How to Build a Computer

so as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today's class is on how to build a computer so today's class I'm going to show you how you actually put a computer together so you take all the all the parts and throw it together and you've got a working system this is really incredibly simple like by the end of this class that this class that might be an hour at the most you're just going to be dumbfounded that Michael Dell made billions of dollars simply by by doing this that you don't need a master's degree you don't need a bachelor's degree you don't need a high school education and frankly maybe if you have a kindergarten degree you should still be able to do this uh building a computer is really pretty simple it's it's a it's just it's paint the dots you know paint-by-numbers you just uh if you know what parts to buy if you understand what you're doing it is just incredibly simple to do you don't need any special tools really all you need to build a computer the only thing that you need in your toolbox is a Phillips head screwdriver and then something called thermal paste this is called Arctic silver we'll talk about it when when we're building the computer but this is all you need all you need to build a computer is a single screw driver you don't need special tools you don't need multimeters or soldering irons or any of that building computers are just very very very very simple seriously they are so uh so give me a second to get prepared and and we'll go in and I'll show you how to build your own computer so now I you know I am all I'm you lie the computer guy I'm all for the geeky stuff I'm all for the technical stuff I'm all for for getting your hands and do the electronic gadgets but as you also know I am a pragmatist so before we go into this class before you decide to build your own computer I just want to take a moment to talk to you about why you would want to build your own computer and why it might be better just to go over to Best Buy and pick up whatever they have for $300 now back in the day ten years ago five years ago three years ago there was a huge profit margin oh when you built a computer so you know what when I started my business I could put one of these computers together entirely from from getting all the parts to having operating system on it and in bed two maybe three hours and for that I was looking at a three to four hundred dollar profit so so that is was worthwhile you know computers were about a thousand dollars for a decent computer and I could put together a decent computer for $600 so yeah a few hundred dollars profit is worthwhile and even if you're not trying to sell computers that's a enough of a discount that it's worthwhile to build a computer yourself I mean everybody would like to save a few hundred bucks but nowadays the price of computers has dropped to the point where you know I can't say that that's it's necessarily worth it anymore even before I close my shop we had stopped building custom computers because the profit margin simply wasn't there anymore so before you you decide to build your own computer because you'll think it'll be cheaper just realize it probably will not be we're going to put all the hardware into the computer today to show you how to build the hardware component but but remember once you build the computer you need to install the operating system well when you go to newegg.com or tigerdirect comm when you go to buy and an operating system CD for your computer what you're going to find out is that the basic Windows 7 operating system costs aprox only $100 or more so think about that yes the operating system cost $100 so if you go to the store and the they have some eMachine or some Dell or whatever for $300 well for you to create a computer like that $100 alone will go to the operating system so that means you only have $200 left to buy the parts so you know depending on why you want to build a computer it it's many times not-it's just better just go to Dell or go to Best Buy now why do I still build my computer so I still unless they're Mac's I still build all my systems well the reason that you should build your own systems is if you require a high-end or specialty computers because uh the main reasons are is if you need a custom computer well you might as well just customize the entire thing you can get exactly what you want or if you're looking for a high-end computer so these are the desktop computers are gonna cost you fifteen hundred three thousand dollars there is still enough of a difference on the profit margin that that is worthwhile so the video computer the computer that I use for video editing one I needed to be customized and - it was very high-end with SATA 3 and solid-state drives in the whole nine yards so I still saved money off of building it myself so that's something to think about so there's so that is a reason to build a computer for yourself the other reason is if you like to upgrade a lot building your own computer at the end of the day will be less expensive so if you plan to go out and you buy new computers all the time then you should just buy new computers but if you're somebody who likes to upgrade you can save a lot of money because you can reuse parts so a computer case so this is an ATX computer case this is what all the guts will go into ATX computer cases cost anywhere between sixty to a hundred dollars let's say well these ATX computer cases have been around for ten years so if I had purchased the computer case ten years ago could be using that exact same computer case for multiple different computers so you know I have one computer I put in there after a year I rip all the guts out I put a new one in after a year about the guts out put a new one in I don't have to keep re-buying the computer cases so so that's one place you save money again 60 to 100 dollars the next place is a is optical drives you know I mean they they really haven't made a major upgrade in optical drives in in five or six years at least so if you have a DVD burner you can continue to reuse that DVD burner like like I say this this would be another fifty dollars so simply reusing a DVD burner and your case you're saving yourself a hundred and fifty dollars every time you rebuild the computer and build a quote-unquote new computer if you can still use the same power supply you can save yourself a hundred dollars if you can reuse your hard drive you can save yourself however much this cost so that's something to think about when you're trying to decide whether you should just buy a computer or build a computer basically realize that you're not going to save a lot of money building a computer and it may actually cost more to build your own computer nowadays if you're dealing with a low to mid range computers there's just no profit margin anymore if you're dealing with expensive computers and now these are desktop Windows desktop computers that cost fifteen hundred dollars or more there still is a profit margin in there if you do decide to build your computer I mean the argument for it is like I say is every time you upgrade your computer you can continue to use all parts you can continue to use the old case you can continue to use the the CD drive you can continue to use graphics cards sometimes so you can save a lot of money so you get a brand new computer but half the parts are used well you know if it's cutting-edge computer that still works so I just want you to think about that because like I said a lot of people a lot of people think oh that the only way they can go is to build their own computer real computer geeks build their own computers and it's just it's it's just not so anymore if I was still in the the computer business selling computers to clients there is no way I it's not worth the time to build computers for clients anymore and and like I say for myself the only reason I still build computers is because I'm dealing with the high-end like video graphics computers otherwise yeah going to Best Buy you'll probably be fine so the question I always get you know when customers come in or new people decide to build their own computers I'll say Eli so what do I need you know what what hardware do I need for my computer and nowadays I have to say that that that that's a very good question and I have no idea the best way to figure out what hardware you need for your computer is to find out or figure out what software you were going to be running on that computer are you going to be running Adobe are you going to be running Maya are you going to be playing whatever the doom of five video game is you know whatever the latest and greatest is and if you're going to be doing that then really what you need to do is you need to go to any forum sites for that software that you're going to be using