Tip: whenever you buy a pre-built PC, run some benchmarks to see if the performance numbers are comparable to similarly specced systems.

Long story short: for my PC they weren’t. Geekbench reported a far lower score than my Intel Core i5-12400 should be capable of, and Cinebench was even worse. As is often the case, the solution was on Reddit.

Turns out that Gigabyte motherboard in my Medion MD35244 came with a very old BIOS installed. One that severly limited the CPU performance of some Alder Lake CPUs. Gigabyte acknowledged this issue and released an update over a year ago. But that’s when I ran into an issue. My motherboard had a Medion BIOS, not a Gigabyte one.

OemID Mismatch

BIOS updates are tricky. If anything goes wrong, your PC can be bricked, and you may need to replace the motherboard. To keep people from flashing the wrong file, some checks are performed. In this case, when I tried to install Gigabyte’s newer version, I’d get an “OemID Mismatch”. Basically, I could only install a BIOS that came from Medion. But their tech support made it very clear they were not going to provide one.

This Reddit post suggests booting FreeDOS and using a DOS-based tool to flash the BIOS. I spent hours trying to boot FreeDOS, but could not get it to work.

Q-Flash Plus

Luckily, this particular motherboard (B660M DS3H AX DDR4) has a little button labeled “Q-Flash Plus”. It provides a way to flash your BIOS, even without anything installed on the motherboard. This is helpful if your CPU is very new, and requires an update even before you build the system. My quess was that perhaps this would do fewer of those pesky checks, and I was right.

I’m not going to recommend that you do this, and if you do, please research the steps involved, and follow them to the letter. This is a potential footgun, so don’t blame me if it does not work.

In my case it worked flawlessly. I put the new BIOS on a USB stick (formatted FAT32), renamed it to “GIGABYTE.bin”, powered the computer down and pressed the “Q-Flash Plus” button. Ten minutes later, the PC booted into the new BIOS. No need to remove any components, as some guides suggest.

Medion

Obviously, this voids your warranty, but I don’t really mind. Doubling the performance is worth it to me. What bugs me is that Medion did not, in multiple emails I got from them, even once acknowledge the problem, or offer a solution. They must have shipped more than one of these machines, and it’s likely they all have this issue.

The very least Medion could do is provide an updated BIOS file. But even then, most owners won’t even know their system is underperforming. Time for a recall?

A while ago, I bought a Vero 4K+ media player. OSMC is excellent, and I love the Vero, but that’s a different story. This is about the machine it replaced. An older, passively cooled Shuttle barebone I previously used to watch movies in my living room.

That little Shuttle machine has a Celeron 1037U CPU. And like with any older hardware I get my hands on, I wanted to see how useful it still was. I wasn’t hopeful because, on paper, the 1037U seems worse than the already dead slow Celeron in my Toshiba Chromebook-turned-Linux-laptop.

Besides the higher TDP (the amount of power the chip is designed to use during normal operation) these specs seemed similar to me. The fact that the 1037U is older and the lower clock speed made me think this thing would be terrible. Spoiler: it’s not.

Performance

I installed Linux Mint on it to see what that would be like. Since I’m not really a fan of XFCE, I opted for the heavier Cinnamon version. To my surprise, it is very responsive. Hell, it feels downright fast.

In benchmarks I could find online, the 1037U beats the N2840 by at least 50%, and in some cases by up to 400%. That’s a huge difference for chips with such similar specs.

Core vs Atom

So I did some digging, and found that the 1037U is based on Intel’s “Ivy Bridge” architecture. Basically, it’s a scaled down version of the 3rd generation of Intel Core CPUs. The N2840 however is “Silvermont”, a power-efficient architecture meant to compete with the ARM CPU’s of that time. Silvermont is essentially a range of Atom CPUs. Like the ones in first-gen netbooks. The N2840 is a very, very slow chip.

1080p only

While the little Shuttle machine runs well with Mint installed, there’s a catch. The internal graphics of the 1037U is limited to 1080p “full HD” resolution. There’s no way I can get it to output my monitor’s native 1440p resolution. It does run 1080p at 75Hz though. Technically, 1440p shouldn’t be an issue. This is likely an artificial limitation. Guess Intel needs to make sure we occasionally buy a new CPU.

Step 1, add the file

Create a new file in the root of your WordPress install, and call it “cache-config.php”. You can use a differen name since we’ll tell Surge where to find it in step 2, but make sure it’s a PHP file. This is what should be in it at the very minimum.

<?php
return $config;Code language: PHP (php)

Once we’ve hooked it up in the next step, this file will be included by Surge, and it’ll know about the $config variable. That variable contains an array of settings. Our file’s job is to modify $config, and then return it. Any settings we’ll change before returning $config will then be used by Surge. But for now, let’s simply return the array as is.

Step 2, modify wp-config.php

Next, we’ll need to tell Surge where our new file is, and what it’s called. You can do this by adding a single line to your website’s wp-config.php. Find the line that sets “WP_CACHE” to true, and directly below it, add the following.

define( 'WP_CACHE_CONFIG', __DIR__ . '/cache-config.php' );Code language: PHP (php)

This will tell Surge to look for cache-config.php in the current folder. Check if your site still works, and we’re ready to do some actual tweaks. If your wp-config.php is not in the site’s web root folder, you’ll nee to modify the code above accordingly.

Configuration fields

Currently, the $config array contains four fields that you can change. You’re not allowed to remove any, and adding new ones won’t work either.

Setting a longer cache expiration time

TTL stands for “time to live”, and basically determines how long any page will be served from cache before a fresh copy is generated. By default the value is 600, so any cache file will be expire after 10 minutes. This is a good default value, but on this blog, which isn’t updated very often, I wanted to set it to a higher value. Here’s the cache-config.php I’m using.

<?php
$config['ttl'] = 1800;
return $config;Code language: PHP (php)

As you can see, I’ve added a line that sets the “ttl” value before returning the array to Surge. As a result, pages are now cached for half an hour.

Adding a URL parameter to ignore

If your website uses a URL parameter that does not result in the page’s content being unique, you can improve Surge’s efficiency by adding that parameter to “ignore_query_vars”.

<?php
$config['ignore_query_vars'][] = 'my_var';
return $config;Code language: PHP (php)

This will add “my_var” to the of set url variables that Surge ignores. This means that “example.com?my_var=1” and “example.com?my_var=2” are considered identical and will be served from cache.

If you’re not familiar with PHP, please note the extra set op square brackets. In other languages, you’d use something like push(), but this is PHP’s weird way of adding an item to an array. Without the [], the existing array would be overwritten. Since is contains a large number of commonly use tracking and marketing variables, that is not a good idea. Also, “ignore_query_vars” would then be a string, not an array.

Adding cookie names and variants works in much the same way.

Advanced options

Since the configuration file is written in PHP, you can get creative with it. For instance, a simple if-statement will allow you to modify the settings only for certain user agents. Please do note that cache-config.php is executed very early, before most of WordPress is booted up. Hooks, filters and core functions may not yet be available.

For most users, Surge will work fine out of the box. But it’s nice to have some control should you need it.