Building a personal computer – the grand finale

Building a personal computer is not quite as simple as building a house out of legos but in some ways it is similar. All of the parts are standardized and the parts are simply plugged together. The process can indeed take a while depending on any difficulties you encounter.

A lot of this time can be consumed while unpacking boxes, finding or selecting which parts are relevant for your build (AMD vs Intel) or even plugging together all of the cables. In my case I connected up the motherboard on the table and worked through all the issues (memory in my case) and then disconnected quite so the motherboard could be moved into the case.

Most of the cables are big and unambiguous when being connected up. However, this does take a while and can be difficult depending on the size of the case and the size of your hands.

The only big surprise for me was when trying to connect the last few tiny cables from the case to the motherboard. For reasons not known both the reset button and the power button cables were both labeled power button. It turned out that these are just for creating a temporary connection on the motherboard and it did not matter which was used.

The other big surprise was that the cables need to be connected with a specific orientation. The power cable contains a tiny triangle which represented the positive lead.

What parts did I eventually decided on?