DIY PC

FIVE STEPS DIY PC

THE TOOLS

As tools, get a Philips head screwdriver, a tweezer or a small sharp-nosed plier (with blunt edges); and a bag of screws and washers (if you buy a new CPU casing, it normally come with screws, washers and plastic fasteners). You can buy the screws and washers in packets of 50 from PC hardware vendors. You will also need a set of ATA66/ATA100 IDE cables for your hard drive, an ATA33 cable for your CD-Rom drive, and a floppy cable for your diskette driver. All these mentioned cables are usually included if you purchased a new motherboard.

Your work area should be clean, dry and well lit. Dust and moisture are natural enemies of electrical components, while you need good lightning to locate the small jumpers and to read the labels on your motherboard.

STEP 1

Read the motherboard manual thoroughly to understand every part and know where the main components such as the IDE ports, DIMM slots and CPU frequency jumpers are located. You are now ready to start.

First, insert your CPU into the motherboard's processor socket. Make sure it is aligned properly. Check that the pin grid of the processor fits the layout of the processor slot. Once it is installed, you need to fix the heat sink/CPU cooler. Ensure that the CPU cooler fan's thermal gel is in contact with and aligned to the processor. Then fix the metal fasteners of the CPU cooler to the plastic latches on both sides of the CPU socket on the motherboard.

Next, connect the power socket of the CPU cooler to the three-pin power connector on the motherboard that is usually labeled as "CPU fan". Configure your CPU to the correct front-side bus frequency and clock multiplier setting if your motherboard requires CPU settings to be adjusted via jumpers on the motherboard. Should the motherboard support Bios CPU configuration as well, it may be easier to do this than to play around with jumpers.

After installing the CPU, you need to install the RAM modules - an easy task. Just make sure that the DIMM slot grooves are aligned properly with those on the RAM modules.

STEP 2

Here you fix the motherboard to the CPU casing. Remove the cover of the casing (older casing uses screws while newer one uses latch which is much easier to remove) and attach the motherboard to the base plate of the CPU casing. Use either plastic fasteners or screws and washers. You will need at least six plastic fasteners or screws and washers to ensure that the motherboard is securely fasten.

Next, connect the power, reset, speaker, SMI connectors from the CPU casing to the motherboard. Then attach the connector from your CPU ATX power supply to the motherboard.

STEP 3

Now it is time to connect your hard disk, CD-Rom drive and diskette or Zip drive to the motherboard. First, mount the drives securely to the appropriate 3.5-inch drive bay, while CD-Rom fit into the larger 5.25-inch drive bays.

Next, connect the IDE and floppy cables to the drives. For ATA 66/100 connectors, make sure that the blue end of the IDE cable is fixed on to the motherboard's corresponding ATA 66/100 socket. Most ATA 33 sockets are black in color. Attach the long end of the ATA 33 cable to the motherboard's ATA 33 socket. Once the drive devices are connected, attach power supply sockets to them from the ATX power supply.

STEP 4

The graphics, audio, or any other peripheral cards need to be installed on to your motherboard - just insert them to the correct slot. An AGP port for a graphics card is brown in color and is the very first expansion slot on a PC motherboard. PCI ports are white and AMR slots for modems are short (less than half the length of a PCI port) and brown. If your motherboard still has an ISA slot, it should be black and at the end of the motherboard.

STEP 5

Now that the peripherals are attached and cables connected, it is time to power up the PC. You should adjust Bios settings the first time you powered up your PC. Once all the necessary Bios settings are completed, you can start to install your operating system and all the necessary drivers and software applications to make your DIY PC complete.

GOOD LUCK!

Don't forget to read up the various versions of ATA when you chose your hard drive.