Let’s Put it Together

Now that you are familiar with the parts of the motherboard, you need to mount it to the computer case.  Be careful, A static/electric discharge has the capability of ruining electrical components.  To avoid this, be sure to touch your bare hand on some metal of the computer case before handling any electrical components. This will act as some type of ground removing any static electricity that may be built up on your body.

Mounting the Motherboard

With the case comes a bag full of screws, nylon plastic spacers, and brass mounts. Place the motherboard over the case and find out where the holes match from the motherboard to the case. If the corresponding hole on the case is threaded, screw in a brass mount; if it is a slot, use a nylon spacer instead. Place the motherboard on the case over the mounting bolt and nylon spacers. Get the fine threaded screws and bolt down the motherboard into the brass mounts.

Installing the CPU & RAM

Carefully read the Motherboard manual and note the jumper settings you must apply for the Motherboard to work properly with the CPU.  Some Motherboards may be jumperless, in this case you can just pop in the CPU with no worries!

Installing the RAM is even easier.  There are no jumpers to worry about.  Just note that the RAM is keyed, meaning that it will only fit in the slot one way.  Also you should know that you cannot mix 2 kinds of RAM, if your computer is able to boot you will most likely battle instability.

Adding the Rest
Now that the motherboard is in place, you are ready to connect the power supply, then the cards, such as the video card and sound card. This is all like putting a puzzle together because if you have a PCI video card it doesn’t matter which PCI slot it goes into and the same goes for ISA cards.

The drives
Next mount the hard drive, floppy drive, and CD-ROM drive into the case. On the far left in the picture on the left, you can see the bays where the drives go. Each drive needs to be plugged into the power supply and needs a ribbon cable attached. The rule is, the hard drive that your computer will boot up on must be Master of IDE Controller 1 and you can only have two devices per ribbon cable (a master and a slave).  Sometimes you will have an IDE drive that has the option of CS or Cable Select.  I do not recommend using this option for any of your components.  Rather, assign each drive to be Master or Slave on each controller.

More on ribbon cables:
On a ribbon cable there is a red stripe on one side. That is used so that you connect pin1 on the drive to pin1 on the motherboard. If you look at the drive you can see which side of the IDE port where pin1 is. It is usually printed on the bottom of the drive. Make sure the red stripe goes to that side, do the same for the motherboard.

Shown is a picture of a Western Digital drive. On Western Digital drives, pin1 is closest to the jumper block.

See IDE Performance for more information.

What about those jumpers?
Two devices may be used on each IDE controller. If you look back the picture of the motherboard, there are 2 IDE controllers. One is set as the master and the other the slave. If you are only going to have one drive on that controller, set it as the master. The jumper diagram above shows you how to set the drive for master or slave. If you only have two drives, put one as master on each controller for better performance, that way they do not have to share. You might have to buy another IDE ribbon cable to do this.

More on CD-ROM and DVD Drives:
CD-ROM and DVD drives will also have a little 4-pin connector on the back that is used to connect it directly to the sound card.  This is the audio cable used when you are playing music CDs.  Without it you will not be also to get any CD audio through your sound card.  See the Sound Card Peripheral picture and look for the CD Audio connector.

Your computer is now together! All you need to do now is install an operating system, which is a whole other tutorial. Until we write one, good luck!

You should be done!
 

FAQ

Article last reviewed: 09/06/2002

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