Graphics card / The First Boot

We will now insert the motherboard into the case, mounting it on the proper plastic board risers and the screws provided in your case. Keeping the motherboard away from the case bottom is important as occasionally it shorts the board and causes hard resets, which is far from helpful. The plastic risers should provide enough lift on the board to allow it to be safe enough. Raising the board away from the case also helps when fitting expansion cards to the board as often a low seated board will not allow expansion cards to go all the way into the slot. 

Once the motherboard is correctly in place screw in the board with the screws which should be provided with the motherboard. Now we will want to insert the graphics card. If your card is an AGP card then you will need to make sure that you get it into the AGP port, this is the only one it will fit into but anyway it will likely be the darker brown coloured one normally on the end of a row of slots closest to the middle of the board. If you have a PCI card then it will be any of the white slots. Place the card into the slot and give it a small downward force, this is required to make sure the card is fully seated in the slot as a slightly loose card will cause the graphics card not to function.

After you have fitted your card and secured it in place we can begin setting up the computer ready for out first boot.  the motherboard requires power just like everything else on your system so that will plugging in firstly. The PSU (Power Supply Unit) will provide a connector to your motherboard, you will see where this goes, make sure you get the connector the right way round, there will be a clip on one side to help you get it the correct way. You will also need to fit the LED's and switches at this point because there is one switch that connects the power switch at the front to the motherboard and so to the power supply, without this you will not be able to boot. Your motherboard booklet will have the information about the LED's and exactly which one goes where.

You can then connect your monitor to the back of the graphics card, then give the case and the monitor power by attaching there power leads to the mains socket. After a final check that everything is fine (especially that your fan is connected properly and that it has power from either the PSU or the FAN header on the motherboard) then you can switch on the power and your system will boot into the BIOS POST screen. Following this there should be a series of errors along the lines of missing keyboards hard drives and floppy drives. This is to be expected as you have not connected them yet. If you are at this stage then everything is fine at the moment. If not check all the previous steps and if necessary try a few of the components in other machines to check if they are working correctly. If you get a blank screen, your monitor may not be connected properly, If you get a series of beeps it is probably a badly seated graphics card. You can use our article on BIOS Beep codes to help you decipher what the exact problem is.

When everything is working up to this point then disconnected the power from the case - This is very important when using ATX cases as the power continues to flow into the system while the Power lead is connected. This is because the power commands on ATX cases and motherboards are software controlled and so need some current in the machine. This is to allow for functions such as Wake on LAN and wake on a certain time. It also allows software applications to shut down the computer once they have completed there task.

We can now start to add a few more components to the system. I would start with the IDE and floppy cables. I would insert these before anything else because these are small fiddly connectors and once other components are added to the system it may be difficult to see and fit these parts. Both the IDE and the floppy cables will have a red line down one side of the cable, this is to help you plug the cable in the correct way.  The red line should be connected to pin one of the motherboard connector. Check with your motherboard manual for the orientation of your IDE and floppy connectors.

If you have ATA 66/100/133 and above connectors you will have to make sure that you connect the cables in the correct order, they will be colour coded in order to make sure you get them in the correct position

• The Blue connector should be connected to the system board

• The Black connector should be connected to the master device

• The Grey Connector should be connected to the slave device    

If you have the ATA 33 drives and cables there is no problem as these can be inserted in any order and into any device, remembering that any devices supporting ATA66 or above will only run at ATA 33 speed if using the ATA 33 cables.

Next - Fitting your hard disks, floppy drives and CD/DVD drives