or even to the to the websites for the software itself and see what they recommend see what they suggest because if you go to Adobe Adobe will tell you uh what hardware you should have if like these video games now are so powerful the video game companies will tell you what type of hardware you should be running to run their video games well on top of that if you go to the forums and if you do a little bit of research you can find what real users have used and and possible differences on hardware so so they'll say you know use this motherboard versus that motherboard and and that's how you figure out what you need for your computer if all you're looking for is some just middle-of-the-road computer you know if this is just a hobby to figure out how computers are built or whatever uh what I would suggest is when you go to newegg.com just find decent middle-of-the-road stuff you know find a hundred dollar processor find a hundred dollar motherboard find other basic parts and just put it together even low-end components now are actually really really powerful the lowest in the computer that they're making it is more powerful than most people need seriously honestly so if you're just looking for just just a hobby computer to put it together then you know spend it's been fifty two hundred dollars on a processor spend fifty one hundred dollars on the motherboard and then buy all of your other you know that's really how it is if you're planning to build your computer again for Adobe or Maya or these video games go to the manufacturer of the software go to the forums and see what they suggest nowadays that these are these different pieces of software have so many different hardware requirements that what is good for Adobe may not be good for video gaming what's good for video gaming might not be good for for Maya it's just how it is uh these systems are now becoming more and more specialized so you have to make sure that you buy the right parts and processors for for for the type of computer that you're going to be building the type of applications that you're going to be using now I've been talking about parts a little bit and so I want to stress something when you go and you decide to to buy parts for your system I want you to buy good quality parts from name-brand manufacturers now these name-brand manufacturers may not be the name brands that you are used to because you are used to dealing with Dell and you're used to dealing with Gateway and they don't sell motherboards that you would know of company is that you should deal with if you're going to buy a motherboard by Ana su smother board or a gigabit motherboard if you're going to be buying a power supply by an Ana tech power supply if you're going to be buying Ram by Kingston ramp these are well known high-quality manufacturers of parts of components a lot of people try to go cheap when they buy parts for their new computer and the problem is is you know you're trying to save money and it's ok to save some money by building your own computer but then you go too far by buying cheap parts for the computer that you're trying to build so you can save money you know that the reason that a seuss motherboards cost fifty to a hundred dollars and crappy motherboards cost $25 is because those crappy motherboards have a horrible tendency to fail just like when you buy a TV just like when you buy a DVD or just like when you buy a normal computer these parts time's come to you dead on arrival that they're bad well the problem is especially if you're new when you're building the computer you don't know how to troubleshoot these things properly you don't know if if it's a bad power supply or if you just did something dumb and the power supply is not working correctly so if you buy these cheap parts the chances are there's one Gumby one or two of those parts in there that come to you dead on arrival and then and then it's just just a complete and utter nightmare trying to make the computer work not only that but you should remember and know that if you buy low-quality parts in a computer the computers or electronic devices and once you connect everything together once you slot the power supply in and the cards they all become one device well these electronic devices if there is a short or if there is a problem with the electricity going through one of the components it can go through and destroy other components in the computer so if you buy a low quality a power supply I've seen this a lot the low power quality power supply dies and you go oh well that's no big deal I was buying a cheap power supply anyway what you're not realizing is when that power supply dies it can send a spike of energy that will go through it'll destroy your motherboard it can destroy your RAM it can destroy your video card so not only are you replacing the this crappy little power supply but now you're replacing your motherboard and your video card etc so all of these parts when you put them together become a whole and if one of those parts in the whole is bad really I'm not joking I'm not being melodramatic like I say uh you know one of one of our fans just bought a power supply it fried his system he spent a lot of money to buy other good parts and he skimp on the power supply and that toasted his system this happens in the real world so the main thing is is when you're thinking what what do I need for my computer the question is what software will you be running find out what the the software manufacturers recommend and then build your computer based on that and then when you go to buy the parts like I said by ASUS or gigabit mother boards by an tech power supply's kingston ram buy good quality parts i mean it's just gonna it's just it's just better so let's go into a little bit of the planning phase or so so the the parts that you are going to buy for your computer you know based on maybe you need a special type of hard drive or maybe you need a special type of graphics card etc every what you should realize is everything runs through the motherboard so so this is the motherboard and this is what connects absolutely and everything together so what you have to do when you're building your computer is you have to buy parts that will fit on and work in your motherboard so once you you're going to go out and you're going to decide whatever motherboard you want you know be fifty dollars will be three hundred dollars you know whatever it is you'll decide on the motherboard that you that you want the two parts that you cannot make a mistake on when you buy past the motherboards you bought the motherboard then what you're going to need to buy is a processor for the motherboard now the processor that you're going to buy it will either be Intel or AMD and then it will be a type of processor so there's something called the socket type and the socket type is actually the shape of the processor that that goes on to the motherboard so 775 771 etc basically you have to buy a processor that will fit onto the motherboard and that is the socket type beyond that there's something called the frontside bus this is how fast the the CPU and the motherboard can can transfer information back and forth and then there are the types of processors core 2 duos Zeon's seller ons etc now so you're asking okay so I figured out what what mut motherboard what how am I going to figure out what processor well basically all you do is you go to the spec sheet the specification sheet of the motherboard that you're buying and you see what will it accept if it'll accept a Core 2 Duo at a thousand 33 megahertz frontside bus then you buy a that type of processor it's it's really that simple basically when you look at the spec sheet for the motherboard it will tell you what will fit on the motherboard and if you buy what it tells you will fit on the motherboard then you're good if you buy something else then it won't work did that simple also it will tell you what type of RAM and what capacity of RAM that it can deal with so ram has different speeds you know there's DDR one ddr2 ddr3 PC 3200 there are different types of this these ramps and so when you look at the spec sheet for a motherboard it will tell you what kind of Ram it takes so basically you go oh it takes PC 3200 I'll buy a stick of that it is literally that simple simply buy whatever it says the motherboard can handle now nowadays you know their computers are getting more and more RAM you know there's there's you can get 4 gig sticks of RAM 8 gig sticks of RAM the one thing that you should realize is most of these motherboards have a maximum amount of RAM that they will support so no matter how much RAM you put in they will only ever recognize whatever their maximum is so so most of these normal consumer motherboards only support 4 gigs of ram even if you put 8 gigs of ram