Class 6 Power Hook Up and Loading the Operating System

Today, there's just a little more wiring to do. The students are making sure the connections are correct.  The power cables to the motherboard and the graphics card need to be plugged in again:

 

 Now we are ready to do a start-up test with the hardware assembled...And we want to do some wiring clean-up and straightening to make sure the wires don't interfere with the functions of the computer or the cooling fans.

Now, its time for a start-up test.  The computers are plugged in and switched on......

   

SUCCESS!!!  The computers work--there is some re-wiring to do in a few, but basically the computers are up and running and look sharp with their LED-lit blue fans:

A handsome computer :-)

Now we add an operating system. We have available Windows7 (64 bit), so we are adding that.

When Windows is added the hard drive is partitioned.

A few students want to run Ubuntu Linux--and that's good too!  We let the Windows installers run after class so the computer will be ready for driver installation next time.

Day 5 --Connecting components

In this class, we are connecting all  the components with cables and power.  The hard drive and CD/DVD drive need to be connected to the motherboard and connected to power.  The connections to the switches and ports provided by the computer case need to be connected.  There are also fans/audio and other connections need to be made...

We first connect power to the disk drives and add an cable connection to the motherboard.

Next, we connect the computer case switches, such as the on/off and reset switches:

The on/off and reset switches are added

Some of the switches are tiny... And we have to consult the motherboard manual to determine placement...

There are a number of different wires to connect and the students look to find the connections.

Here are the USB and Audio connections....

We are nearly all connected:

Day 4 --Motherboard and Graphics Card --In!!

Day 4 -- Today we have an early morning class and we install the motherboard and graphics card in the computer case.

Motherboard installation raises some concerns, because it is possible to short circuit the motherboard if we allow the connections of the motherboard to touch the sides of the case.  The case we purchased provides stanchions to lift the mother board slightly off the sides of the case.  However, it is necessary to install stanchions only where holes are provided on the motherboard.  So, to do this we made a quick trace of the connection holes on the motherboard, and then installed the stanchions using the map we created.

  

This made us feel confident that we were installing the motherboard correctly and we would have no electrical problems down the road...

Then, before class ended, we put the graphics card back on to the motherboard and secured it to the case.  

Now we are ready to attach power to all parts.  We are nearly done with the building part of the build!

Ports are ready to go!!

Day 3 -- Hard Drive and Other Components Go into the Case

After the successful test of the chip, motherboard and graphics card, it is time to put the components in the case.   Our case is the Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel.  One fun aspect of this case is the LED fan light, which will make a great impression when the computers are finished.  The lights are even in St. Mark's colors -- Go Lions! 

 We opened up the cases and first installed the power supply in the bottom, making sure that the cooling fan for the power supply was on top:

Next we installed our DVD/CD drive (the drive that reads and writes to CDs and DVDs) and our internal hard drive.

       

Our DVD/CD drive is an ASUS DRW-241st (optical drive).  It has a 2MB cache (can hold 2MB chunks for storage),  has a pretty good write speed (24x) and interfaces using the SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) bus interface.  Our hard drive is the Samsung Spinpoint F3, which provides one Terabyte (1T) of file storage!

To install the DVD/CD drive, the students took apart the front of the case.  The DVD/CD drive slides in from the front.

  

To install the hard drive, the students have to remove one of the fans also on the front of the case.

  

Then we talked about how the motherboard would be installed  -- We're almost done with the installation of the parts.

Day 2
We are working to complete the external set up and testing of the basic components --  motherboard, chip, RAM memory and graphics card.

After Day 1, we had the chip on the motherboard.  Today we installed RAM and the graphics card to the motherboard, and we also connected power to do a boot test.  Our motherboard, the Asus P8 H67-M Pro/CSM, has 2 Ram channels.  So for each of our 8 computers, we have two SDRAM DDR3 cards to install.

Each SCRAM card contains 4 Gigabytes. Thus, each computer will have 8GB of available RAM (4GB operating in each of the two channels on the motherboard).  The students knew where to install the memory cards from past classes.  However, many were new to the feel of pushing the cards and making sure they were secure. The trick was to push RAM card into the motherboard until the slot "snapped."

From there we installed video cards.  Our card is the EVGA GeForce GTX460, which carries an NVIDIA chipset and 1024MB of GDDR5 (Graphics Double Data Rate) Memory -- for fast graphics processing.  This was also a quick install, adding it to the motherboard via a PCI Express slot.

The harder part of the this class was installing the power supply and doing a boot up from the motherboard. Our power supply is the Rosewill GREEN Series (GR530-S12),  which converts 120V outlet power in to usable power for the computer and disk drives.  Our supply has eight separate power lines which require some sorting out (it looks a little like an octopus) -- but each line gives power a different part of the computer.

Motherboard with graphics card, RAM and power supply

 We then were ready for a test.  However, since the motherboard doesn't have on "On/Off" switch we, we needed to "hotwire" or "jump start" the motherboard.  We located the on/off power pins on the motherboard and with a flick of a screwdriver, we tripped the on/off switch as the computers fired up!

We need to install an operating system and do further work, but the response of the computer's BIOS was a sure sign that the basic core components were working..... this was good news.

Getting the test set up to work took some doing...

And there were some setbacks along the way, which required troubleshooting....

 

But in the end all the students got their computers to boot

Day One:  This project developed out of student interest in building an awesome working computer.  During the fall,  the students learned about programming and computer technology.  While all of the students had experience running computer devices and software --few had knowledge of the inner workings of a computer device.  What was "inside the box" was a mystery.

In October and November we looked at some basic parts that make up a PC-- motherboard, chip, drives, etc.   During this investigation the class got excited about actually building a computer.  We then priced parts and looked on-line at what possible computers we could build (the IT department at St.Marks also gave us great guidance and help).... Now, we are ready to start the project!   We will build 8 computers over the next few classes.   Here is the CS31 class building team!

Today, we started an external (outside of the case) build to get the core parts-- motherboard, chip, memory and graphics card-- together and tested to make sure they work.  Our motherboard is the Asus P8 H67-M Pro/CSM which is configured for Intel chips.  Our chosen chip is the Intel Core i5-2300.  The Intel i5-2300 has four processing cores (for multitask processing) A fast chip, good for graphics--which is what we want!

Here is the Motherboard (Asus P8 H67) with the chip (pin-connecting side up).  Also pictured is a cooling fan to install on top of the chip, because the chip gets very hot and needs cooling as it runs:

Here are students installing the chip and fan

    

   

Here's the result after our first building class (chip and heat sink installed on all 8 motherboards!):