Guide: Jon "WildChild" Bishl
Editor/Design: Allan "Zardon" Campbell

 

On this board there is only one power supply wire to plug into the motherboard, but with some newer motherboards there are 2 power supply plugs needed 1 is your 20 pin ATXPWR plug the other possibly needed is the 4 pin 12V Rail plug.

You will have numerous amounts of 4 prong plugs. These will be inserted into your cd-rom’s / video card and hard drive and one little tiny 4 prong for the floppy power cord.

Next we are going to connect the ATA IDE cables....pretty simple to do here also...they will usually have a notch on them which will only fit one way in the devices for the cd-rom / roms use one IDE cable to connect both the master/primary drive and the slave/secondary drive together with one cable, connect this cable to 1 of the IDE slots on the motherboard as shown below.

Now that that’s finished, we move to the other cables. The floppy drive is basically the same as the above instructions except for when you connect the floppy cable to the drive itself .Usually the red line on the IDE cable will be facing away from the power plug sometimes depending on the floppy drive it will be facing towards the power plug, depending on the manufacturer of the floppy drive. But it too has a slotted end on the cable that makes it very easy to figure out which way is which.

Now to install the extra cards, (Video, Sound, Ethernet, Etc.)

You will have to remove the brackets located directly in front of the AGP/PCI card slots you wish to install. Align the card connector with the slot and press firmly down on the card until it is completely seated into the slot. Secure the cards with the screws that were removed with the brackets.

Last but not least, you will have to follow the diagrams located in the motherboard’s user manual on the plugging in of the power switch/power led/hard drive led/etc.

That should just about cover the basics for building a standard system ...Hope this is helpful and educational for those who were a little uneasy about doing it themselves.

 

Jon Bish has his own company and his website "pecehelp" can be found here so make sure next time you are thinking of a system to contact him

There will be forthcoming guides so keep your eyes on DH !