42 MA XIMUMPC NOVEMBER 2004
Build It!
Step 16 : Mount the optical drives
Once again, it’s time to
mount drives in your case,
but this time, they’re opti-
cal. Before you can slide
your DVD and/or CD drives
into your case, remove the
front slot covers from your
case bezel. You shouldn’t
have to apply strong force
to get it loose. If you’re hav-
ing difficulty, check your
case manual.Step 17 : Connect the optical drives
Just like hard drives, optical drives need to
be connected to a mobo and a power source
to work. Although we’ve heard rumors of the
existence of Serial ATA optical drives, we have
yet to actually see any, and don’t expect to
before the end of this year. So for the time
being, it’s strictly parallel ATA cables for the
optical drives.
The connections for your optical drives are
exactly like those for parallel ATA hard drives,
so attach the cables in the same way—line
up the cable and apply even pressure to both
sides of the connector. You’ll also need to run a
four-pin Molex power connector from the power supply to each of your optical
drives. Maximum PC Lab technicians generally no longer bother with the ana-
log CD audio connector or the SPDIF on their optical drives. They’re not neces-
sary now that all drives can digitally extract CD audio.Step 18 :
Install the rest of your cards
We’re almost there. Soundcards, network
cards, TV tuner cards, and any other type
of card you might want to install should be
plugged into your rig now. Installing PCI
cards is easy. First, remove the slot cover
from your case for the PCI slot you want to
use. It doesn’t really matter which PCI slots
you use for your devices. Next line the card
up with the slot (a). Once you push it into
place, lock it down using screws or your
case’s latches (b).a
b
The PC world is going serial. First it was
Serial ATA and now it’s PCI Express.
That’s because it’s far easier to ratchet
up bus speeds when a signal is sent
over a few wires rather than the dozens
of wires used in parallel connections.
The PCI Express graphics slot will ini-tially be able to transfer 4GB of data in
both directions. (Compare that to the 8x
AGP slot, which can reach just 2.1GB/s
in one direction.)
For all the rest of your add-in cards,
the tiny x1 (pronounced bi-1 ) connector
almost doubles the bandwidth of PCIfrom 133MB/s to 250MB/s. To add more
bandwidth, chipset and board design-
ers simply increase the number of
“lanes” to each connection. Eventually
motherboards will have x4 slots for
add-in cards which will support up to
1GB/s of traffic.Why much faster data rates make PCI Express a must-have technology.The Secret Serial Life of PCI Express
A PCI Express card (bottom) has
a single row of connectors, while
an AGP card (top) has two rows of
connectors.Almost all PCI Express mobos use the
new ATX 2.0 power spec (white). PCI
Express graphics cards use a new 6-
pin power connector (black) as well.Inserting a PCI Express graphics card
is really no different than installing an
AGP card.