I got bored of waiting for the thermal paste to arrive and decided to check out the contents of the components and familiarize myself with them only to find some thermal paste in the CPU cooler box. I'd just watched a 2-hour tutorial video on building computers so I just felt 'in the zone' and went for it... 8 hours later(yep, 8, 5PM-1AM) it loaded to UEFI and subsequently Ubuntu from my Live CD/USB. The next morning I installed Windows and almost all was working!
During installation I ran into several issues:
1) I didn't have anything along the lines of alcohol to clean whatever I used to spread the thermal paste. I just went ahead and cleaned a screwdriver with some kitchen towels and spread away.
2) The motherboard screw holes(forgotten the correct term) didn't
quite match up to the case meaning it's at a slight slant and slightly compressed for want of a better word.
3) The CPU cooler didn't screw down as expected, and I suspect that although it's tied in strongly and doing its job it isn't on as it's supposed to be.
4) I managed to break the latch on the PCI-Express slot where the GPU goes... fortunately that has no purpose other than to hold it in place and it being slotted in plus the screw keep it in tight enough.
5) The sound card got right in the way of all the connectors at the bottom of the motherboard, as did the GPU to a lesser extent.
6) I must have touched all the chipset stuff on everything about fifty times whilst connecting stuff together. I'm amazed I didn't (to my knowledge) break anything.
7) The optical drive doesn't fit in this case... and whilst learning this I've bent the front of the case. Fortunately due to the design it isn't too noticeable. Aside from that I love the case, cheers to whoever suggested it! (Cooler Master CM 690 II Advanced)
8) Nothing happened in terms of something appearing on the screen on the first boot. Scared me half to death.
I'm getting a consistent 60+ FPS with everything on high + 2xAA on Far Cry 3 and the computer is taking about 5-10 seconds at most to boot. No problems at all with stability once I'd fixed an issue a rogue sound card driver was causing with Windows.
Now, I said 'almost' all was working as my HDD isn't being detected. I attached it to the same port thing as the SSD which was labelled as being faster somehow(the correct terminology escapes me). My friend suggested I try plugging it into the slower port thing and see if that works which I'll be trying in the morning, does that sound like it'll work?
Anyway, HDD aside, WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
P.S. I was so scared to death whilst building it I forgot to take pictures during the building process... also I'll randomly note that I built this whole thing on my bed for lack of a better place to do it... anyway, there's a picture of it on my camera somewhere, I'll see if I can get that uploaded soon.
