Assembling a PC in 2024
Context
Most of the gaming in my house happens on consoles (PS5, Switch) but my little one is really into Fortnite, which (at least he claims so) is best played on a PC.
After some back and forth with my wife, we agreed to buy him a PC.
This post is a fun one for me, as I used to assemble maybe not a lot of PC back in the early 2000's, but that surely took some time of my weeks.
Order
- Install the power supply in the case
- Install the CPU on the mother board
- Install the CPU cooler on the CPU
- Plug the CPU cooler on the mother board
- Install the RAM
- Install the m2 SSD hard disk
- Install the mother board in the case
- Install the graphics card onto the mother board
- Plugged the power cables to the motherboard
- Plugged the HDD LED, Reset and Power switches cables to the mother board
- Tried booting but no luck
- Checked the Gigabyte online documentation and realised I also had to plug the CPU to the mother board through the ATX 12V port
- Tried booting again, still no luck
- Checked the ATX power cable, realised there were actually TWO connectors to the PSU, tried plugging both, and this time it worked!
- Plugged the DVD player to the mother board (power / SATA) - just in case I need to install something through a CD or DVD =)
I then proceeded to install Windows 11 (yeah...)
Feeling
As a student, I used to go to a very famous street in Paris: rue Montgallet.
This is where a lot of shops would sell PC parts, and if you were looking for all the good stuff, you had to go there.
This changed a lot since then: I ordered all the components for that PC online.
What has also changed is how easy it is to assemble a PC!
Going from that stage:
to that stage:
Took me probably less than an hour, and as mentioned above, I barely looked up things online.
Windows?
Yeah, since this is meant to be a gaming PC, I didn't have much options (although my buddy Benoît is gaming on a Mac, and playing Windows games - but the entry price is not exactly the same): I had to use Windows.
The install was a no brainer - although I went the "install with a local account only, not a Windows account" route.
The only thing that made me smile is the first (and only) time I launched Microsoft Edge (Windows' browser) to download Firefox, and it greeted me with that message:
For the non-French speaker, it says "Edge is your browser, driven by IA"...
Tags: IT