PC Building: Week 7 - Building Part II - Non-Required Components

This week, I installed the last few critical components into my machine (my HDD, SSD and CPU cooling fan), and added the rest of the components to the motherboard to produce a machine that I hope will boot.


First, I installed the cooling fan by mounting the base plate to the back of the motherboard, attaching a cross of metal over the CPU attached to the base plate, removing the heat sink from the fan and screwing it to the cross, re-clipping the fan to the heat sink, and attaching the wire to the 4 pin CPU_FAN connector on the motherboard.

Next, I mounted my SSD and HDD in their respective bays, and used SATA cables to connect them to the motherboard. I then used SATA power cables to connect them to the PSU

After that, I mounted the graphics card in the PCI Express slot, screwing it into the case at the back, and connected it to the PSU with a PCI-E connector. I also mounted the Dual Band WiFi card in a similar fashion into the other available PCI Express slot (the third being covered by my dual-width graphics card).

Finally, I installed my optical drive into the bay in a similar way to the hard drives, but found that I had run out of SATA cables. I decided to connect the power anyway, to save time later.

The last thing to do was to connect up all the fans to a cable, and connect that to the PSU and the motherboard for control. When closing the case, I found that one of the side fans didn't fit due to my graphics card, so I have removed it and set it aside.

Now the building my PC is complete, I hope it boots!

This has been a Behind the Team post from Thomas (The Stacinator). Bye for now!