Putting it all together: getting started
First of all, you need a clean, dust-free workspace. One that is well-lit is useful, because there is a lot of peering into dark corners during the process. A separate lamp is also useful, and a flashlight probably essential.
During construction, you'll be handling lots of sensitive electronic components, and there is a danger that static carried in or through your body will fuse or short them if not handled carefully. When that involves a £100 motherboard, it is worth being careful.
There are two ways of dealing with static by making sure you are earthed. The first is to buy an anti-static wrist strap (which will cost around £5 from an electronics store), which comes with a lead and crocodile clip. Attach the clip to an earthed object (I used a radiator). The other option is to plug the computer's power supply into a wall socket, but switch the socket off - the earth on the power lead will still be in use.
In particular, make sure you earth yourself - before removing components from their anti-static packaging - by touching a safe metal surface. It is safest not to remove the packaging before you need each item. You'll also need screwdrivers, especially Philips screwdrivers.
Time-wise, it took me an evening and a morning to fit it together so, depending on your ability, you'll need between six and eight hours from start to boot-up, all going well.
Assembly
Here's what I started with:
· Antec Solution SLK3700AMB mid-tower case with 350 watt power supply, £65
· Asus A7N8X Deluxe Socket A motherboard, £90
· AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Socket A processor (retail box with heatsink), £73
· Western Digital Caviar UltraDMA100 80 gigabyte hard drive, £70
· Crucial Technology 512 megabyte (2 x 256MB) DDR PC2700 Ram, £71
· Asus Nvidia Geforce4 MX440 8x AGP video graphics card, £30
· Total: £398
My aim was to keep the price at around £400 but still have a PC that was respectable in terms of performance and upgradability. With a few pounds more, I would buy a larger hard drive, with a 120 gigabyte drive costing another £20-£30, and more and faster random-access memory.
The graphics card is a cheap one, but pretty good value for money. I did not need a sound/audio card, because the A7N8X Deluxe motherboard has excellent onboard sound thanks to its integrated support.
For those wanting a budget PC, the price could be taken down to around £300 by substituting a slower processor, a smaller hard drive, and only 256MB of Ram. The keyboard, CD drive, monitor and mouse were reused from my previous PC.
Both the Antec case and the Asus motherboard were value for money in one other respect: both suppliers include stacks of extras with their kit. In the case of the motherboard, Asus include all the cables (including SATA and UltraDMA twisted cables) and extra brackets needed, while Antec add in enough screws and parts to comfortably roll your own PC at home.
Installation
1. Remove the case from packaging and sort through the components (a power cable comes with the case, which has an inbuilt power supply. For cases without power supplies, start by installing the power supply and fans).
2. Remove the side cover from the case, and any other things, such as fascia, that might get in the way of installing the motherboard, as well as any removable drive cages. Work out where everything is going, and decide where hard drives, floppy drives and optical (CD or DVD) drives will sit, removing any covers for them as required. Watch out for sharp metal edges on the case - good quality cases won't have sharp edges, but cheap ones will.
Insert the port template (called an I/O template) supplied with the motherboard: this is where the motherboard's installed ports, such as serial and mouse (PS/2) ports, will project out of later. Most cases come with templates installed, which will have to be removed.
3. Remove the motherboard from its packaging and look to match the stand-off spacer holes in the motherboard with the holes inside the case. Spacers keep the motherboard away from the frame of the case, and in this case looked like brass screws with a long neck.
The case will have a variety of spacer holes to fit different types of motherboard: identify the ones that match the holes in your motherboard, and screw them into the case. Do not add extra spacers: that may short the motherboard. Do not fix the motherboard into the case yet.
4. Familiarise yourself with the motherboard and its manual, noting where leads and cables will be attached, especially the hard drive cable (which may also carry the optical drives) and the motherboard's power supply input.
5. Remove the processor and heatsink/fan from its packaging. Attach the processor to the motherboard - in the case of an AMD processor here, it is attached using a "zero insertion force" socket. Align the pins of the CPU with the socket and gently lower it in, then pull down the attaching lever, which should click into place over the lip of the processor.
