DIY – Building your own Computer

I’ve been building computers on and off since…  whenever. This is a video that shows a quick build for those that have never built their own computer. It is from ASUS, my choice in motherboards. They deliberately make it look easy. While I am sure they ran into problems when building this unit and then edited them out, this is pretty real.

For instance, the radiator and memory conflict they mention. First time through this would be an almost certain gotcha. It would normally require some disassembly, new plan, and re-assembly.

If you are wondering how he knows what wire to hook to what connector, it is the motherboard manual that explains that. Computer assembly is pretty much a paint by number thing these days. The complication is in knowing what they are calling things.

The home for ASUS on YouTube is here. You’ll find a full parts list on this page.

You’ll notice the  Core i7-7700K 4.2GHz Quad-Core Processor is the latest Intel CPU (7th Gen). (My previous 7th article Hardware: Intel 7th Generation CPU.) The motherboard is the Asus – MAXIMUS IX HERO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard. Also, a recent release from ASUS. This board is recommended by some as the board for newbie builders as the manual is good. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say.

The latest motherboards are Z270 (LGA1151 – 6/7th Gen CPU’s) and X299 (June 2017 – LGA2099 – Core X CPU’s [i9 ?]). The big difference between these two is the number of PCI channels. The X299 has way more channels. I can’t imagine a configuration where a Second Life™ user would want the additional channels the X200 provides.

These boards are using the USB 3.1 tech.

To take full advantage of tech in the Z270 motherboard you need to use a 7th Gen CPU. I’ll skip those details. I will point out that the Z170, previous generation MB, can’t take full advantage of 7th Gen CPU’s.

I like everything in the parts list except the Seagate drive. I haven’t had good luck with Seagate. But, I haven’t used Seagate anything for years. Others like them and they were making some of the fastest hard drives going.

The SSD drive is connected via the M2 connector. This is the best way to add an SSD. Using the M2 connector bypasses the limits of the SATA ports and allows for faster data transfer.

 

Look through my other hardware articles by clicking Hardware in the Categories selector.

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