in and even if it works the motherboard will only ever recognize four so so just be careful with that you know some people go I want I want 32 gigs of ram and they slide it in and the computer boots up but but the operating system will never be able to see any more than 4 gigs of ram or whatever that the maximum is so what you have to realize you know when you're when you're going to buy your parts is everything goes through the motherboard so you know you gets gotta fit on the motherboard if you need a special type of video card for your Adobe or for your video game you need to make sure that that your motherboard has the slot for that type of graphic card so you know PCI Express no longer AGP you know make sure it has the slots that you need and then you know you've got the the CPU so the the specification sheet will show you Oh what of CPUs will fit on your motherboard just buy whatever they tell you to buy and then the RAM again they'll tell you what what the motherboard can take just just buy whatever it is they tell you to buy so I mean it's really that simple I want to go and we're going to go onto the computer and we'll go out to newegg.com and I'll kind of show you how this process works but like I say it's very simple it's easy as it's me it's easy as long as you paint-by-numbers you if you start being Vincent van Gogh it all go goes weird but you know if you just if you just do what they tell you will work you'll be fine okay so so we're at the computer now so I can show you how to how to buy all of the parts for your computer so you're going to need a motherboard you're going to need a CPU you're gonna grab you're gonna need a hard drive you're gonna need an optical drive and you're going to need a case so the place that we're going to go to buy these parts is newegg.com any w EG g comm this is the best place to buy parts if you're going to build a computer really most technology parts they're incredibly fast efficient the good quality and you can't beat their prices I used to have when I had the repair shop used to have distributor relationships with you know real distributors you know people you had to sign contracts for and all that and I found they were not as fast as good or as inexpensive as nuoc so I have used Newegg for years like I say even running my shop if you bought a hard drive from me at my shop I had purchased it from nuoc because it was just that inexpensive that creep so the first place that we're going to start is with the motherboard like we talked about before so we go up to computer hardware and we look for motherboards and so we see motherboards now the first option that you're going to see is there are AMD motherboards or Intel motherboards this is not the manufacturer of the motherboard this is the type of processor that fits on the motherboard so AMD is a manufacturer of processors and Intel is a manufacturer of processors so if you plan to use an AMD processor go for AMD motherboard so if you're planning to use an Intel processor go for an Intel motherboard you know they're they're not interchangeable so what processor you're going to use depends on what you plan to use your computer for AMD processors are usually less expensive than Intel's you know they're both good I go with Intel honestly because most people know what Intel is they don't really understand what AMD is so you know the whole marketing thing it's easier to sell what people think if they understand so I do Intel so click on Intel and so now you know you're going to be present with with lots and lots and lots of motherboards there are 17 pages of motherboards so that means there they have about 400 different types of motherboards you can buy so you will have to narrow down what motherboards you're looking for by using these search features so you can search by manufacturer so I like I say I like a soos motherboards so I will select a soos CPU types frontside busses ADP slots number of memory payda SATA I like the the SATA 6 gigabits per second this is the new standard for hard drives so I'll select that and then I'll just see what it tells me so I hit search so we see these are Intel motherboards that support Intel processors they are seuss motherboards and they support the new SATA 6 gigabits per second standard for hard drives you know there's different prices here 139 dollars 154 189 you know these you know not all motherboards are made identical there are different types of motherboards with different types of things on them so so what you spend on your motherboard depends on what you're going to need since I'm showing you how to do this we'll just go with an inexpensive motherboard so we'll click on this this first masseuse with Newaygo once you click on the item it'll show you reviews so these are honest reviews from people who have purchased the item and then you can click on the specification tab right here and this tells you the technical specifications for this motherboard so things like the socket type what socket type do you need to buy your CPU what what CPU type so is an i7 and i-5 and I 3 so with this basically socket type is the size of the socket you know with the CPU actually looks like and then the CPU type you know this says that you should not buy a xeon processor for this motherboard a xeon processor would not work properly on this motherboard then it tells you down here then the slots for memory so these are the individual memory slots what tells you what memory to put in so ddr3 2200 1613 33 or 1066 so it tells you specifically what types of ram you can put in there and then the maximum supporter ram 16 gigs so this it will only ever recognize 16 gigs of ram so even if you put in 32 gigs you know just want to recognize it and then as you go down it tells you the expansion slots PCI Express 2.0 PCI Express 1 PCI slots paid a SATA these are the SATA 6 gigabits per second so you get 2 of them these peda SATA these are the connectors for your hard drives so just keep that in mind it will tell you more about that when we go to buy a hard drive later onboard video you know does it does it have a network card built into it yes it does it's a gigabit per second network card and you know etc a lot of other information and then when we go to buy a case see the physical specifications the form factor is ATX so this is a large motherboard which means we need to buy a large ATX case up for this motherboard so the first thing that we're going to do is we are going to say we like this and I hear I think there's some stuff in the cards so let me just kill all this let's remove slide so we'll go back and so we are going to say we like this motherboard and so I'm going to add this to the carb and so it is now added to the car we are then going to go back to this motherboard now what I'm going to do is I'm going to use something called a tabbed browsing if you if you know anything about modern web browsing you know you can create tabs so this tab this is a tab that we're on well now I will just keep this for the motherboard and it will open a new tab to do searches for all the other parts so what I'm going to do is I'll go to computer hardware we're going to look at CPUs next so CPU processor I can right-click and do open in a new tab so we now have a CPU tab open so we can buy CPUs will go to processors desktop so these are the the desktop processors will go to manufacturer we will say Intel just to get this down because we know we're dealing with Intel processor so now we're dealing with Intel processors you see they start at forty one dollars and while Intel processors will go up to you know two thousand dollars a piece so we go to the specification on the motherboard and we say we see we need a socket type of LGA one one five six so we go over here and we see CPU socket type LGA one one five six and we do a circuit so this shows you the Intel LGA you know one one five six archetypes and then we go and it says CPU type so we can do i sevens i 5s or i threes so you know i want the latest and greatest and the fastest so I'm going to say what I processors they have and click circuit and so now it shows me the two processors that it has that are i7 one is $279 and one is $579 I can click on that you know I see the reviews like before sees the specifications and so since the motherboard the motherboard says LGA one one five six core i7 this one will work for my computer and so you know I look through it and go okay that looks good so I add that to the carb and so now I have two items so I have now I have the motherboard and I now have the processor now the processor normally comes with its own heat sink so the heat sink is you know what what cools off the processor so it doesn't overheat some people decide to buy a better heat sinks for their processor it really depends on what you're planning