R&D
11 12
WITH THE POWER cables attached to the working PSU, I
need to get the cables to the various components. There
aren’t many things that need connecting—no SATA drives
in this build, so it’s just the motherboard, graphics card,
and SATA devices—in this case, the Corsair fan/RGB
controller. I found these attractive red and black braided
cables in the stock cupboard—they aren’t necessary, but
because this case has a glass side panel, it’s nice to make
everything look neat and tidy—apart from a small amount
of thermal paste which I scrubbed off. Going round the
back of the machine, Corsair has some excellent cable
tidy straps, which do a great job of keeping everything out
of the way. Hopefully, we won’t be coming back here that
often, but it’ll be easy to diagnose any faults if we do.I TURNED THE COMPUTER ON, looked at the readout on
the motherboard, screwed the power supply into place,
then put the two side panels on. I didn’t have enough
screws to properly secure the power supply but the case’s
thumbscrews make rebuilding the machine a doddle. I
attached a keyboard, mouse, and monitor but, sadly, the
machine wouldn’t boot up. The readout indicated it could
be a memory problem, perhaps different RAM was used
before and custom settings implemented in the BIOS.
Either way, a BIOS reset seemed to do the trick. After
that, I rebooted and went back into the BIOS to engage
the RAM’s XMP settings, so I could get the most out of
those fast clock speeds. Then it was a case of installing
Windows and the games and software for benchmarking.THE BRAIDED BUNCH COMPLETING THE BUILD