How did your very first computer build go?

I'm talking your first time building a computer from ground without the assistance from someone else.

I had this experience two nights ago. I ordered everything on newegg. I was excited when everything came in the mail. I had never built a computer from nothing. I have had experience with the insides of computers though (computers that were already assembled). Before starting, I read all instruction manuals through for completeness. I was not nervous at all while building this computer until it was time to flip the power switch on the power supply. I felt confident in my knowledge to piece it all together. When it came time to flip the power switch, I thought "what happens if it doesn't boot"?! I called my brother in for the "big moment" and I flipped the power switch on the power supply and NOTHING HAPPENED! Well that was because I was so worried about something going wrong that I forgot that I'm supposed to press the power button on the case as well haha. I thought "OMG its not friggin starting" and my brother said "what about that button? You didn't press that one". So I pressed the button and the LED power light came on but nothing else. I started to worry. Its not over, I then hear a noise that sounded "electrical" and I start smelling something burning... And here it comes, I start seeing smoke!! I immediately turn the system off and unplug it and start trying to "sniff" for the smell to pin point it. I could smell the burning coming from the 4v4 12v connection. I evaluate the situation and remembered reading in the manual that the system would not start if the 4x4 12v power supply cored is not plugged into the motherboard. I unplug it and realize my mistake... I plugged in a PCI-E connector into this port!! The plastic for one of the pinouts was a little melted but it looks like thats all the damage that was done. So I plug in the CORRECT 4v4 12v connector and the system started up just fine and looks pretty friggin cool to me. I wondered, "why the heck did the pci-e connector fit on that port??". Needless to say, I caught it in enough time to not have done any damage, so it seems. I do not have any hard drive in this system yet as I ran out of money and will get one next week. And also, I have no video card yet so I'll be using the integrated GPU from the i5 2500k

Here are the main components used:

N82E16819115073
CPU INTEL|CORE I5 2500 3.3G 6M R

N82E16820145345
MEM 4Gx2|CORSAIR CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B

N82E16817139005
PSU CORSAIR|CMPSU-650TX 650W RT

N82E16813128512
MB GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3 R

I still need to get a graphics card and an HDD. I ran ubuntu from a live disc and it ran very well, not that its very demanding to begin with.

And here are some pictures:

ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting
ImageShack® - Online Photo and Video Hosting

I like the cable management with this case, a lot of its hidden except for the many unused power supply cables.

This was a great experience and I'm glad I was able to put it all together, even with that mistake!!

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Comments

cisco_trooper

Very cool. I built my first computer from scratch in 1997, maybe 1998. It was a blazing fast 200Mhz Pentium Pro with an unknown amount of RAM..16M, 32M maybe. I put Windows 98 on it. I wanted to try linux so I spent 3 weeks downloading Red Hat 5 over a 33.6k dial up modem. I got Red Hat downloaded and was too dumb to figure out how to get it working....lol. Linux as come a LONG way since then.

CodeBlox

The very FIRST system I ever opened was a Pentium II which is one of the slot based CPUs from 1999'ish. I still use it too. I leave it on always on the network as sort of a file server. Runs at 450mhz with the ram maxed out at 386mb and it's got a 200w power supply. It runs XP just fine as long as you aren't doing much at all...

Bokeh

Mine was back in 97. Was working for a case and motherboard manufacturer. Got the case at cost, the HDD, floppy, cd rom and whopping 2MB of ram from local VAR at their cost. Processor I got from one of my customers for free, a Cyrix 133mhz. I thought I was in 7th heaven, lol.

Got everything home, built it, turned it on, and the floppy didnt work, neither did the sound. Cable wasn't seated properly on the floppy, and the cable for the cdrom sound was bad. The 14.4 modem was lightning quick too, lol.

Things have changed over the years. I tell people about dial up and BBSes, and they think I am nuts. They couldnt stand doing things that way! Hey, that was high tech back in the day.

dustinmurphy

My first build was an AMD K6-II 400mhz... back in the day when it was cheaper to build than buy. That PC is long gone... now I use mainly laptops, however I do have my "beast" machine... which is an old server I got from a previous job. Dual Xeon 3.0ghz CPU's... 16GB RAM... (2) DVD-RW drives, nVidia GeForce 8600GT (used to have an 8600 and a 8500 for 3 monitors, but took one out to feed my media center PC)... also has dual 650w power supplies... 4x 36G 15k RPM SAS drives (RAID0) and 2x 250G 7200RPM SATA drives (RAID0) ... it's quite overkill... but I built it for free... with spare parts I got from my old job (we did a server refresh to standardize... this machine was $5k a few years ago).

Unfortunately, after my first $400 electric bill running this machine, I decided I'd rather run my laptop instead. LOL

SteveLord

First complete build - Pentium III 600EB "Coppermine" with a Voodoo Banshee video card. Think I was 15. Setup a LAN in-home with my dad 2 years earlier.