to do what I would suggest is if you're new to building computers just use the heatsink that they gave you if you run into problems then buy an heatsink you know at a later time but it you know these heat sinks these additional heat sinks can cost anywhere between ten to a hundred dollars so if you don't really know what you're doing it's probably a waste of money to buy one the stock standard heatsink that comes with a processor it is usually good enough at least in the beginning so now we've got the motherboard now we've got the processor we need to go looking for RAM and so this says it supports ddr3 2200 overclocking 1613 33 or 1066 overclocking is something we'll need to talk about later that's kind of where you you you push the the the hardware faster than it's theoretically supposed to go I generally suggest that people don't try to do overclocking unless they really understand computers if you if you've built five or six computers and you're very comfortable building computers by all means deal with overclocking if you don't even know what overclocking is at this point in life do not do overclocking so it says ddr3 2200 OC I would suggest you stay away from that you should buy ddr3 1600 so that's what we will look for now so we will go over we'll go to computer hardware go to memory we'll go to desktop and memory and what we're going to do is we're going to go down to speed because that's what it is and we're going to go ddr3 and what did it say ddr3 1600 so we go to speed ddr3 1600 and so we just select that then we hit search and now once the dr3 this is all the ddr3 1600 ram that shows up now the main thing that you have to decide is what manufacturer you want to buy and then what size so this is a one gig stick Kingston one gig stick our thing supports what 16 gigs of ram so we'll go to capacity and we'll say we'll just buy the 16 gig pack so to search and so there's g.skill and there's Kingston Kingston is that a stock g.skill is another good manufacturer of RAM so when you buy this package you get a total of 16 gigs of ram but it's full when it says four by for or to buy whatever this is four sticks of four gigs ramps so you get four four gig sticks of RAM you know if this looks good to you don't don't don't don't go overboard on the price you know this is seven hundred twenty nine dollars it doesn't have to be that expensive that's for you know all the RAM you can possibly buy if you go down here to this Kingston one gig over am that's only thirty five dollars so so that you guys don't stress out let's only buy one gig of ram so so you guys are comfortable I know if you see $730 you're all of a sudden never going to build a computer you can buy it for $35 so we will click on this RAM you know will look at it will go yep that looks nice and so we'll buy that Ram and so now we go to carp we have the motherboard there the RAM and the CPU now these are the the most important parts to buy if you buy the wrong type of RAM it's your computer is not going to work if you bought the wrong type of CPU your computer's that's just not going to work you know there's no jury rigging there's no superglue there's no duct tape atheist simply will not work so these are the most important parts to buy and as I showed you this is paint-by-numbers all you do is you decide what motherboard you want and then you just see what it will accept like I say is if you buy ddr3 1600 it will work if you bought ddr3 I don't know 800 it won't work because you know it doesn't support them so now that we have the RAM the motherboard and the CPU let's go and buy a hard drive this particular motherboard supports SATA hard drives so it supports both three gigabit per second which is the the standard hard drive that's been around for about five years now were the new SATA 6 gigabits per second that just came out this year I like the six gigabit per second because it is it is faster so what we're going to do is we're going to go over go back to computer hardware we're going to go to hard drives we will go to internal hard drives and then again oh you just use plug in the information so the interface is SATA 6 gigabits per second and so we do a search and it shows us the four hard drives that are SATA 6 gigabits per second hard drives you know there's one 480 dollars all the way up to 250 dollars just look at this you know if you like the specifications great if not find another one we're going to like the specification and we're just going to hit add to cart' so now we've got we've got hard drive RAM motherboard and CPU now we need an optical drive so we're going to go and we're going to go to optical drives so BCD DUP it'll be CD DVD burner and media we will go to CD DVD burners and then basically we're just going to select something if you get a modern motherboard it will only have SATA connections SATA connections for hard drives and optical drives so you basically you have to make sure that you get a SATA SATA optical drive so you'll see there is IDE or SATA so we go for SATA and we hit search and you know it gives you all these options I like light on drives but there's Sony the whole nine yards now when you buy these optical drives you're going to see something that will say either retail or or OAM you have to be careful when you're buying these because what om means is when you buy that optical drive all you're going to get in the mail is the actual optical drive you see this drive right here you're going to get that and it's going to be taped and bubble wrap and that's all you get you don't get any of the CD burning software you don't get the DVD playing software so if you plug this into your computer you will technically have a DVD burner but you won't be able to burn two DVDs because you won't have the right software so always make sure especially when you're new that you buy the retail version because the retail version actually comes in a box like you would buy at Best Buy and has the all the software and everything else that you would need so it's just we'll just go down say it I see these are OE and all these really cheap ones or OEMs and then we get down - oops sorry om OM okay so this one right here is not an om so we look at it you know SATA connection etc you know you look you can have pictures so you know you see that you actually get a box and you actually get the software that's very important with the DVD put the optical drives and then you click Add to Cart so now that we've done that let's look so we've got the hard drive the optical drive now we need a case so we're going to go over we're going to go back to this motherboard and we we need to look for what is called the form a factor that's what says here is ATX so ATX what this means is this is the actual size the the physical dimensions of this board so obviously you cannot put a motherboard into a case if it is bigger than the case so you have to make sure that the motherboard will fit into the case so you have ATX mini ATX and micro ATX smaller motherboards will fit into bigger cases bigger motherboards can't fit into smaller cases so since this is an ATX motherboard this is the largest type of motherboard and therefore you need the largest type of case all we do is again we go back to parts we go down to computer cases we computer cases again and then what we're going to do is see type this is where you you say what type you want so there's ATX desktop ATX full tower these are the two types that we'd be looking at a mid tower or a mini tower would be two small micro ATX would be too small and this thing called mini ITX would be small the remember the the size of the motherboard has to correspond to the size of the case so we will go for ATX full Tower and click search and then I mean you've just got an insane number of different manufacturers of these cases you know it all depends on what you want do you want clear sides you want neon lights do you want a thousand fans it's whatever you decide I like a company called cooler master so I'll see what cooler master has they have a different a lot of different types of cases again they go from cooler masters low expensive but you know they go for anywhere from 25 to you know five hundred dollars you can spend on the case let's say I like this this Coolermaster case here you know it's kind of stylish it's you know got the black stuff got handles all you do is you just Add to Cart so we've got the the case we got everything other than the power supply so we're going to go and we're going to take a look the the power and so physical specs and I'll stay power pin so it's a normal 24 pin the one thing with a power supply that you probably want to do is one of the tabs on Newegg is you can go to manufacturer and film and then you can go to the manufacturer product page so this is the actual product page of