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With only one x16 PCI-E slot on our mobo, there’s only one place for our Radeon HD 4850 card to reside in. Before you plug in the videocard, you need to clear a slot for it. Remove the slot cover from case, then slide the card in along the expansion slot. It’s important to keep the card perpendicular to the plane of the motherboard, so that it properly seats in the slot. Make sure the card makes complete contact with the slot and is fitted all the way in. Once the card is securely in place, screw the mounting bracket to the chassis.
Before installing the optical drive, you’ll need to locate the screws that will hold the drive in place. The loose screws will be located in a small plastic bag inside your DVD burner’s retail box. (If you didn’t buy a retail DVD burner, check your case’s parts box.)
On some computer cases, there are bezels covering each slot where you’ll mount your drives. In this instance, you only need to remove a single bay bezel from the front side of the case. Simply slide the optical drive into the 5.25-inch bay, making sure that you line up the appropriate holes with the slots and that the front bezel of the drive is aligned with the front of your case. Then, mount the drive on the case using the proper screws. You only need two screws on each side of the drive to keep it safely mounted.
With the hard drive, you won't have to remove any bezel or front paneling. Just hold the drive in place while you screw it in.
Oh cables, how much we loathe thee. Luckily, with SATA drives we don’t have to worry about ugly, gray, IDE cables anymore. You’ll need to run a SATA cable from your motherboard (the ports are on the lower right portion of the board) to your optical and another to your hard drive. It’s a good idea to make sure that the hard drive containing Windows is plugged into the first SATA port on your motherboard. In this build, we kept it simple by only requiring two SATA ports for our two drives. This MSI board can connect up to six SATA devices, which leaves you plenty of room for upgrades in the future.
Next up are the dreaded front panel connections. You know, those multi-colored wires that need to be pushed onto a bunch of poorly labeled pins? Find these color-coded cables near the front of your case, and isolate the HDD LED, the power LED, the reset switch, and the power switch. You can plug the power and reset switches directly to the labeled leads on the mobo, but the two lights are trickier. Plug the HDD LED into the orange section, making sure the colored wire lines up with the + pin on the mobo. Do the same for the power LED as well. Don’t worry about making mistakes; a faulty connection will not harm your case or motherboard.
If you want to use the case’s front-mounted USB ports, connect the labeled USB cable to the JUSB1 pins; it should slide in easily and it’s keyed, so there’s only one possible way to connect it. The last connection you will need to make is for the front panel audio. The case comes with both an AC ’97 and HD Audio connection. You will want to use the HD Audio connector and plug it to the JAUD1 pins on the bottom left corner of the motherboard.
Now that you’re done with these troublesome wires, you may want to stand back and observe the mess of cables you have running around the interior. Bundle up your loose cables with zip ties and tuck them away in the case’s many crevices. With some extra effort and patience, you can pretty up the mess of wires and have your $800 PC looking like a Dream Machine.
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savage4naves
December 18, 2008 at 8:10am
Quite a deal for the not so hard core gamers out there. Another 500GB hard drive to set up a
Raid 0 configuration would do the trick.
A day without laughter is a day wasted...
Russtynailz
December 18, 2008 at 7:53am
"We have seen today that dual channel memory on the Core i7 is more than enough to keep it fed with bandwidth, especially since the CPU and memory are communicating with each other directly. There is very little lost bandwidth and it makes better use of all of the dual channel memory than the triple channel memory. However, with Intel’s plans to increase speeds and allow heavier memory usage, especially with IGP based systems, the extra bandwidth will end up being welcomed."
I Jedi
December 18, 2008 at 7:50am
Not bad at all. Certainly does help those who have a limited budget, but still want to play the newest games out there. Great article.
brockalee
December 18, 2008 at 7:04am
Beef_Wellington - A "decent case and 500W power supply" for $45? You're more likely to find a decent prostitute for that much. (Which is to say it's not very likely, nay, impossible.)
Interesting comment on the Antec brand - I too have lost faith in them. Hundreds of dollars and hours of troubleshooting lost to their PS that have crapped out on me. You always get what you don't pay for, yet you don't always get what you do pay for... Such is life.