CodeBlox

Looking back over this, I just realized that the fan on my power supply is not running. Is there a connection on the motherboard that should be made? If so, I see no mention of it in the instruction manual. And the only thing in BIOS I see is to give an alert if the fan fails. I enabled it and restarted the computer and it gives an alarm. Should the fan from the power supply start automatically?

Cpl.Klinger

It should start automatically. There should be a cable coming off the fan to plug in on the mobo, usually it's a white, two pin affair. The plug in should be right in the area of the cpu socket.

TLeTourneau

I remember my first, it was a 386DX-40 with a Wietek 387 FPU, 4MB RAM (SIPPs not these fancy DIMMs) and a 20MB hard drive. Those were the days!

CodeBlox

About the power supply fan. I just checked VERY CLOSELY and it is running. Its just amazingly quiet that I thought it was not running. Why does it report 0rpm in bios though??

Wow, 4mb of RAM!! And I've NEVER heard of a SIPP

Cpl.Klinger

Oops, and I had a reading fail apparently. I read CPU fan instead of PSU fan. Should have slept a little longer I guess...

jamesleecoleman

When I first built my computer it went really well. It took two hours because I was watching tv.
I had problems when I upgraded my computer. The thing about it is that people told me that the
motherboard, processor, and ram was good. Which it wasn't. I ended up getting a pentium d
and some nforce board with different ram. If I had stuck to the original build, I would have had
to upgrade my computer about two years ago.

ImTheKing

The first machine I built was around 10 years ago. When I built it, I had no problems at all. A few months later I had to replace the power supply and unplugged every connector from motherboard. I believe I plugged case's USB cable into the sound pins or something. Needless to say, I shorted out the motherboard. Took me ages to figure out what happened.

Believe me when I say that I never made a mistake like that again. :< A $100 lesson in properly wiring the motherboard, lol.

demonfurbie

mine was a 8086

i still have bad dreams of a jumper falling out and haveing to re-irq everything

Dsmith81

It was in 1998, Pentium 233mhz , 32mb of SDRAM, 4GB hard drive, Windows 98. It went really well. I was 16 and it took me a few months to buy all the parts, put it together one piece at a time, and used and abused it for about 2 years. IDE controller on the motherboard failed, and ended up building another computer in 2000 to replace it Celeron 633mhz, 128mb SDRAM, 20GB hard drive, Windows ME.

Everyone

Mine was in the late 80's, and I was about the age my son is now, maybe a year or 2 younger (my son is

. IIRC it was a 25MHz 386, I had helped my dad build a 286, and an 8086 before this, but this was the first one I got to build mostly by myself while he watched.

The 1st one I built completely on my own, as in I bought all the parts myself, AND put it together (prior to that my dad bought the parts, and he let me build it) was an Athlon XP 1800 with 1 GB of RAM, an AGP 4x graphics card (nVidia Riva TNT IIRC), Sound Blaster Audigy, and a 30 GB ATA IDE HD. This was around 1999 IIRC. Cost me somewhere around $1500, which included the case, keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Monitor was a 19" Viewsonic CRT with the flat glass front. I still have everything, some of it is still in use. :P

jmritenour

Mine was mid 90s. It was a cobbled together mis-mash of parts that I got from friends, because I was in high school, and only had a part time job. I think I spend maybe 100$ out of pocket.

Couldn't tell you what type/bring of motherboard was in it. 486SX25, 4MB of RAM (1MB SIMMs), a NASTY 100MB hard drive that was dog slow. As in, I tried to play Super Street Fighter II on it, and if this thing was thrashing to keep up, and was getting MAYBE 1FPS. Made me a master of Zangief's spinning pile driver, though.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure I had a Diamond VLB (remember those?) video card, with I want to say 1/2MB of video ram. I know it was capable of SVGA at 800x600 at the very least. As for the sound card, I can't remember what brand it was. I know it wasn't Sound Blaster, but compatible. I can't remember the brand, I know it was one of the major non-creative card makers though. Oh, and a DOUBLE SPEED CD-ROM.

God I miss old technology so much.

jibbajabba

.. badly .. The first build was the latest and greatest - spent over $5k just to find out that it isn't as easy as throwing pieces you want together. I had more blue screens than someone can imagine. It turned out that the latest CPU wasn't 100% supported by the motherboard, the motherboard also couldn't handle the RAM properly ... it was all fixed with firmware upgrades months later - but that taught me an important lesson : Never just assume stuff works together, but research the compatibility of motherboards.

With later builds I decided to opt out for an older "mature" motherboard.