manufacturer sometimes these motherboards require very powerful power supplies like I say the the computer that I use or the motherboard that I use required a 600 watt power supply so sometimes you have to go to the specification page of the manufacturer to make sure you can buy the right power supply it's a USB features overclock okay it doesn't seem to say it needs any special one so we will just go and we will buy our power supply so click and we hit power supplies and then here you know again you just have a crapload of power supplies the big thing is is how much wattage so this is the actual power of the power supply that you're going to be using this is you know how much um it can put out if you're new to building computers I would actually say by high if you if you know what you're doing building computers them then by a low as low as possible most of my computers run off of 300 to 80 watt power supplies but again like I say that this big goober computer that I just built required a 600 watt power supply for you guys yeah why not just do a 600 watt power supply you know because that way if you're over powered your computer will still work fine if you're underpowered yeah it's it's not it's not going to work at all so I'm not turned on now you're going to see uh once you do this that there are a lot of different manufacturers of power supplies as I will tell you you do not want to buy cheap power supplies to be power supplies can do just massive amounts of damage to your entire system I would suggest you go with this company called an Tek a in Tec these make very very very very very good power supplies high quality power supplies when you buy power supply by a good high quality power supply click on it it'll give you again you know the normal overview specifications etc and so if it has everything you like you simply click Add to Cart and that's it so with this basic computer that we just bought all the parts for so we have the motherboard motherboard is the most important part then we bought the CPU and the heatsink then we bought the RAM then we bought the hard drive then we bought the optical drive then we brought the case and then we bought the power supply so all of these components so it should work very well and then you see the total price for this one is eight hundred and fourteen dollars now the one thing to remember with this is don't forget about your operating system you know once you build the computer oh you know once you have it needs an operating system to work so if you already have you know either a hacked operating system where you have a real operating system CD that will work fun you know if you use Linux that will work fine if you don't have those make sure you just go and buy an operating system while you're here you just go to software and you go to operating systems once you go here you can see you know they've got home premium home premium $64 Windows XP if you wanted to bother with that so let's say just say we want a home premium 64-bit OEM we just add that to the car so now we have absolutely everything that we need and you know we will just go through the checkout process now when you're when you're brand-new to building the computers though the one little piece of advice that I would give you is always give yourself a cushion for the price of buying all these parts it's really easy to buy the wrong part by accident you know you click the wrong thing and for most of these parts it's too expensive to ship them back because remember if you return a part they're not going to refund you the shipping that a cost to ship it to you and you're going to have to pay for shipping it back to them so you're going to end up spending they'll retain between ten to thirty dollars to return apart so it's usually not worth it so just give yourself a cushion of an extra hundred or two hundred dollars when you're first building computers because the chances are that you are going to buy a wrong part and that you're just going to probably have to eat the cost of the wrong part you know kind of kind of sucks but you know that's the way it is but but really I mean that's that's that's all there is to to specking out and buying the part through your computer if I actually wanted to build it by this computer I would just click buy and I would buy all these parts and build it in the two days when it came to me so now that you've seen how to how to go about buying parts for your computer let's go back out to the the real world and I will show you how to put all these parts together so the first thing that we need to do is we need to put the CPU this is the the CPU the central processing unit we need to put the CPU on to the motherboard and this is best done before you do anything else so a lot of people decide to put the motherboard in the case first and then then put in the CPU but it's it's really easier to do this when the motherboard is outside of the case especially basically for plugging in the heatsink now you will notice I'm just kind of like touching all this stuff willy-nilly and you've probably heard of something called ESD or electric static discharge this is static electricity that goes in and fries computer components and yes I will tell you as a professional that is something you should definitely definitely definitely be worried about but I'm not worried about it too much it's one of those things it is real um theoretically you should be worried about electrostatic discharge but I'm not I've been doing this stuff for 12 years and I don't think I've ever killed a component but it's something to think about so what we're doing so we have the motherboard we have the CPU we have what is called the heat sink this goes on top of the CPU and it dissipates heat if the CPU gets too hot it will shut down automatically the reason is is because if the CPU gets too hot it little literally can melt itself so I mean it gets hot it gets really gets hot enough to boil the water so you need to put a a what's called a heat sink on top of the CPU so that it cools down and then finally to connect the CPU to the heat sink you use something called a thermal paste which is normally a brand called Arctic silver basically this is a weird it's like a glue or a paste with metal fragments in it and it connects the the CPU to the heatsink in such a way that the heat transfer is better if you don't have any thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsink the CPU can still overheat so so this is like this and the the Phillips head screwdriver the only tools you need to put together pewter you know one of these little little syringes for probably 20 or 30 computers will cost you seven bucks on new ENCOM so this stuff is not not that expensive but you do need it so what do we do we grab the motherboard as so and then on the motherboard you have a little door mechanism so you kind of just pull this down and then you open up the door and that allows you to put the processor onto the board now with this remember these are very delicate parts so you have to make sure that you put the processor into the motherboard the right way it's kind of stupid how they did it these processors are squares so it seems like you could you could put it onto the motherboard any way you want well they have little little guides you can use I don't can you see those little circles or half circles right there those little guides show you how to put it onto the motherboard so you line those little half circles up with a little half circles on the motherboard and you put in the processor make sure you put in the processor the right way if you don't and you crank down on this door you will destroy the processor and you will destroy the motherboard but once you put it in properly all you do is you close the door and then you close the latch and that's it now the processor is on the motherboard literally that simple so now that you've done that you need to put a little Arctic paste compound I don't know all the little fifteen-year-old experts out there have all kinds of things about how much you should put on I just put a little dollop on it so you just put a little a little dab will do you I don't know if it's too much worth too little but I don't have overheating problems on my computer so I'm not too worried about it so I put about that much on there and then once you do that you grab your heatsink and you put that onto the board now this putting the heatsink onto the board is what I call a thumb buster because it really kind of hurts your thumbs to do I don't know why they've done this it seems like there should be an easier way to put a heatsink on a board but the way that the manufacturers have made it really kind of hurts your thumbs and put it on there if you're like from my generation think of it like Nintendo thumb I just