Not a Media Centre build

[jimbouk]

Following on from the £100 CPU and motherboard - last night I put it all together! Here are some pics for you lovely Hexus people to laugh at what I've cobbled together

First up, a dusty old Antec Fusion case taken out of the loft. This was purchased from someone on Hexus about 10 years ago I think - a little bit chipped on some edges but still a nice case:



Notice the extra sexy Papst case fan with a molex connector! Inside an equally ancient 480W Antec PSU, don't think it's original but it certainly isn't new!

New, second hand and swiped from my main rig components:



It may be a mATX motherboard, but dang it's tiny! I remember having a bit of trouble fitting a proper mATX motherboard into the case and having to take care with PATA cable routing as there wasn't much clearance round the edges of the board - no worries this time!

Basics installed:



I really didn't enjoy fitting the CPU into the motherboard, those Intel sockets do not seem very robust. Next up, the stupidly large GPU:



I had done a dry-run before spending more money, pretty tight top and back! Having previously stuck an oversized graphics card in this case (and not thrown out useful things) I had 2 right angles GPU power extension cables in a box ready to fit - something coming straight out would have fouled the case lid. The PSU only had one GPU lead, fortunately I had a spare molex to PCI-E 6pin adapter so it all cobbled together fine!



A couple of cable ties later to neaten things up and she was good to go! Booted up first time with a few worrying twitches of the CPU fan and we were away. Nothing installed yet as we're going to take the SSD from her all-in-one, currently a old hdd spinning away to itself for cable length.

Issues: I'm not sure I have enough leads for all the case goodies. There's a molex and a floppy disk power adapter from the case, and only one spare molex on the power supply. I can do one or the other (with an adapter) at the moment, will see if it works with one otherwise I'll be looking for a molex pass-though to floppy power adapter (or doing some soldering at work).

The CPU is idling in bios around 37 degrees, I assume this is ok on the stock heatsink & fan. It is tempting to get a couple of decent case fans and a after-market cooler for the CPU...

First things first though, I should manage a Windows 8 install on the weekend and we'll see how she games

[jimbouk]

Wow, what a slog. After a few evenings of head scratching and going round in circles installing Windows in UEFI mode then legacy mode thinking the graphics card was causing issues, turns out it was just the ssd on the way out! Popped the old HDD in and installed and booted fine in UEFI mode. Don't think it's that old so will see how far I get with pcworld without a box...