What I did on my holidays

1) L->R      1200 w/hr uninterruptable power supply      2TB offline data drive (USB 3.0)      4TB backup drive (USB 3.0)      Spiffy full tower Windows 10 PC      Wireless printer/scanner 

2) Lit up on the inside

It came! It was installed! It is good! (factum! plenum! esset bonum!)

Win10 came on a USB3 memstick...I just booted from that and installed. There were NO problems...all devices were recognized and correct drivers installed. The only thing I had to do was relocate the special folders away from the SSD system drive to the hard disk data drive. 

Next I started the process of installing software. First was a new, highly recommended anti-virus. So far it seems to be working ok (eset nod32). Then the intel and MSI utilities for the motherboard and GPU. Win10 seems to have installed the latest drivers. I connected the external drives and then installed the backup software. The final pieces of software that support hardware (printer/scanner and uninterruptable power supply) were installed and checked. 

So now the machine is all installed, protected and backed up. Time for software application installation. So far: Opera (forget Edge and Chrome both data gatherers for microsoft and google), Open Office, Adobe cs5, AnyDVD, DVD Shrink,  VLC,  Skype, Steam.

I don’t know if I need a iso==>dvd burner. I also have a bunch of mkv/ogg tools that I might or might not need. 

I’m going to try the Adobe CS5 movie builder and see where I go from there.

There’s nothing to do while the operating system is in transit. I bought some cable wrap from Staples and tried to neaten the machine as much as possible. So then I wrapped up the cables and attempted to route them as well as I could. (I’ve seen better! - check out http://imgur.com/a/BG1Hn Lucky I’m not a perfectionist!

1) Cables wrapped up and tie wrapped to the case

...and nothing happened. Oh no! It was too late for diagnosis so off to bed and wake up early to try and get this going.

So I got up and started checking connections, memory seating &c. All the fans were working properly, the lights were cming on. Aha! In turned out that the graphics card needs BOTH power connections. 

After setting the machine back the power on birngs up “No Boot Detected”. Pressing the Delete key beore this shows the motherboard BIOS. Success!

Just to be sure, I’ve prepped a flash drive with Ubuntu and I can get the machine to boot off that. More success!

1) Finally, l get a BIOS screen which says processor, motherboard and memory are working.

There’s just a few components to put in and they all go with no trouble. The hardest was the water pump/heatsink and fan/radiators only because the water tubes were so stiff and resisted the placement I wanted.

Once that was in, it was just a matter of placing the graphics card in the first PCI slot. The Power supply unit goes in the bottom of the machine and is plugged in to the mother board (1 24 pin connector, 1 8 pin connector), the graphics card (1 8 pin and 1 6 pin connector), and the SATA drives (unfortunately the disk drive and CD/DVD/BD required two cables as one wouldn’t stretch.

1) Mount water cooler pump and top fans with radiator

2) Graphics card with its two fans and massive heat sink

1) Mother board in the case and connected to the case.

I installed the fans to maximize air flow. All the fans that draw air from the inside pull it through filters first (MUST REMEMBER TO CLEAN REGULARLY!).

So two fans at the base blowing up, two fans ate the front blowing to the rear assisted by the tilt fan (this will blow over the GPU), one fan at the read blowing air (hopefully warm/hot) out. This will be joined by the two fans of the water cooler blowing up through the radiator.

Also installed are the hard disk drive, the optical disk drive, the the flash memory reader. 

I made the first attempt at cable management, effectively disentangling and routing the cables. This will be tidied up considerably before the end.

Case read for MoBo:

1) Front view: CD, DVD, BluRay play; Card reader, front fans (in)

2) Side view: Bottom fans (in), tilt fan (in), rear fan (out)

NZXT provides a case that supports a bunch of stuff...a lot of which I don’t need. Also, on someone’s recomendation I bought Noctua fans for both their quietness and longevity. So what had to go were the excess drive cages and fans. 

1) My assistant, Igor, ensures the case is copaceptic. After his approval I proceed and...

There’s some stuff that can be done to the MoBo before it goes in the case.

So, donning my grounded anti-static wrist strap, I installed the 500GB M.2. Solid State disk (this will be used for the system and apps); the processor (the pin-out density is amazing); and the DDR4 RAM (32GB -- w00t). I didn’t install the cooler or the video card because they’re pretty heavy and the installation in the case may distort/crack the MoBo.

1) Blank Mo-Bo

2) Intel Core i7 and Socket L2011 (all those little connections)