Norton 2009 PC Build

3

It would be great if every PC build went without a hitch. All the parts you need are there, on time, at a good price, etc. Sadly, it never happens and this particular build is no exception. But I’ll get to where I ran into trouble later in this article. This week we’re going to do a bunch of things: install the CPU, the CPU heatsink and fan, the two hard drives and the optical drive. Technically, this would be it for the assembling side of things, if it weren’t for the little hiccups.

At first, it was all smooth sailing. I was going to put the CPU on the motherboard, in the white/beige area pictured below, also known as a CPU socket.

And this below is the CPU in its box. As you can see, it’s the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+, dual core CPU. Yes, it’s an older model but one that’s still powerful enough to do what we need.

Here’s a closeup of that CPU socket. If you squint hard enough, you might see a chrome lever arm on the right.

Before inserting the CPU, you must raise this lever.

Below are a couple of pictures of the CPU being unboxed and placed on its socket. Not pictured is an after shot of the chrome lever arm being lowered. This locks the CPU in place.

And that’s the heat sink and fan. It’s the one that comes in the box with the CPU, with the thermal grease already applied. I was going to use another one, but the fit was a little tight. I won’t be overclocking anything, so this should do.

And there you have the heat sink and fan sitting on top of the CPU.

And now we get to the hard drives. Each one of these babies is a full terabyte of storage. With the RAID 1 setup we’ll do later, we’re going to get 1 TB mirrored between the drives. One fails, the other keeps the data safe.

The next few steps are pretty obvious. Insert the drives in the appropriate place in the case, screw in, and connect… And this is where the trouble started. First, the pics.

The following pictures show you orange cables coming out of the drives. These are the SATA data cables… What you don’t see are the SATA power cables. You know why? Because I completely forgot about those. Duh! Sure, you can plug the drives to the motherboard, but they still need power!

Now, you might say: “That’s not that big a deal. Go get some cheap cables and you’re set.” Of course, you’d be right. But forgetting those cables got me thinking about what else I might have forgotten. So I decided to check on my work so far… and that’s when I discovered an even bigger problem.

See, it turns out that this particular motherboard requires two power supply connections. There’s the 24-pin connection you saw last week, and a second 12V 8-pin connection. But here’s the thing: the power supply I have does not have an 8-pin cable. It just doesn’t. At all. Meaning I have to either get a new motherboard, or a new power supply. Obviously, I am now in the market for a new power supply.

Below is a shot of that 8-pin connection I need. It’s easy to miss and I’m just glad I caught it now, rather than later.

So, after checking all the work and noticing the problems, I decided to install the optical drive and finish this leg of the work. You install this drive in exactly the same way as you install the hard drives. And you guessed it, it too needs a SATA power supply cable. I left my apartment to go buy: 1 modular power supply with at least one 8-pin connector and 3 SATA power cables.

With any luck, next installment we’ll get to the software side of things. Getting Vista on there and putting Norton Security 2009 to the test.