Analogies are fine, but simplicity isn't the same. Example: You know what else fits the lego analogy? Building a car. Or a space station.

When I tried upgrading my old computer with a new motherboard, CPU and RAM, the CPU was broken. I didn't want to wait and all (and there seemed to be an incompatibility between some connectors; parts weren't completely compatible, so I'd have needed to either get new parts or mess around a lot to get it working), so I sent it back, gave my brother the parts, and bought a nice XPS 430 from the Dell outlet for about $600. Stuck my old 8800GT GPU in it and it ran pretty much everything I wanted fine. Then I upgraded to a 5770 and it ran everything perfectly. 2.5GHZ intel Quad Core, 6GB DDR3, 500GB HDD, pretty basic stuff (I think it was 1.5 years ago).

Ex keeps bitching about people wanting to buy pre-made computers, but for maybe $100 more you don't have to deal with worrying about breaking any of the components, with faulty components, with extra parts/wires you forgot or anything else. It's fine that CAFG wanted to do it, but everyone yelling at anyone not building their own computers are idiots.

My face is swelled from a spider bite so don't expect to see my face, so in return, an old gif I made a year ago.



And here's the crappy youtube I shot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3Pa64nh5Mk

It's incredibad quality and shaky. I'm just going to reshoot it and start from the begining, but you can watch the video to get used to my nasally voice.

It's broken. It stops after 30 seconds when it is supposed to be 5 minutes. And yes, it's shaky. Hard to tell anything from it.

The first should be working now. second video going up, but it's not much better

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_RGFc-DCXQ

Just 1 thing about the off-center connector: You put screws between your case and mobo right? There needs to be about 5mm of space between them. You should have special placeholder screws for that.

PS/2 port is on top, then below is the digital audio (the orange RCA jack), then to the right is the optical audio.

The next 2 on the far left are eSATA ports followed by a Firewire (the hexagonal one) and obvious USB.

Expansion cards are designed to go in so that the part that plugs in lines up slightly above where you think it might go.

Are you using your risers? It looks like you've got it screwed in awfully tight to be that close to the motherboard. The order you want to put things in (if you don't have a removable motherboard tray) is backplate -> motherboard -> screw in motherboard with risers in every hole that makes sense. The jacks should be sticking out of the back.

Your cable management is terrible, but that doesn't matter so much right now. What you ideally want to do right now is get it working. Later you can take it apart and rewire it so that as many wires are out of the way as possible.

IDE (ribbon cables) come twofold: a PATA cable (parallel ATA, sort of like serial ATA, but older) and a smaller one, which is the floppy ribbon cable jack. The PATA has 40 pins, the floppy has less. You can check the manual for the actual names and locations. If you have a floppy drive, or an IDE optical/hard drive, then you'll use the ribbon cables. Otherwise, DON'T USE THEM.

Your graphics card needs a few things: to be plugged into a PCI-e x16 port, to be plugged in to the correct port (there's a master and a slave on mine, the master is the top one, the slave is the bottom one, it will work in either, but ideally you use the master in non SLI/xfire setup), extra PCI-e power, and a monitor plugged in. The monitor's on the outside. The PCI-e power is a 6 pin (sometimes 8 pin) connector. Depending on the video card, you'll need 0-4 cables connected. Low end cards can get away without any supplemental power. Dual GPU cards need upwards of 4 (think 4870 x2 and 5970, the two fastest single cards on the market). The card itself will have the jack somewhere on the side, so just plug it in after you've screwed it in place on the motherboard.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 29 2010, 8:50 pm by rockz.

Ya, that's an outrageous assumption. LEGO's are way harder to work with. They're easy as hell to lose, there are so many, and you have to stack each and every one a single LEGO at a time.

I was thinking the same thing. Mounting the mobo on those screws should help for short circuiting also.

Are these the risers? I screwed the motherboard straight to the back plate. The package they are in says "Screws for Chassis" witch has already been referred to as the front panel of the computer, not that there is even anywhere for me to put the screws in there...

It isnt. Legos dont break when you put an electrical current through them

Yeah, those are the ones. You screw those where you screwed the original ones.
Hope they solve the problem.

Those were definitely the risers, because now everything fits perfectly.

Another question: my mobo came with 1 sata-hdd wire, and 1 sata-sata. I went out and bought a wire that looked like it, but its red instead of blue lie my others. It has the L shape i needed, but its not sata, its Serial ATA. Now I know I read there was a difference somewhere...

S-ATA is short for Serial ATA. They are the same.

Now I just can't get the fucking case panels back on because of all the fucking wires the case says to run through the back via a hole on the bottom.

There's no fucking way it can close, I have no idea why it told me to do it this way.

Said 'fuck it' and moved all the wires messily into the open part of case and closed it.

Some modern motherboards come with only a single port that is half purple and half green, and you can plug either a keyboard or a mouse into it. This is good, because mice have been using USB for a long time, while keyboards are still commonly PS2. Saves space on the mobo for more USB or other ports.

All of the mice I've ever seen, do. Including the USB->PS2 adapter I am using, and the KVM.

I've never heard of such a thing happening, and I have plugged and replugged PS2 cables many times without incident. Yes, it's *possible* that it might damage the motherboard, but it's also *possible* that you'll get hit by lightning in the next thunderstorm. What is more of an issue is that older OS like Win95 or 98, as well as XP sometimes (prior to SP2?), may not cope with PS2 mice and keyboards being plugged and unpugged. Simply rebooting fixes that, though.

Erm, no. PS/2 ports were invented in 1987, while USB is from 1996. The first USB standard, 1.0, had a 'full speed' of 12 Mbs. PS/2 are serial ports, and for a keyboard operate at 9600 bps. Mice might be faster, but it's still not going to be anywhere near USB speeds. Now whether you actually mean 'data speed' or 'responsiveness' I'm not sure, and the data rate for these peripherals is irrelevant because both PS/2 and USB are 'fast enough' so you do not see any issues. USB does use a shared bus so I guess you could potentially run into issues there.

Yes, almost all motherboards will come with their own back plates, and you shouldn't use the one that comes with the case unless it matches your motherboard. They can be real bitches to get out, and sometimes your motherboard one will not 'quite' fit into the case properly, and you have to jam it in real hard - tapping it firmly with a mallet or hammer may be required (or similar improvised bashing tools).

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 30 2010, 12:30 am by Lanthanide.

Hey lathanide, I'm about to power on for the first time, and want my ssd to be my boot drive with win7 and stuff on it, anything I need to know?

Stick them in the corners and behind the HDD cage.

SourceObviously I was mistaken. This happened to me on my win 95 computer. The mouse would stop working in the middle of playing starcraft, so I would quickly replug it in. Eventually it stopped working entirely.

Responsiveness. Something to do with the number of updates per second. Sure, a 100 MB/s vs a 100 kB/s would almost always favor the 100 MB/s side, but if the 100 MB/s operates at 40 Hz, and the 100 kB/s operates at 120 Hz, and the data you're sending never gets higher than 56 kB/s, the 100 kB/s connection will be much better. I forget where I read about that, and can't cite anything, sorry. I did say I use USB, though, and it's obviously not going away for mice and keyboards.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 30 2010, 1:08 am by rockz.

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