I recently had an entire day off work, and no pressing chores around the house, so I gathered up the shipping boxes and replayed Christmas morning gift opening.
The case.
Side covers removed.
Back side. This is the first case I've bought that didn't come with a power supply pre-installed.
Below, power supply mounted. The CX 650 Power supply box goes inside, then gets pushed to the back of the case. Four screws at the rear hold it in place.
PC ATX Power supply from wikipedia - Hans Haase
The SMPS provides DC voltage at 12, 5 and 3.5 volts. That's it - But man, what a bundle of snakes the power leads make. That power goes everywhere in the machine.
The next step is to install stand-offs in the case. This keeps the motherboard up and off the case, which might cause it to develop short circuits. In this case, eight stand-offs were needed.
You should test-fit the motherboard to ensure your stand-offs on the case match those on the motherboard. Those holes are pretty obvious. Below, they look like silver washers. I count eight of them on this image. The top right one is partially hidden by a capacitor.
After the stand-offs are installed and the board test-fitted, it can be mounted with machine screws.
Below, motherboard before mounting
After mounting.
Every. Single. Time. I forget the small metal plate that seals up the hole where the I/O ports are. I had to dismount the motherboard and install the plate from inside.
This shiny metal plate, right here. I forget to install it. Every time.
The beating heart: A Ryzen 7 3800X CPU
CPU cooler. It's quite heavy. Lots of copper heat sink and aluminum fins. Plus a fan!
I set it down like this to get a photo of the cooling fan, unaware that the thermal conductive paste wasn't under a wrapper. The cooler stuck to the table top :)
The next step is to install the CPU on the motherboard. You lift up the little handle on the right, and this opens up the pin holes in the socket.
If you look very carefully, you will see a small gold colored dot (actually a triangle) at the bottom left corner of the CPU that helps you orient it correctly in the socket.
After you orient the CPU correctly in the socket, pull the handle down and latch it. This clamps the pins in place to get a good connection on each one.
Attach the heat sink and fan. The motherboard has mounting hardware installed, so this is a snap. Just slide the holes in the arms over the hooks, and twist the lever to tighten the arms.
The motherboard has a connection for the CPU fan to get power. It's a really good idea to plug the fan in so that you don't burn the CPU up.
Next up is memory installation.
The manual that comes with the motherboard tells you which slots the memory goes in (At the right of the CPU cooling fan). The base of each memory stick is slotted so that you can't install it backwards. A locking tab holds them in place.
Time to install the drives. Opical: Just pop out the panel, slide the drive in, and lock it down.
Both Optical drives in. Easy peasy.
Magnetic.
Static
The 2.5" Solid State drive mounts to the bottom of this particular case, while the 3.5" Magnetic hard drive mounts in a bay using special plastic rails. This mounting scheme is a new thing to me. In the past, I've used carriers that let you put a smaller drive into a standard bay (see below).
Bottom of the case is to the left in this image. The cage fits a 3.5" drive using rails and you can mount a 2.5" to the bottom with screws. I had to loosen the SSD in order to connect the cables to it, then screw it down again.
Video Graphics card installation up next
The motherboard manual tells you which slot it goes in. Then remove the slot covers on the back panel and install. Add a screw (left) to keep it in place. At the top right of the video card is a connector for additional power.
The LEGO® portion of the build is now complete.
Time to find homes for the bundle of snakes.
The motherboard gets a 24-pin power connector on one side, and an 8-pin connector on the opposite side. The video card needs supplemental power from an 8-pin connector. Each of four case cooling fans require a 4-pin connector, and each Hard/Optical/SSD drive requires power. Each drive requires a data cable as well. I was short one SATA cable because I installed so many drives. The motherboard came with two data cables, and I found another one out in the shop. That still left me short one.
I took no photos of this process. I had to work in tight and poorly lit areas to connect everything and tie down the cables so they were not flopping around. It was a tedious enough process without trying to take photos of the process.
Next it is time to connect the front panel of the case to the motherboard. That would be the power switch and power on LED, Hard Drive light, and reset button. These are also always tedious, because the case manufacturer and the motherboard manufacturer don't usually use the same nomenclature, and the motherboard seems to always be poorly marked, both in purpose and polarity.
At some point I was cutting the ends off several zip ties and noticed how grungy my wire cutters had gotten, so I scrubbed off a lot of surface corrosion and grime. WTF am I doing with a Snap-On tool? Never in my life would I have paid Snap-On prices.
Oh. Heh.
The initial smoke test went OK. I'm pretty sure that several front panel wires are not correct, but I got the power button to work after I changed the location of the wires on the pins. The others probably need a little re-wiring as well.
Another shot with the far side of the case installed, and the near side cooling fan wired up. Colorful!
At this point I was tired of messing with it, so I closed it up and set it aside. I'll hook it up to a monitor soon and see what still needs to be straightened out, and get that last SATA III cable installed. Then I'll set up the BIOS and load Win 10.
That part will require quite a bit of time and a lot of patience. I don't have much of either right now, so it'll have to wait a little while.
Edit: The package with the SATA cables arrived. I still have no time to mess with it.
I noticed a cute little video graphics card on top of an unused PC at work. It's so small! Looks like an old Radeon 7000 series. I put a pen next to it for comparison. At this point, I'm used to monstrous wide cards with multiple fans and huge heat sinks.
Update:
After spending a bit of time with the motherboard owner's manual, I realized there has been a really cool development since my last PC build, and that is the M.2 slot. The M.2 slot is for an internally-mounted expansion card, which can be a Solid State Drive (SSD) that uses the PCIe bus.
Below, the M.2 Interface circled in red. Actually that's the heat sink. The slot is underneath.
So I bought a 500GB SSD to fit in the M.2 slot. According to the literature, it can read at up to 4950 MB/sec and write at 4250 MB/sec. One reviewer said that with Windows loaded on his M.2 SSD, his computer went from power off, to Windows desktop loaded in 4.5 seconds. Awesome!
It's the tiniest hard drive I've ever seen! The blade of my knife is maybe 3 inches long.
I'm looking forward to installing this and seeing how well it performs!
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