hurts so you you you line up the the heatsink so it goes on and then you see these little buttons here you push that through so it connects to the motherboard so you click click click and then finally click so all four so you do it in a diagonal you do one here and then you do the one here you do one here then you do a one here that's how you secure it down the next and final thing that you do so you don't lose your mind is the fan on the heatsink has to be connected to the motherboard this is little electrical connection all you do is you look on the motherboard and there will be one little connector and it will say CPU fan so you just connect this to the CPU fan connector and then it's all good to go this is something like even I forget about sometimes and seriously if this fan is not working the computer will not do a lot of stuff it may not even boot up because it doesn't want to fry the CPU so if you forget to plug this in you may have a non-functional computer for something as simple as this and then you're spending two hours trying to figure out what's wrong with your computer so that's what you do to connect the motherboard since the motherboards out and it's easy to do anyway I'm going to put the RAM in so the RAM sticks as you should know by now just look like this no big deal so in order to put a stick of RAM into your computer you just line it up notice see how that little there's a middle divider but the middle divider isn't really in the middle this allows you to line up this Ram stick properly into the slot so you just wind it up properly and then push down really hard and so when you push it down these little little ears here need to click in and make sure it's secure so this should be secure on everything has to be secure on this motherboard and so now this is a motherboard with the processor with the heatsink and with the RAM on it which is which is really just a huge part of this job now once I put this into the computer it's going to be a little hard to see some of these parts so I want to show you something right now so that you see it and realize that it exists these little plugs up here these are for where the power plug and the reset button and little hard drive led get plugged in when you put this into into the case so you'll have on whatever motherboard you have you have these little line of pins and then you put you connect these little connectors for like I say the power switch the reset button the hard drive button etc so that's where those now before I put the motherboard into the case one thing you'll notice is that this case you know this scene is more open than normal so this is about where the motherboard will go and seen that that seems very open well the reason that is open is because all motherboards so all motherboards use different something called a backplate so this backplate goes into the case right here like this so for some reason and this can be really confusing to new people these cases almost always come with a generic backplate a backplate that looks something like this but is not quite like this and their feel therefore will not work properly so when you buy your motherboard you will get a backplate that looks like this if your desktop computer or your case has a backplate already in it you need to push it out you need to punch it out and then put the new backplate in there because like I said they give you a generic backplate with the case I don't know why because it's never fit any motherboard that I've ever put into a case this one that was funny thanks so realistically if you won't put the backplate in when I say you got this you got like a little frame around this all you do is you take this you slot it into the back from the inside and then you just push it now I'm showing you this was very easy because I'm using used parts but sometimes you might you might have to kind of push it in there with a with a screwdriver sometimes it can be very difficult that was very easy but it can be really just a pain in the butt to push it again Nintendo thumb now the next thing this case is nice enough to have something called risers already built in what risers are are do you see these little these little metal things right here these are little posts that you screw the motherboard into so sometimes these risers are already on the case when you buy it other times for some reason they're there extra little parts that you have to screw into the case you need to screw them in because it gives it gives a lift for the motherboard about this high if you try to screw the motherboard straight on to the case it's just going to be bad it doesn't fit properly and when I say a lot of people overlook this because they don't realize it so never screw the motherboard directly to the case there are always going to be risers either built-in or like I say they they just give you a packet of them and you screw them onto the motherboard and then you screw the motherboard onto those risers so the risers get screwed into the case the motherboard gets screwed into risers make sure you do that so now that we've done that let's bring you over and we'll start building this computer so now we've got the case and we we have the motherboard now what we need to do is we need to slot this motherboard with the processor and everything into the case so all you do is you know these are these are the the stuff on the back panel you just line this up with the backplate as I talked about before and you just kind of slot that in again you know this is a D I'm using used parts so this is a little easier than it may be for you but but that's really all you do and then grab your screws and you just screw the motherboard down to those risers that I talked about so there's a little screw here screw over here and there's a screw up here so that's that that's really you know all there is to describe other-- board onto the case so now the motherboard is part of the case so oh you know once we do that now we need to put in the optical drive so let me go get the optical drive so when I talk about the optical drive of time out the CD drive the DVD drive the the blu-ray drive etc now in this a case it's very nice because you can just slide the drive in so you just take this alright have the whole open and you just slide it in and then you lock it into place you don't need any screws for this one and now the drive is the least on the case itself and then the next part is putting the hard drive in so now this hard drive here as you should know it is a SATA hard drive and it has these little rails that connect to the side of it so these rails you just clip on to it and then you can slide this into the hard drive carrier so now we just slot it in there and now the hard drive is in the case so we've got the motherboard CPU RAM hard drive optical drive etcetera in the case and then the final thing or right at this moment will be the power supply so so the power supply that you're putting it all you do with the power supply is you line it up properly it just goes in and then there are four screws on the back of it you just screw them in from the back for some reason power supplies almost always get screwed in from the back I've never seen a power supply get screwed in from the side or the bottom they're always four little screws on the back that's I'm just out is okay so now we've got the power supply in you know since I'm doing this anyway I'll just throw in my fancy graphics card all at the same time again very simple to do so I've got a it's called a a PCI Express graphics card and all you do to slot in the graphics card is you see this see this slot right here this is the PCI graphics slot you just take it and you push it down into that little slot and then with all of these cards you have to make sure is you're always able to put one screw in just to secure it so you slide it into the slot and then you you secure it with one screw and voila so right now all of the hardware that needs to be in this computer is in this computer again so we have the the motherboard we have the CPU we have the heatsink we have the RAM we now have a graphics card we have the power supply we have the optical drive and we have the hard drive see how simple that is that's really simple to do now what we need to do is just actually start connecting all of this stuff together with in this case now the first thing that we need to do when we're connecting all this stuff together is connect all the stuff from the front of the case what I mean by this is this means the power the reset button the hard drive button etc now in order to do that again on the motherboard I showed you the pins before a lot of times these pins are marked and you can read them straight on the motherboard other times you actually need the the manual for the motherboard and