Primus2112
December 19, 2008 at 6:59am
I had the same frustration, go for a PC power and Cooling or Corsair PSU.
beef_wellington
December 18, 2008 at 6:20am
I just built a new system, and I must say it's pretty impressive. For under $900 you can't beat it. Starting with
- MSI X-58 Eclipse Platinum Motherboard MS-7522 $220
- Core I7 920 2.66GHz $309
- Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB $145
- 1x Kingston 2GB stick of DDR3 10600 $68
- Generic Case and a decent 500Watt PSU $45
- Western Digital 80GB 3.0 Gb/s $36
- LG 20x SATA DVD+-R Burner $24
Newegg Total $847 plus $30 shipping
I've got it overclocked to 3Ghz with the stock cooler and it's as solid as a rock. It doesn't get hotter than 45 degrees C even when playing Far Cry 2 maxxed out. Granted the hard drive is small, it's a generic case and I've only got 2GB of RAM all of that stuff can be upgraded really easily later on. All in all the price to performance ratio is pretty much outstanding.
Xyonix
December 18, 2008 at 10:05am
Make no doubt about it, the memory controller will run that ram in either single, dual, or triple channel configurations. Although it begs the question of the memory bottleneck of a single dim of ram defeating the purpose of going with that fancy 920 processor. I guess the only way to tell would be to compare benchmarks.
One thing is for certain though, he's left himself one hell of an upgrade path. Very interesting build on a budget for sure.
Nice article from MaxPC too.
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 7:13am
there is no way that can work. the i7 requires tri-channel memory. aka, you need 3 sticks of memory to run the compy. even if you only have 2 sticks, then it will have boot errors. i dont believe that it will run far cry 2 (let alone boot) without crashing. that is just how the memory controller works on the i7. i dont beleave it. anyone want to back me up?
savage4naves
December 18, 2008 at 8:14am
it's recommended that you use 3GB memory (tri channel memory) for optimal performance but it should run just fine on 2GB. There are some pretty handy tri channel memory bundles out there...
A day without laughter is a day wasted...
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 9:15am
its not that he has only 2 gb but that he only has one stick. it shouldnt be able to run based off of the i7 memory controller. you have to have 3 sticks of memory. it expects 3 sticks of memory (aka, tri-channel). i have seen ppl run 2 sticks but NEVER 1 stick.
willsmith
December 18, 2008 at 10:24am
Running in single-channel mode works fine. You'll lose some memory bandwidth (1/3rd from a 3-channel config, or 1/2 of a two channel config), but it will work fine. It shouldn't be unstable or throw any boot errors.
silvershad
December 18, 2008 at 12:16pm
thanks for clearing things up. i have had a lot of people say that they have tried to use less than 3 sticks and they keep getting boot errors or crashes. perhaps it was just bad memory or a bios issue.
gothliciouz
December 18, 2008 at 5:52am
i would've gone with the classic Q6600...dualcore is becoming so... out of style.:)
killerxx7
December 18, 2008 at 4:08am
I would swap that Antec psu for a corsair 500hx-tx i dont trust antec when it comes to psu's.
Primus2112
December 19, 2008 at 6:57am
I was having the insuffient power prompt on my Nvidia control panel with a ANTEC 550 NEO... powering the 8800GTX.
After many emails to Antec and how they insisted that it was a overheating problem and not the PSU... I switched my Antec PSU to a generic 500 PSU that I had gotten from Best Buy that powered my non-gaming rig and Voila! My Problems went away. I would go for PC Power and Cooling and not any ANTEC PSU. No more Antec for my power rigs.
bamache
December 19, 2008 at 1:18pm
Why has Antec on there 900 and 1200 cases and here the 300 started putting the PSUs in the bottom of the case? Is it for stability, heh? Show me that it's for thermodynamics in the case... heat rises, right? My, very old, Antec mid-towers came with a 400W, upgraded to 550W that are mounted in the very top.
Any clue? Thanks!
