Hey all,
This afternoon I went round a friend's house and using various spare parts he had laying around, we built a completely working PC.
So what we did was use his old MSI Socket 939 board, paired it with an Athlon 64 3800+ (I think?) and 1.7GB of RAM (basically just filled all 4 bays with whatever we could find), replaced his power supply with a 425W one he had laying around and then put it all into a Dell case.
Here are some pics:
I don't have any pics of how the original machine looked before we tore it all apart, so here's the earliest photo of the build stage I have.
We had just removed pretty much everything and then dusted out the case using an air compressor and started putting stuff back in. Above we have the power supply, power buttons and optical drive installed.
I basically bunched all the cables we weren't using up and shoved them underneath the optical drive (which by the way is a DVD-RW drive). Cable management features in this case are non-existent so we had to just do our best to hide all the cables.
We then got the motherboard and a single case fan installed.
One thing to note is that we don't have an I/O shield for this build yet, so we have to make do without one.
We should be getting one to fit this board soon though! We also installed a front speaker as you may or may not be able to tell.
Finally we plugged in all the power buttons and the IDE cables. Sadly we don't have any SATA hard drives or DVD drives laying around right now, so we had to make do with IDE. Routing the IDE cable up to the DVD-RW drive was easy enough and the IDE cable to the hard drive is very short anyway.
We broke the original power button we were going to use which had longer cables, so we had to use the power button and LEDs the Dell case came with. The cables were shorter so it was a bit tight and not as tidy looking unfortunately.
And then we put the front bezel and side panel back on, and job's almost done!
We still need to get a proper graphics card and install an OS on this PC, but I have a spare Radeon X1300 laying around which we can use and I'm sure I've got some copies of Windows somewhere which can use.
What do you think?
This afternoon I went round a friend's house and using various spare parts he had laying around, we built a completely working PC.
So what we did was use his old MSI Socket 939 board, paired it with an Athlon 64 3800+ (I think?) and 1.7GB of RAM (basically just filled all 4 bays with whatever we could find), replaced his power supply with a 425W one he had laying around and then put it all into a Dell case.
Here are some pics:
I don't have any pics of how the original machine looked before we tore it all apart, so here's the earliest photo of the build stage I have.
We had just removed pretty much everything and then dusted out the case using an air compressor and started putting stuff back in. Above we have the power supply, power buttons and optical drive installed.
I basically bunched all the cables we weren't using up and shoved them underneath the optical drive (which by the way is a DVD-RW drive). Cable management features in this case are non-existent so we had to just do our best to hide all the cables.
We then got the motherboard and a single case fan installed.
One thing to note is that we don't have an I/O shield for this build yet, so we have to make do without one.
We should be getting one to fit this board soon though! We also installed a front speaker as you may or may not be able to tell.
Finally we plugged in all the power buttons and the IDE cables. Sadly we don't have any SATA hard drives or DVD drives laying around right now, so we had to make do with IDE. Routing the IDE cable up to the DVD-RW drive was easy enough and the IDE cable to the hard drive is very short anyway.
We broke the original power button we were going to use which had longer cables, so we had to use the power button and LEDs the Dell case came with. The cables were shorter so it was a bit tight and not as tidy looking unfortunately.
And then we put the front bezel and side panel back on, and job's almost done!
We still need to get a proper graphics card and install an OS on this PC, but I have a spare Radeon X1300 laying around which we can use and I'm sure I've got some copies of Windows somewhere which can use.
What do you think?
