PC Building
Posted by Ben Harris
Hi all.
Over the past month, I have been building my custom PC. Here is a little guide to building your first PC.
The first thing you need to do is buy all the componants you want. Here is a quick checklist of everything you will need.
- PC Case. I recomend ATX
- PSU (if there isnt one already in the case you are buying)
- Motherboard
- CPU
- RAM
- Hard Disk Drive
- CD Drive
- Graphics Card
- Sound Card
I really recomend buying all your stuff off ebuyer, its a really great site, and it all works out quite cheap. When ordering parts, note that OEM means that it comes straight from the manufacturer, and so tends to come without any instructions or anything. For example, I bought my hard drive and CD drive OEM, and they came as-is, just the componant, nothing else.
*Wait for delivery*
Ok, now all your componants have arrived, and its really worth checking you do have all of them first. What you want to do
is get your PC Case out. Check it over, take all the packaging off it and everything. Put the case on a table or something on its side, and remove the side pannel. It may vary, but in my experience, its always the panel to the left of the case that comes off. Once off, we will move onto the next step.
Ok, now what you want to do is fit your processor to your motherboard. To do this, you first need to either get an anti-static wrist strap, or just touch a metal pipe or something to earth yourself (this prevents static electrisity on your body
damaging the componants).
Get the motherboard out of the packaging and place it on the plastic packaging you removed it from. The motherboard
will have a little piece of plastic where the processor will go to protect the contacts, flip the lever that holds the cpu down,
and remove this piece of plastic.
Now you need to get your processor out, get it out of the box, and place it in the processor slot. It will only fit one way.
After getting the CPU fitted, you will need to fit the heat sync. The heatsync is the big fan thing with metal fins that keeps
your CPU nice and cool, and will prevent damage to it by overheating.
Most modern heat syncs will have four pins which slot into four holes surrounding the cpu on the motherboard. (Your heat sync will have some thermal paste on it, dont touch that, its used to make a better contact between your cpu and heat sync). Now what you wan to do is place the heat sync into the four holes on the motherboard (make sure the pins are all rotated fully clockwise), and diagonally press the pins in until they click. Do these at oposite diagonals, so the top right and bottom left ones, then the top left and bottom right ones. Just press until they click. After fitting, try to give it a little wobble to check it is fitted firmly. If it moves much, take it off by rotating the four pins anti-clockwise by 90°, and repeat this stage. Once firmly fitted, take the wire from the fan, and plug it into the motherboard (on the ASUS P5K its at the top right)
Now you have your CPU and HSF (heat sync) fitted to your motherboard, you are ready to put your motherboard into your PC Case!! There are small metal rings over the motherboard, these are the holes you use to fix it to the case. you will have been
supplied with 8-10 little (usually brass) screws with a screw hole in top (sorry for the in-technical description). You should screw these into the appropriate holes on the case back panel. After screwing them in,
place the motherboard ontop and screw the motherboard to those little brass things.
Yay! Your motherboard is fitted!!!
The next stage is to plug your power supply into your motherboard. On many cases, the PSU (power supply unit) will
already be fitted at the top right of the case. It will have quite a few wires coming out of it. One big main one, some straight
line 4 pin ones (molex), some square 4 pin ones, and probably many others.
What you want to do is plug the main big one into your motherboard. There will be only one place where it will fit, and its
usually fairly obvious. Its on the far right side of the ASUS P5K motherboard.
Once that one is plugged in, find a square 4 pin one, and plug this into the motherboard too (top left on the ASUS P5K).
This is usually labeled something like ”P4″.
Okay, thats the basics, now we just need to slot the HDD & CD Drive in and connect the power to them with a molex power plug, and then connect the drives to the motherboard either via IDE or SATA cables (depending on the type of drive).
Now thats done. You will want to slot your graphics card and sound cards in. These will really vary depending on the cards,
so I wont cover those here. Just follow the instructions in your manual.
The last thing you want to do is connect the small loom of wires to the motherboard, these connect the buttons, lights and
other basic functions to the front panel, again, these highly vary depending on the case.
The most crucial one that all cases will have is the power button. All of the little wires will have a small black plug on the
end with a label. Just follow your motherboards manual on how to fit these as there is likely to be much variation.
Now you just need to fit your RAM into the ram slots, and you essentially have a built PC.
Plug the power cables in, monitors, mouse and keyboard, and start her up. When you startup, hit whatever key you need
to to enter the BIOS. Just check the motherboard has detected all of your componants.
Now you just need to install an operating system and your away!!!
Cheers for reading,
Ben