Unboxing

4

Pretty much like anything else in life, you have things as they should be by the book… and then you have things as they end up happening. The two don’t always match.

In this instance, shipment of parts ended up throwing a bit of a wrench in my cogs and delayed some things I was planning on doing. Still, almost everything did arrive eventually and I’m ready to get started building this Home Office PC. I’m only missing the LCD monitor. For the record, TigerDirect is usually pretty good at shipping stuff on time, so I’m just lucky this time around.

I’ll get to the unboxing pictures in a minute. There’s something that needs to be mentioned first. See, before you actually put a system together, it’s never a bad idea to do a little prep work first. This means downloading the latest firmware versions of the components you’ll be assembling. You don’t know what updates might have come out between the time you ordered something and the time it reaches your doorstep. So, take the time to visit each manufacturer’s site and enter your product numbers to get to the updates. Of course, this will not be possible if you don’t have another PC to do it from, but since you’re reading this article on one, I’ll assume you do.

Ok, let’s see these unboxing pics.

In the above picture, you can see two boxes. One contains our Power Up case with the power supply inside. The other has everything else. Again, we’re missing a third box with our nifty 22-inch widescreen display.

In this picture, all the parts are splayed out on the floor. This may sound dumb, but make sure that everything you ordered is there.

Yeah, that’s our case. It’s simple, white on black and not too big (mid-tower). It’ll do the job.

And above is the motherboard. You’ll notice XFX packaging is creative. I’ve ordered XFX parts several times before, and quality is top notch. They’re usually more popular among gamers but this board is perfect for a Home Office since it has solid onboard graphics. At least, solid enough for what we need.

Notice the bag the board is wrapped in? That’s a static bag, and almost all our components will have one. That’s because static electricity is the kryptonite of PC parts. I’ll get to this in more detail when I start the actual build, but as you assemble, you do have to take precautions against static electricity.

And that’s it for the unboxing. I mean, the rest is pretty standard stuff and not really that exciting that we need pictures. In my next installment, parts start getting attached to other parts.