgiving as Iceland and Jordan had left it scarred and pitted, but its battery life was the killer: a decent train journey’s worth of Twitter and the PC&TA website would leave its battery meter dipping into the red.

 

 Step 1 of replacing iPhone 5 battery guide

So it was, I found myself with a pouchfull of tools and a replacement battery.Both came as a set for $20 from Amazon, although a quality-control issue meant I ended up getting a replacement for my replacement battery. iFixit sells a kit including all the tools you need for around $45. I opened iFixit’s step-by-step guide – bright, professional-quality photography and clear, concise instructions that ease the pain of a fiddly job.

And fiddly it is. The first step is to remove two of Apple’s controversial pentalobe screws from the bottom of the device: at 3.6mm long, these are – incredibly – the longest screws you’ll work with by some distance. Somewhere to keep everything safe is essential. One sharp hand movement on either your part or that of other household members could be enough to lose sight of them forever. The black pentalobe screws would be hard enough to find on a carpet – the screws you’ll find inside, impossible.

 Step 2 of replacing iPhone 5 battery guide

With the screws removed, a tiny bitof brute force is called for. Attach the small sucker to the bottom of the screen and pull upwards slightly. This will reveal a sliver of a gap at the bottom of the screen, into which you’ll insert the thin end of the curiously named spudger. Gently prise up the bottom of the screen until you hear the click of the catches within giving way. Work your way up the sides of the phone until the sides and bottom are free. Bear in mind that, at this point, the only thing connecting the phone’s screen to the rest of its body are three incredibly fragile, wafer-thin ribbon connectors. These run the phone’s touch digitiser, LCD screen and the phone’s camera; yanking the screen away from the body could ruin everything.

Step 3 of replacing iPhone 5 battery guide

Removing the blanking plate covering these ribbon connectors allows you to gently (gently!) prise the connectors from the phone’s motherboard. The screws holding down the blanking plate are of two different sizes, with the screw’s length differing by a measly 0.4mm. Place them separately, so you remember which is which.

Step 4 of replacing iPhone 5 battery guide

The best way to disconnect the ribbon cables is with a fine metal spudger,or a finely tapered pair of tweezers. Prising rather than pulling feels like the safest approach. This done, the screen is free of the rest of the phone and can be gently popped on the side. You can remove the phone’s battery without removing the screen first. However, leaving it in-situ and connected to the body of the phone means it remains connected via the three fragile ribbon connectors, and a clumsy move could result in one of the ribbons tearing off its connector.

Step 5 of replacing iPhone 5 battery guide

Next, the business end: the metal blanking plate protecting the battery connector is unscrewed and, again, the fragile ribbon connector prised free. The battery is now disconnected from the phone, but glued in place. The right-hand side of the battery has enough room to insert a spudger, with which you can prise it free from the bottom of the phone. Once it’s lifted up sufficiently, gently lever it free. Installing the new battery involves simply reversing the process. There will be enough adhesive left in the bottom of the phone to secure it in place, and again, it pays to be extremely careful when connecting the battery and the three connectors for the screen.

 

Pro tips? Patience.

Becoming frustrated or trying to rush will result in broken connectors, lost screws and dead iPhones. While replacing the battery in another iPhone, I broke the plastic connector on the motherboard – fortunately, there’s enough of the connector housing left, plus the pressure from the metal blanking plate, to hold everything in place. The worst thing you can do is drop a screw – the smallest screw you’ll deal with is a mere 1.2mm long, and if you drop it on anything other than a sterile white surface, it vanishes instantly. These screws are pretty bouncy, and can’t be trusted not to ping off your work surface onto the floor. A fine set of tweezers is useful for picking up screws lying in the body of the phone itself – your fingers might as well be sausages with equipment this small. The good news: with my new battery installed, the phone fires up first time and I’m rewarded with a handset that can come off the charger in the early morning and last until dinner time, extending my phone’s life by at least a year.

High Speed RAM – THE VALUE OF BUYING HIGH-SPEED MEMORY

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS GOING TOO FAST? MARK WILLIAMS LOOKS
AT THE VALUE OF BUYING HIGH-SPEED MEMORY

Bigger and faster is always better, isn’t it? At least that’s what PC hardware marketing would always have you believe. However for memory, the old adage ‘it’s how you use it that counts’ rings especially true.

With DDR4 now being mainstream there is a large swath of speeds available from 2133MHz up to 4266MHz and under extreme overclocking even 4800MHz, well over double that of DDR4’s launch speeds. The question is how much does that translate into real world a performance gains?

