Simple America

This continues from the Power Player post.

With the power supply in place I was ready to work on the mother board. I removed the board out of its wrapper. There was a padded cloth like protector on the bottom of the board to protect it. I left this pad attached and placed the board on top of the wrapper. Just the safe thing to do.

Note always ground yourself before you go picking up circuit boards. One errant zap and all you have is silicon and solder. This is easy to do if you keep your case near. Just touch a metal area and all should be well. I intend to affix cards and chips onto the board now, prior to securing the mother board into the case. More room to work outside of the case and with the board resting on the pad, less chance of bending or breaking the board while shoving in a card also.

This is a rather small mother board but good enough for my current purposes. It has a PCI-E slot for video cards and two 32 pin slots for further adaptability. I may buy a couple of cards down the road to fill these slots. Most likely they would be a sound board and maybe a television or HD connector. The mother board has video and sound inputs so I can hold off on these if I choose. Being a PC gamer, a decent video card is absolutely neccesary. Sound can wait until I decide I require surround sound.

The board also has an IDE slot and four SATA slots. IDE will be used by my DVD player and my hard drive interfaces with SATA. That means this mother board can run three more SATA hard drives and with my IDE cable I could add an IDE hard drive too. SATA and IDE are the pin configurations for interfacing devices with the mother board.

This was a nice surprise. The PC came with a backplate that allows access to the mother board’s various ports. It even fits onto my case.

I removed the plate that came with the case and installed the one that matches my mother board. Awesome!

I pulled out the processor from the box. The processor is the little bitty chip at the bottom of the photo. The top is dominated by the CPU’s fan. Wow!. It has been so long since I put a computer together I did not realize they came packaged with cooling devices. That is good cause heat kills processors.

Then I opened up my processor slot on my mother board. There are some covers to protect the connectors. You do not want to touch these. The oil from your skin is not good for them at all.

And then I placed the Core 2 processor in its new home and locked it shut. And then I realized that I need thermal lubrication to place on the processor and fan where they contact each other. Of course I did not have any. I hoped they would include it with the product. Too late to go back to Fry’s so this assembly just became a two day project.

This did not stop all work though. This is the Pioneer 18 X 18 DVD RW device. No need to put off placing it inside the case. Just remove one face plate. Slide the device in and secure it with four screws.

And there it is. Kind of stands out. Wish I could have found a black one to match the case. Oh well.

Next I installed the Maxtar 300 GB hard drive. This section of the case can hold three drives and that fan will blow air directly on the hard drives.

Looking from the front to the back there is another fan here. This fan blows the hot air out of the case.

And here is the hard drive secure in its new home. Looks kind of lonely. If it is good I will buy a few more hard drives as the memory space gets filled up to keep it company. I want to purchase a one terrabit hard drive so bad. Never will I get screwed by a computer dying. I am going to have back ups everywhere. But until then I secured the hard drive box back in the case and called it a night. Also put the mother board back in the wrapper to keep off any dust.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.