the manual will tell you it all really depends but basically so we have a reset switch here so I just go down and look and I say where is the reset switch and it shows me or the reset switch and then uh we have the power switch and so I look down here and it tells me where the power switch is and I plug on power switch and then you know they've got other stuff I don't know if I care about the power LEDs and then you plug in the power LEDs and and that's all you do so these are the power buttons the reset switch and all that that now plugs into the motherboard now on top of that you have the front USB connections and the front audio connections all you really have to do is if you notice this is a very distinctive type of plug so you just basically look for a plug that looks like this on the motherboard and so if I look down there's the audio plug and all I do is I connect that right and then you push it in Wow and that's done now these are the the front USB connectors and so I look for the front USB plug and I plug that in which is right and now that's a that's all it is for plugging uh the motherboard onto the case now what we need to do is we need to start plugging the power supply into the places the power supply needs to go so the first thing is is this this manage am a honking power connector so this power connector you need to look on the motherboard and see where it goes so this big guy has a big port right there and you just plug this into it and that plugs into it and then you have another connector that goes to the motherboard this is the plus 12 it's called plus 12 volt and this goes over there's a little plug over by the CPU and this gets plugged into it and now the power supply is connected to the motherboard now all you need to do is you need to connect the power supply to the optical drive into the hard drive now these are both SATA SATA a hard drive an optical drive so you use a SATA power connector and so you take that and connect that take the other one and you can and voila that's a now the power supply is all connected there's no more connections for the power supply the last thing is to actually connect the optical drive and the hard drive to the motherboard so that's where you need these SATA cables either SATA hard drive cables so one side goes up and connects to the optical drive and then you look on the motherboard and there's SATA connectors oops if you can see them right down there and you just connect it in it doesn't really matter which SATA connector you connect these into so you can connect the hard drive into whatever you want the optical drive into whatever you want doesn't really matter and then the that goes into the hard drive and that goes on to the motherboard so literally we have and however long this took about 20 minutes we have put all the hardware together for this computer now if you're if you're using other types of specialized hardware you know there may be some extra stuff you have to do some video cards require their own a power connection you know if you're using scuzzy or SAS hard drives that they have their own configuration but those those are incredibly specialized things that you're probably not going to run into for a while but this is how you build a basic modern computer so you know you have the power supply optical the whole nine yards enough that's really it I mean all you do from here is you slap the side on this desktop computer and it's ready to get an operating system put into it so uh oh let me help me straighten up a little bit and I'll talk to you about the the major problems that most people run into when they start building their computer so this that's it this entire computer has been put together if I've done everything properly uh you know I just put a power cord in the back of this plug in a monitor keyboard mouse and I'm ready to install an operating system really that's all there is to it now that there are common mistakes that cause problems and these are things that you should know about so if you if you plug the computer in and it will not turn on there there are a few reasons for that now the first reason is if you look at the back of the computer if you look at the power supply there are two potential problems right here one is most power supplies actually have a power switch on the power supply itself so if this power switch is turned off no amount of turn pressing the button in the front will make this thing turn on because the power supply itself is turned off the other thing is all of these computers are built to either accept 115 volts or 220 volts so either us a voltage or European voltage sometimes that little switch in the back gets knocked one way or the other so if you look on the back of that power supply and it says 220 on a little red switch shove the switch over so that it says 115 that's what the u.s. uses if it says 222 work properly you get this problem also a lot we had a problem with cheap power supplies where that little switch would just kind of knock back and forth with the wind like literally somebody tapped it with their foot it would switch over to 220 and the just the computer was shut off it wouldn't work right so so that is a problem you can run into the power supply the other major problem that people deal with is these little little cords I was showing you you know the connectors that go from the motherboard to the power and the reset button on the front you know those things can be really finicky and it's there's just little pins in there you have to make sure that you get those pins correct even me doing this for 12 years throwing the computer together a lot of times I'll mess up and I won't put the power switch on to the right pins so make sure that those pins are proper now if you did the computer still will not boot-up the next thing that you should do is it's called reseating everything.what reseeding means is you pull out the RAM and then you stick it back in to make sure that the connection is done properly you pull off the CPU and the heatsink and then you put it back on to make sure the connection is proper you pull out the connectors for the hard drive plug them back in and make sure that the connection is proper for some reason this fixes and atrocious amount of problems I don't know why but but simply just just pulling things out and plugging them back and a lot of times a fixes the issue now if you're still having problems you may hear a beep being in the background be very quiet and you might hear like beep beep beep beep beep beep eep-eep eep-eep sometime moore's code almost that is something called a bios error beeps so the BIOS on the computer is the lowest level operating system well it tries to detect everything so it tries to detect the hard drives it tries to detect the the keyboard and mouse it tries to detect the CPU it tries to detect the RAM if it doesn't detect those things a lot of times it will give a beep for an error code and if you have the manual for your motherboard you can go oh three beeps in a row means the RAM is bad and sometimes that will show you what the problem is but um but yeah that's really all there is to a to building a computer so let me get a couple things cleaned up and then we'll have some final thoughts on this so that's really all there is to building a computer you know what in 15 minutes to half an hour you can throw all these parts together and have a system that is ready for you to install the operating system now if we press the power button your hair everything we're up and you know everything is working now so that is literally how easy it is to build a computer and now remember when I'm talking about building a computer some people may be thinking well that's a desktop computer what about a server what about a media center computer what about a digital surveillance computer what about a telephone system computer it's all basically ah the same stuff depending on what the the computer you're building is going to be used for you may have a few specialized components like if you build a telephone system computer you will need a card to go to that computer that actually accepts telephone lines if you build a digital surveillance system computer you will need a card that goes into the computer that accepts video cameras but it's still a motherboard a processor a heat sink Ram hard drive etc you know there are specialized parts out there and if you're building a computer that needs one of those specialized parts just do a little bit of research you know 5 10 30 minutes worth of research and you'll understand how to install I mean it's it's really that easy so you know this computer here you could put Windows XP Windows 7 Windows 2008 Enterprise Server Edition Linux basically anything other than Mac OS you know could be installed on this computer