Day 3, Putting It All Together

Now that we knew all of the parts work and were talking to each other, it was just a case of "fit this into this using nothing but that."

The major components

The first order of business was getting the power supply into the case. This was fairly easy as all we needed to do was place it on the bottom of the case and screw in four screws on the back.

Case with power supply

The next step was to mount the motherboard, but before we could do that we had to insert all of the motherboard standoffs. This was relatively easy to do because stamped into the case there were instructions on where to place the standoffs for different motherboards. Once the standoffs were screwed in place, we put the motherboard into the case and attached it using the screws provided with the case.

Mobo set in place

Next up we got to "unbox" the optical drive which involved removing the plastic sleeve the drive came in. We chose the LITE-ON DVD Burner - Black SATA Model iHAS124-04 because it was cheep and it didn't make sense for us to get a Blu-ray drive. Mounting it into the case was very easy. Our case has 5 optical mounting slots where the drive is slid into place and a button is pressed to release the pins that lock it to the case. 

Before

After

Once the optical drive was in place we opened the solid state drive. We chose the Crucial M4 CT064M4SSD2CCA 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC with the plan of running just Windows 7 and using the remaining space to try out Intel's Smart Response Technology, thus we only needed 64GB. We are going to put everything else on a Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive. 

SSD

Mounting the SSD on the bracket that came with the motherboard was actually a lot harder than we would have thought. This was mostly because neither the SSD nor the motherboard came with instructions on how it should be mounted. Eventually we noticed that the SSD could be just screwed in from the bottom, but it was not obvious and some help from the manufacturers would have been appreciated. 

Unboxed SSD

With the SSD in place we opened the WD hard drive and snapped it into one of the 5 trays in the case. 

WD hard drive

Once all the components were in the correct place it was time to connect everything to the motherboard and give everything power from the PSU, a.k.a cable management!

Everything is in place

We didn't really have a strategy going into cable management. Instead we just plugged everything in using a more or less random order,  focusing on keeping cables in the large space behind the motherboard tray provided by the case.

We're plugged in and ready to go!

We then used the provided zip-ties to condense all of the random cables into larger groups to decrease the amount of obstructions to good air flow inside the case. 

From the other side

With everything ready to go we re-attached the side plates, plugged everything in, and again held our breath...

Second moment of truth....

And it worked again!!!

Look at that UEFI!!!

The UEFI came up on the screen, meaning that everything is getting power, and all the components are talking to each other!! 

Let the domination begin!

Now that everything was working, the next step was to get Windows 7 installed. But at this point we were really tired and decided it would be better to work on it after getting some well deserved rest the next morning.