The reality is, for the average user or gamer, it’s basically not much, but in some circumstances it can help quite a bit. Under light loads like office work or browsing the web nothing is going to be gained as these aren’t memory intensive tasks. Even gaming on a high end rig with 2133MHz vs 3200MHz memory won’t see much more than a 2% difference in frame rates. That’s because most of the load is on the graphics card which has its own inbuilt memory subsystem (typically GDDR5 these days) which takes most of the bandwidth load of the system. Not only that, but a well paired CPU and GPU combination also means the CPU isn’t the bottleneck in this situation.

So where can faster memory make a proper difference? For gaming, surprisingly it’s in low end systems where you are CPU-bound. For example, with the entry level Intel i3 6100 CPU paired with a discrete graphics card, simply moving from 2133MHz to 2666MHz memory can see an 11% boost to FPS in games like The Witcher 3 and Far Cry 4 and up to an astonishing 76% increase in Ryse: Son of Rome. So if you’re considering a low end CPU for a build that may do a bit of gaming, it may be worth an extra few dollars for above stock memory speeds. This is especially true when not using a discrete graphics card with AMD’s APUs or relying on Intel’s integrated graphics, as the IGPs in these cases must utilise your system memory directly for their graphics processing meaning it’s not just your CPU hitting the RAM. Faster RAM speeds in these situations has been shown to be particularly beneficial.

In non-gaming situations, calculation intensive programs will also benefi t. For example, rendering programs like 3D Studio Max which benchmark suites like LuxMark easily highlight the benefits of faster memory, and also scientifi c loads like Folding@Home, video transcoding (without hardware acceleration) and file compression with WinRAR and the like all see benefi ts. Unless you’re doing such things regularly on a daily basis, though, you don’t really need to worry too much about how fast a memory to get.

As a guide when buying memory for general use, first get the correct capacity you need (16GB these days is a solid choice for gaming), then look at latency (lower latency numbers are better) and then finally speed, only looking at above stock speeds if you’re on a low end CPU using integrated graphics or often doing compute intensive tasks

Source: PC & Tech Authority

ASRock and it’s 10-core Intel Core i7 consumer processor

Intel’s Broadwell-E sets a new standard with its 10 cores’ worth of horsepower, reveals Gordon Mah Ung.

 

Motherboard maker ASRock recently outed Intel’s most anticipated enthusiast chip of the year: a 10-core Core i7 CPU. Yes, we’ve seen dribs and drabs of leaks for months, including Intel’s own accidental disclosure of the Core i7-6950X recently, but no vendors had confirmed the core count until now.

“The most unmissable part of Intel Broadwell-E is the flagship Core i7- 6950X, which will be the first deca-core processor for the commercial market,”

ASRock said in a press release on its website.

ASRock went on to confirm the rest of the line-up. ”While this new CPU boasts a compelling 10-cores-and-20-threads architecture, users require a BIOS update for their motherboards to handle it; this update applies to the rest of the Broadwell-E gang, including i7-6900K [8-core], i7-6850K [6-core] and i7-6800K [6-core] as well,” the press release said.

This matters because Intel’s Skylake CPUs (and Windows 10) have failed to buoy sagging computer sales since they debuted last year, so the company has increasingly looked to gamers and hardware enthusiasts to move product. Nothing builds excitement like more CPU cores, which the Core i7-6950X has in spades.

More leaks than the Titanic

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One can’t help but wonder if all the leaks are somehow condoned by Intel to help stoke the hype-train engine. We asked Intel to comment on ASRock’s confirmation and was given the boilerplate response that the company does not comment on unannounced product.

Intel had its own accidental slip, when a web page appeared to confirm that the Core i7-6950X would hit speeds of up to 3.5GHz and have 25MB of cache (see below). That page has since been pulled.

 

MSI ‘leaked’ news, too. The company said its X99 motherboards were ready for Broadwell-E. MSI’s press release, however, was far more coy and used screenshots and performance numbers from a Xeon chip instead. Gigabyte also quietly added “Support 2016 Q2 coming new CPU” in a BIOS update pushed out in January.

So obviously, this has been a badly kept secret. The only real unknown is how much Intel will charge for the CPU. When the chip first popped up on the leak radar, many people assumed the price would be £835.

Intel has basically charged just under a grand for its top-end processor since the days of the first quad-core Bloomfield Core i7-965 Extreme Edition. That price held when Intel added two more cores to the Core i7-990X. Several generations later, when Intel ‘gave’ consumers two more cores still, for a total of eight in the Core i7-5960X, the price remained £835.

With the 10-core Core i7-6950X, though, there are indications Intel may ramp up the price to £1,200. Again, Intel hasn’t confirmed nor talked about the CPU on the record, but rumours of the higher price have been hot and heavy since January.