this stuff is really really really that easy now I talked about in the beginning buying parts the main thing with making sure that your computer build will be successful is make sure you buy the right parts I showed you how to go on a new a comm look at the spec sheet from the motherboard and then basically like I say just paint-by-numbers if it says it accepts ddr2 RAM by ddr2 RAM if you buy ddr3 it's not going to work it's that simple yes just by what that motherboard will accept if you do that it's it's easy-peasy again buy good quality parts you know I have to bang this into so many people's heads it's not worth saving a few dollars up buying cheap components uh the first thing is is most of these components when it when they come to you if they're cheap by no-name manufacturers they have a huge number of defects I mean literally I've seen up to 50 percent defects where you know I had to build a computer lab I bought ten motherboards and five came Batam dead-on-arrival this kind of crap happens so it's just it's not worth the time and energy to buy these few components you just it's not not only that but remember that when you put these parts together they become part of an electrical system so if there is any problem with one component in that system you risk the chance of damaging other components in the system again power supplies are a big culprit but I've seen it with things like motherboards the power supply sends a surge of because it's died you know power supply dies oops oh well well but the power supply when it died sent out surge of electricity fries a motherboard fries a video card maybe even fries a harddrive simply by putting an inexpensive you know keep no-name power supply into your computer you could literally fry every single component in that computer and is that worth 20 30 40 bucks that you're saving buying some cheap power supply I don't think so and then the one part that I don't talk about making sure you buy a quality part of but you should is is the case um a lot of people again if there's one thing that they think they can skimp on the go you know what I'm not gonna spend money on I'm not gonna spend money on a case I don't care what my computer looks like I just need the metal frame to put all these parts and it's fine not to care what your computer looks like but just like the the motherboard and the RAM and all that the manufacturers the cheap manufacturers of cases really really make some crap and you know I showed you how easy I love these cases these cases relate my Coolermaster and they're very easy to shove all these parts into some of those 20 and $25 cases are a nightmare parts aren't square when they're when they're fitted together so like when you go to put the optical drive in the DVD drive you have to like shove it in there you have to bend parts of the metal just to get it to work right being able to open up the case can be a pain in the butt you know just parts don't-don't-don't fit and so when you go to build the computer it's just it's just a pain because you're literally you're going in there with a pair of pliers and having to bend metal sometimes just to get the motherboard to fit right so again I would say it's not worth it you know spend 50 bucks and get a decent case and and you'll be good now you know as with all these classes you know talk just not about the the technical part about building computers but I want you to have a greater aspect or greater thoughts about about the IT industry and one thing with with building computers is I really want you to think about is look at this you know this took me 15 30 minutes you know the bad data should take 30 minutes you know if I'm hungover and have the flu it would take 30 notes to build this thing throwing an operating system on there and depending on what process I was using would take anywhere between an hour to maybe two hours right so two and a half hours from this going from parts to a fully functioning computer I want you to realize that three years ago that would have been two to four hundred dollars in profits so I would have made anywhere between two to four hundred dollars simply by putting us together putting the operating system on it and that's before I dropped it off it's before I installed it just just building it was was through to four hundred dollars five or six years ago it was five or six hundred dollars profit ten years ago it was almost a thousand dollars profit simply to put a computer together and it has gotten no easier in ten years put a computer together this what I showed you is basically how you've been putting computers together since something called 386 days I mean this it's always been that simple the thing is people were willing to pay a lot because they were they were scared of the technology they thought it was more complicated than it was you know for whatever reason they were willing to pay people basically a thousand dollars they didn't realize they're paying a thousand dollars but they were willing to pay a thousand dollars simply to have a computer look together now you know I don't want to cry cry and my beer or anything about the old days but what I want you to think about that is think about the new technologies uh that people are willing to pay for think about that so this computer here yeah two and a half hours at one time would have been $1,000 profit I had at 19 of your 19 year old friend of mine making $100,000 a year when I was in high school by building computers doing simply what I did there is technology like that right now like I say whether it's a with his building websites people will spend two to three thousand dollars on website you can build in four or five hours web marking all these other technologies what I want you to think about is now that you understand how to build a computer so you build your own computer yeah but look for technologies like this that you can provide to to your customers your clients or your boss that are available today the social networking websites if there's a bunch of stuff out there with the same type of profit margins I really think about that I'm not joking for for what I showed you what I showed you I used to pull $400 profit and that was before I charged the people to install the computer into their system so simply building a computer like this and setting it up we used to be six or seven hundred dollars in profit and that that type of profit margin is still available if you're if you're willing to go out there and then and look for the products that people are willing to buy yeah I say just the the bigger picture on this and something to think about again as a computer geek as a technologist if you want to build your computers you should still build your computer stuff it's best to build your computers if you need something highly specialized or if you're like me you're gonna be swapping out parts all the time anyway but don't feel like nowadays you have to build your own computer or that you're going to save a lot of money building your own computer as I said I can go to Best Buy right the second and buy a laptop computer a laptop and out of that book a laptop for 130 bucks or 330 dollars I can buy a desktop computer for between 200 and 300 dollars when you go out to build your own computer you're going to see that the operating system itself by Apple Windows operating system is going to be at least $100 so there's no longer than markup in building computers there's no longer you don't save a whole lot of money by building your own computer and you may not be able to build it first cheap as they can sell it so so just to keep that in mind it like if you feel like the only way to save money is to build your own computers that's not so anymore just just go out and buy a Dell or HP or what if they got a Best Buy if you want to build your own computer it's because you either need something that's really customized or again you know something really high-end if you're going to spend 1500 to 2000 dollars simply on a desktop computer itself then it might be best to build your own computer but uh well I hope you learned a lot you know I know this is the this is one of the popular topics everybody wants to know how to build computers so I hope you now understand how to build it it is that simple don't overthink it don't you know they don't need a soldering irons no anything that you need a Phillips head screwdriver and you need arctic silver thermal compound that's all you need to build a computer as you know I'm Eli the computer guy and I look forward to seeing you at the next class

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 249,017

Rating: 4.8589563 out of 5

Keywords: how, to, build, computer

Id: cF6LiVOFOz0

Length: 81min 8sec (4868 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 16 2011