My current workstation has a Supermicro Serverboard which was the end of my troubles ...

nel

i am ashamed to say it....but i have never built one from scratch

jibbajabba

nel wrote: »

i am ashamed to say it....but i have never built one from scratch

Nothing to be ashamed of to be honest, a lot of hassle, more expensive ... After all the builds I have done - I am now happy to use server hardware and got my gf a Dell with 3 years onsite warranty - I am "done" with it

dave330i

My first build was back in 96-97. It was a Cyrix with a Rambus powered video card. It was pure crap for gaming. After a month or so, I punted both and got a Pentium and a voodoo card.

I haven't built one since 00. Need to build a new one next summer for VCAP.

njkt

Kind of funny, but when i built mine around 10 years ago i didn't know the difference between ECC and non-ECC RAM so when i put it all together, i turned it on aaaaaaaaaand... nothing.

All the excitement had been completely replaced by utter dissappointment... i had been working my butt off prior to this so i could own my "own" pc while living with my family going to school...

Needless to say i had a buddy send me some more ram, threw it in and boom! all is well... I didn't have the money to afford windows 2000 or XP so I downloaded NetBSD... bad part was, i couldn't figure out how to use it for a couple weeks. My family wasn't too thrilled about me using their computer to troubleshoot mine for hours (by troubleshoot i mean RTFM and pretend to know what i need to do next)

+1 to freenode and efnet.

Tackle

Wasn't bad except I remember struggling getting the speaker/hard drive light and the rest of those little plugs in and in the correct place.

Fat fingers + motherboard was not marked = frustration.

TLeTourneau

*** Warning - Potential thread hijack ***

jibbajabba wrote: »

Nothing to be ashamed of to be honest, a lot of hassle, more expensive ... After all the builds I have done - I am now happy to use server hardware and got my gf a Dell with 3 years onsite warranty - I am "done" with it

It's not necessarily more expensive, it depends on what your final goal is.

Anonymouse

I don't remember the specs but I still have the computer in my closet. The first motherboard I bought I ended up scraping with a screwdriver while screwing it down because my ex-gf was yelling at me over the phone while I tried to multi-task.

astrogeek

CodeBlox wrote: »

So I plug in the CORRECT 4v4 12v connector and the system started up just fine and looks pretty friggin cool to me. I wondered, "why the heck did the pci-e connector fit on that port??". Needless to say, I caught it in enough time to not have done any damage, so it seems.

I don't get why they did that either, I almost made the same mistake when replacing a power supply. Good to hear there was no apparent damage though, that certainly would not have been a good first experience!

My first experience went surprisingly well. I was sure I did something wrong but when it came time to power on, everything started up just as it should have. My most recent build is the only time I ran into some problems with the CPU overheating, which ended up just being the crappy fan Intel supplies with their new 2nd gen chips, (i7 2600k). Eventually I got it firmly seated before ripping it out and throwing on a Zalman

alan2308

TLeTourneau wrote: »

*** Warning - Potential thread hijack ***

It's not necessarily more expensive, it depends on what your final goal is.

Completely agree with this, especially when you can recycle parts from your old build. A new motherboard and CPU will always be cheaper than a entire new system.

My first build was a Dual Athlon MP 2100+ system back in 2003. I still have the motherboard and the CPU's set aside somewhere. The case, psu, drives, and video card are still in use with my C2D E6400 that I use today.

CodeBlox

Updating this. My SSD arrived in the mail finally and I installed Win7 Pro 64 bit. I must say, this new system is an AMAZING improvement over my old one. With GNS3 configured properly, it can run A LOT of routers at once!!! On my old system, 4 2600 routers would really bog my system down, even AFTER proper idle values. This morning, I had about 10 routers running at once and had NO ISSUES. THIS IS FRIGGIN COOL I CAN GET A LOT MORE STUDIES IN NOW

With win server 2k8 R2, I had four VMs running without a problem. Hadn't tried anymore than that but im sure I can run probably twice as many. I was afraid of having heating issues with the stock fan with the i5. Between it and the case fans, idle temps are sitting around 25 degrees celsius. The system is really quiet too. I would have to say that the loudest piece of hardware in the whole system is the DVD drive... I should have taken head to the feedback on newegg. Everyone said this drive is pretty loud and I can see what they mean. It makes a sorta loud noise at boot and when used its loud. I was blown away at the improvement over my old computer when I finally tested drove it this morning.

tpatt100

I want to try an SSD in my system. I bought a pretty recent build refurb Alienware that blew away my older Dell system. Its fast as is but would be cool to see the performance boost from putting the OS on an SSD.

SteveLord

I run SSDs at work, home and in my laptop. Price is really justified when you stress them with certain games or other taxing programs. And if you're smart about about how much of those you install...since space is often limited.

ally_uk

First PC i built was a AMD-K62 think it was 400Mhz or something in that respect, Running Windows 98, Whacked in a 3DFX Voodoo 1 those were the glory days of FF7