6. For AMD Socket A processors, now comes the very tricky part: attaching the heatsink to the processor socket. This was, frankly, a terrifying experience. If you get it wrong, you can snuff out £160 worth of kit just like that. The heatsink has to fit over the chip exactly, but a great deal of effort is required to slip the heatsink's metal clip over the extruding plastic tabs of the socket.
After all the exhortations about treating the processor with zero force, you suddenly require great force to seat the heatsink. The AMD documentation wasn't much help either, as it seemed to show pictures of a different heatsink, although there is online help at AMD's website that is more useful (and carries the phrase "Use caution!" several times).
The trick is to slip one end of the bracket over one tab first, then apply downward pressure, perhaps using a flat-headed screwdriver, on the opposite side of the clip to push it over the other tab. It sounds easier than it is: the metal clip requires a surprising amount of force to bend it over the second heatsink tab. One slip, and your motherboard could be a widow. Intel processors don't have this problem.
7. Phew. That's the hardest part done, but you won't know whether it has been done properly for a while yet. If you heard a cracking sound while attaching the heatsink clip, start worrying.
8. Attach the memory cards. Open the slots first by pushing back the plastic tab on each end, and align the cards the right way. Some motherboards have three memory slots, and require cards to be put in in a certain order. Push the cards down by applying consistent firm pressure to seat them in their slots, at which point the plastic end tabs will spring up and close over each end. Help them along if they don't quite snap up all the way.
9. At this point, check jumper positions from the motherboard's manual, and work out which settings you are going to require. Make sure the jumper blocks are in the right settings. This is fiddly but very important. It may not require any changes, but you must make sure.
10. At this point, some technicians say that you should attach the drive cables to the motherboard, but I am not convinced that having large cables dangling around is a good idea. But if the cables will be hard to reach and connect when the motherboard is installed inside the case, it may be worth it. If your case doesn't have a removable hard drive cage or easy access, it may be a good idea to install the hard drive into the case first (but first read the master/slave setting information below, in point 15).
11. Carefully pick up the motherboard and lower it into the case to sit on its already-installed spacers,carefully aligning the motherboard's ports with the case's holes (you installed the motherboard's supplied template in the case first).
Then go around adding the top screw through the board into the open end of each spacer. Do not screw them down too tightly - finger-tight will do it. Do not force the motherboard into shape: you may have to manoeuvre the board to get the top screws aligned, but be careful while doing so. This part can be very difficult - one tip is to start off each screw, so the motherboard aligns, and then go back and screw them all the way down (but not too tight, of course).
Make sure no screws get lost inside the case: one lodged in the wrong place could easily short the board when it's switched on, especially if it gets between the underside of the motherboard and the case. Remember to put a screw into each spacer hole - don't skip any, they're all important for the motherboard's functioning. Some useful tips on handling this part of the installation is here.
12. That's the second hardest part done.
13. This is perhaps the right time to attach the cables to the motherboard that connect to peripherals such as drives and expansion cards, and the leads from the case's switches, external lights and outlets (such as Firewire and USB ports), as well as the heatsink's fan power supply lead to the motherboard (which is vital, otherwise the processor will overheat in about 60 seconds and blow up). The case leads are the most fiddly, so do them first.
The floppy disk drive (FDD), hard drive (ATA or UDMA) ribbon cables are the largest and require firm pressure to seat them into the motherboard socket, so do them last. Make sure the plugs are correctly aligned with their cables, although this is hard to get wrong (SATA drive cables don't have these problems, and are smaller and much easier to connect.) This is also a good time to identify and unbundle the motherboard's power supply connection, which is easy to spot, generally being bigger than the rest of the power leads. If case fans require leads attached to the motherboard, do that now.
14. Before installing the hard and optical drives, check the manual settings for their master/slave configurations. What are they? Most motherboards now have two IDE sockets (labelled primary and secondary, with any luck), and internal IDE or ATA devices - those that have cables attached to the IDE sockets - can share one cable and one socket between two of them.
