Building a computer is not as complicated as many people think, everything just slots into place and can be done with one phillips screwdriver, pc component manuals are super useful and unlike in most situations there’s no shame in opening them and taking a look. That said it’s still quite nerve wracking for me, there’s a lot of my money in the boxes and I don’t yet know if everything works, have I missed anything? please don’t drop anything! Just to add to the peril, I decided the best time to build was during my little boy’s nap time, so I had to get this done in around 2 hours.
I grabbed all the components I had been collecting including my last minute purchase, a WD Blue SN550 500GB M.2 Pcie NVMe SSD. I was planning on using the SSD from my old machine to save money but £60 really isn’t bad for a quick boot drive, this had the benefit of keeping my old machine usable (it’s a work PC so I really don’t want down time) and also allowing me to get the full new PC feeling. I’ve never used a NVMe drive before, they are so quick, tiny and neat with no wires. I even remembered to download the windows installation files onto a USB stick.. I was ready to build!
The build went without a hitch.. well I had to remove a motherboard standoff which I put in the wrong place and that required pliers which were in the bottom of a cupboard, and I didn’t want to rake through a cupboard! Oh and also NVMe screws are really small and my trusty electrical screwdriver found them hard work but aside from that everything went really well, I was ready to grab the 1050ti from my old build, steal a keyboard, mouse and screen from my partners machine (my screens are wall mounted) and fire this thing up.
Graphics card installed, cables and connectors double checked, I was ready to push the power switch for the first time, it’s a tense time, you have to remember to turn on the switch at the back of the power supply, not just at the wall, without doing so just results in the click of the switch followed by nothing which is scary.
It came to life and I was in the bios! the ability to use a mouse in the bios is new for me.. actually a bios with graphics is new for me.. this is very exciting, I’m not overclocking and this temporary stick of ram doesn’t have XMP, so all I had to do was check everything was detected, and set the boot order to boot from my windows installation USB. Oh and to check the CPU temperature wasn’t too hot, which is a sure sign you didn’t take off the “remove before fitting” sticker or your thermal paste application is poor.
Minutes later windows was installed! did I mention how quick NVMe M.2 SSD’s are compared to mechanical drives?
Time to pop this in the office and see what it can do.
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