I’ve done it before just with needle pliers, when I wanted to swap the configuration of a machine that had three IDE hard drives and an optical. It’s not that hard - although it’s not a very useful thing to know about any more.
Okay, this one spooked me, because the motherboard has a 24 socket connector and the PSU has a 20-pin plug.
However, the motherboard manual *explicily states * that the 20 pin plug is okay, as long as it’s lined up the right way. Fingers crossed …
My new PSU has the 20 pin and cable tied to it was a 4 pin. I used them both. I looked closely at the connecter and saw that there is a combination of square and round surrounds around each pin, which is to stop you plugging it in the wrong way, and at the wrong end of the 24 pin socket.
Of course, with my ham hands, anything will fit any which way if I apply enough force :smack:
I was under the impression the 4-pin connector was the CPU connection. Now I gotta go back and check for a second one.
I think my PSU has 3 4 pin connectors, one of which I used for the CPU. Then there is another 4 pin connector that is cable tied to the 20 pin connector, which had the square and round surrounds. I’m certain one of the other 3 wouldn’t of fitted the 24 connector. It was easy to figure out just by looking which went where
Yep, there were two. When I looked closely at the one that was, as described, tied to the 20-pin plug, I saw that it was made to snap-fit onto the 20-pin plug making it a 24-pin plug. Cool beans.
At the moment, I’ve got all the internals connected up and I’m just working up the courage to hook up a monitor and keyboard, plug it in, and turn it on.
Oh, here’s something I had a question about: the case has a temperature readout on the front panel, and the instructions state somewhat vaguely that I should “Place the thermal sensor into the CPU’s heat sink.”
Does that mean I just stick it between the fins of the heat sink?
Looks like you’re getting there.
Yeah, I’d say just wedge the sensor in the fins somehow. Try not to block too much airflow. Might need a bit of blu-tac to hold it?
The sensor will most likely not be accurate, but it will give an indication of whats going on. What I mean is that it might say 45°, but that’s the temp of the fin or the air where the sensor is, not the cpu’s actual temp. But if one day you see it at 55° instead of its (say) normal 45°, it’s a warning to check things out.
Well, it boots. Well, it counts RAM and lets me into the BIOS, so I’m guessing all is well so far.
Alas, it appears that one of my hard drives is indeed toast. I had hopes that maybe it was just the IDE channel on the motherboard on the old PC, but this one doesn’t see the drive there at all. I’m hoping that’s the only thing causing all the beeping.
Also, the big 120 mm fan in the back seems pretty damn noisy. I’ll have to see how it sounds with its case assembled, but that might have to be my first upgrade, after replacing the dead drive.
But, hell: it boots! 
Swapped out the dead drive for one I happened to have laying about. Seems to have fixed the beep problem, and also has allowed me to boot to a Linux boot CD (the CD-ROM drive is secondary on the same channel, so was invisible behind a dead drive).
That’s all I can do tonight. Gonna let it sit running while I go fall down for a few hours.
That’s great news, I was hoping it was just a dead drive. Catch ya on the other side
Not true. Systems can be unstable enough to cause problems, but not so unstable that they’d crash during the span of installing windows. People probably run systems that are mostly stable for years but still turn out bad math here and there.
The prime95 torture test for 24 hours will give you a good idea that your cpu/memory/northbridge/etc is stable in that configuration.
You can get that info with cpu-z
That’s odd. The 120 mm fans are supposed to be pretty dang quiet. I’m running my homebrew in an Antec Sonata case with dual 120 mm fans (one in the back, one over the hard drives) and with the door closed you can barely tell the computer is powered. You can’t even hear it if you’re listening to something else. Make sure that fan is rubber-grommeted though to help cut down on vibrations.
I’m planning to build a new one here in a couple years. It’s about time I go to a PCI-E video card, I want one of those 7.1 sound cards and speakers (I’ve always had trouble getting my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz 4.1 card and Altec-Lansing 4.1 speakers actually do 4.1), I’d like to go multi-core on the CPU, and I never could get my keychain FireWire to work, along with a couple other motherboard features (like the CPU temp monitor.)
The fan was much quieter this morning. I think it just needed to settle in a bit. The loudest thing about it when I got up this morning was the hard drive. (See below)
It’s been running Memtest86+ since about 1:15 a.m. and will continue running it until I get home tomorrow afternoon. I’ll probably install that prime95 software SenorBeef recommended after I’ve got the OS in (I was really hoping for something that would run from a boot disk, but whatchagonnado?).
As to hard drive noise, I actually had one remaining question directly related to the construction. The case came with a lovely little packet of screws and heavy paper (just shy of cardboard) washers. Unfortunately, there was no indication as to which screws (there were 3 types) were for what purposes. (The exterior panels and the motherboard tray are held on with thumbscrews, so no problem there.) I wound up using the smallish screws with heads that look like they have washers on them though they really don’t for the three drives I installed, the slightly nicer-looking roundhead screws for the motherboard, and one of the “hexhead” screws for the PCI sound card.
But where are the washers supposed to go? On the drives, to insulate vibration noise? I tried them with the screws on the motherboard, but it seemed like I was only getting one or two good threads in on those screws, so I took them back off.
When I got home just now, Memtest had been running for 38 hours or so and was on pass 97 with zero errors, all was well with the PC and it was running at about 35[sup]o[/sup]C.
Time to start buttoning it up, I reckon.
Do you have a core 2 duo? If so, your cpu temp was probably not that low. There’s a really stupid issue with temp monitoring with the C2Ds… the reading that intel gives is actually the max operating temperature minus a number. IE if your max temp is 100, and the number is 60, your actual temp is 40. The problem is that for some retarded reason, the actual max temp is apparently Super Secret and they won’t even tell the BIOS manufacturers. Why? I have no idea. But BIOSes as well as stuff like fanspeed, motherboard monitor, etc. won’t give accurate temps.
The people who wrote realtemp used thermal sensors on various CPUs and put together a best guess of the max value for various CPUs and is regarded as the best guess at real CPU temperatures.
It’s an Athlon 64 x2.
Uhm, never install the drivers that come with your PC hardware. Never. They tend to be extremely outdated. Always find the latest chipset drivers direct from the company’s website and use those. Same goes for GPU and CPU if needed. Also skip chipset and GPU drivers from the mobo’s manufacturer as well. Always go to the source and get the drivers from them. So if you’ve got an ASUS mobo with a Nforce chipset and on board video, grab the mobo BIOS from ASUS, but get the chipset and video drivers from Nvidia.
Also, update the MOBO’s latest BIOS before installing the OS. They sometimes solve instability or compatibility issues.
And unless you are not gaming or doing a lot of video encoding, OC that bad boy!