But the devices have to be told who's the boss. Usually, with one hard drive and one optical drive, the hard drive will be configured as master, and the optical drive as slave. It is also possible that the hard drive is configured as sole master and attached to the primary IDE socket, while the optical drive is a master connected to the secondary IDE socket. Hard drives usually have the configuration choices printed on their cases. If not, check their manual. The new SATA drives don't have these issues.
15. Now install the appropriate drives into the case: hard, floppy and optical. The optical internal drives may need to have rails attached first, while hard drives may be installed within removable cages. In any case, with all internal drives, do not tighten the screws attaching them to tightly, as doing so may warp the case (although that should be a problem with a quality case, just cheap ones) or harm the drive. Again, finger-tight is all that's needed.
16. Insert any expansion cards - graphics, sound, internal modems, additional expansion slots for infra-red or wireless devices, or extra USB ports. Only a graphics/video card will go into the AGP slot. All the other cards will be for PCI slots, of which there will be four or more. Again, firm pressure along the length of the card will do it, being careful not to warp the card or force it in. You should have already removed the expansion card metal case slot covers: keep these for a later date, as they may be needed to be replaced one day if a card is removed. The cards may take some jiggling to sit comfortably.
17. Attach the various internal drives and cards to their appropriate cables.
18. Unbundle the rest of the internal power cables and plug the appropriate ones into devices. Be careful to match the type of devices with the right cables: this shouldn't be hard.
19. Nearly there. Check everything over, and give the case a gentle shake to expel any rogue screws.
20. Now check all the leads again, making sure that everything is plugged into the right place according to the motherboard manual. I failed to do this properly, as we'll see.
21. The acid test. Attach a monitor, keyboard and mouse, then attach the external power lead at the wall. Prepare for the moment of truth ... but do not replace the case cover just yet.
22. Switch the PC on using the case's power switch. All being well, the fan should whirr and the processor run, and the PC will boot up into the motherboard's on-board BIOS (the meta-system that gets a PC up and running before handing over to an operating system such as Linux or Windows).
Switch off and then reboot, going through the BIOS settings this time, referring to the motherboard's manual as to meaning, and change the settings you prefer. The boot process will run through hardware onboard and should confirm that everything is in place and recognised. If it is not, go back and check the cable positions and configurations or each device not functioning or recognised.
23. Power the computer off again and reboot it, inserting a CD with the operating system of your choice. Go through the loading and formatting process.
24. And that's it! One last thing to do is to run what the experts call a "burn test" - leaving the PC on and operating at least overnight or for several days. This will determine whether the PC's hardware has any problems: hardware problems usually arise within the first couple of days in serious use, so you want to find out if anything is likely to go wrong in order to return faulty hardware to your supplier. It works best if the PC is running a process during that time: specialist "burn in" software packages can be downloaded (some free, some not) that do this and provide diagnostic tests.
It's not working!
That's what happened to me: I checked everything, did the big switch-on ... and silence. As Spike Milligan once wrote: "Suddenly - nothing happened. But it happened suddenly." I went over everything, and found with relief that I hadn't plugged the hard drive's IDE cable in, so nothing would happen. Easy.
That fixed, the switch was then pushed again - and still nothing happened. Panic started to creep in, and I took the thing apart, checked all the power cables, reseated a lot of cables, just in case. Two hours later, still nothing, and I'm cursing my folly.
I thought it probably wasn't a dud power supply because, thankfully, Asus had added an on-board light to show that the motherboard was receiving power. Many other motherboard manufacturers are not so thoughtful. After going through every option, I eventually noticed that the motherboard's manual was ambiguous about the position of the lead connecting the case on switch and the motherboard, and by a fraction of a centimetre I had placed the lead in the wrong position. That fixed, I pressed the on button, and there was a roar of the processor and fans starting up instantly - a great relief.
The result is a PC that works perfectly. I can identify every piece of hardware within it as old friends.
Have I missed anything out? Inevitably, because hardware configurations are all different. I have tried to keep things as basic as possible to cover as much in common between them as possible, but your motherboard's manual should have all the information required.
Building a computer can be fun - or at least informative - combined with moments of terror and uncertainty. The satisfaction of having done it all yourself is enormous.
