Remember in Kung Fu how Caine had to grab a pebble from the old
man’s hand to prove how badass he was? Well, installing a com-
puter’s front-panel connectors is kind of like that. Only after years of
study and apprenticeship will you be able to plug in the front-panel
connectors without getting it wrong at least once. Nevertheless,
we’ll try to do it right here. Grab the rainbow cable with the Power
SW, HDD LED, Reset SW, and Power LED connectors and take a
close look at the front-panel header. You’ll notice that the yellowheader is color-coded and also features a plus symbol on the posi-
tive connector (image A). The motherboard manual will spell out
where each cable goes, but since the board follows the Intel FP
connector standard, we know that the power switch connects to
black, the power LED connects to green, reset goes to blue, and
the hard drive LED goes to red. The orientation of the power-on
and reset switches don’t matter, but you’ll have to match the posi-
tive and negative with the LED indicators. If you do it wrong, don’t
worry; there’s no risk of destroying anything. We got it right on the
fi rst shot, however, because our kung fu is that strong (image B).11
FINISH OFF THE FRONT PANEL
The CM Stacker comes with a generous six front-mounted USB
ports. Fortunately, the MSI P35 Neo 2–FR has enough USB head-
ers to run them. To connect them, fi nd the three USB cables in the
Stacker case. Each is keyed, so they cannot be installed incor-
rectly. Plug them into the JUSB1, JUSB2, and JUSB3 mobo head-
ers (image A). Now use the SATA cable that came with the mobo to
attach your hard drive. Simply plug one end into an available purple
port on the mobo and plug the other end into the drive (image B).
One caveat: A SATA connector is delicate. Once you have it in place,10
CONNECT THE UMBILICAL CORDS
do not put pressure on it or you may snap it; this can be fatal,
especially if you snap the connector on the drive. You might notice
that one of our budget board’s fl aws is the inconveniently located
SATA ports. With a long GPU in place, two of the SATA ports are
blocked. You can get around this by purchasing a right-angle SATA
cable, but that will work for only one of the ports. Fortunately,
there’s an additional SATA port, and you’ll fi nd two eSATA ports
on the back of the motherboard. Now get the IDE ribbon cable
that came with your mobo and use it to attach your optical drive—
there’s only one slot on the motherboard into which it can fi t.28 MAXIMUMPC | APR 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
A
B
A
B
$1,500 PC