For the CD-ROM, the diagram indicates that 2 is Slave setting. What does this mean? Well, looking at the back of the device, we have 3 pairs of pins. So, to make it a slave device, I place a jumper over the central (second) p

That’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed this little visual build-log. If you’d like to try the same thing yourself, keep an eye on FreeCycle , or head down to the city dump and find old some old PCs to play with. Just tearing them apart fully, mixing a few components, and trying to make them work again is a fantastic learning experience. Comments are welcome, but I might not be able to answer any specific hardware related questions for your particular bu

Similarly, you may get away with reusing old storage devices (such as a hard disk drive used as a data store rather than for installing games or applications), power supplies (as long as they’re suitable for new motherboards, drives and graphics cards), card readers or case-mounted USB h

Originally, I wanted to just get a 4-core processor, but it was pretty much at the same price as this 6-core model, so I just opted for more cores because I didn’t really have to pay more anyway. I didn’t get a more powerful CPU cooling solution because it would have made me go over my budget, plus I don’t plan on overclocking the CPU. If you plan on overclocking, I’d definitely recommend a bigger fan or a water-cooling solut

The benefits of SSDs are not in question. But how do you install one? Actually, installing a hard drive is one of the easiest upgrades possible. Anyone with two hands and a screwdriver can do it. Here’s

On each channel, there is a master and a slave device. The master device is connected in the middle of the cable, and the slave at the end of the cable. Each device must also be set with a hardware switch (a jumper) as to whether it is supposed to be the master or the slave. This is where almost all headaches and problems came

Western Digital Green 500 GB 3.5-inch SATA III 64 MB hard drive : I wanted to find a cheap hard drive that would still offer a decent amount of storage. I absolutely love Western Digital hard drives (and absolutely despise Seagate hard drives), so I went with a Green 500 GB. Since loading times are going to be reduced anyways, might as well save some power while we’re at

However, as some readers pointed out, the process of adding an IDE drive is significantly more difficult than a SATA drive, so in the interests of completeness and for those of you with old PCs, here is a complete tutorial for how to add a second IDE dr

You can also define how your users can stream music over the network to their own computers or devices. Choices include launching the user’s own music players, or utilizing the embedded Jukebox player that is integrated with Subso

power supply For gaming|https://pcbuildinsight.com/ for system components will come from either a regular molex 4 pin, or SATA style plug for SATA devices. Case fans will often come with daisy chain connectors for regular molex power plugs, like t

You can reduce the cost of your upgrade by discarding with unused or unnecessary features. For instance, you more than likely don’t need a floppy disk drive anymore and probably discarded it years ago. More to the point, however, do you need an optical drive? If you’re building a gaming machine and purchasing purely online, the answer is probably no (and if you do need an optical drive, a USB device might be more suitable if it is purely a device used occasionally that can be picked up after you have upgrad

Cabling, too, can be reused, although take care not to rely on cabling that is old or damaged. Plug connectors and kinks in the cable can result in data transfer/power issues. Indeed, it might be worth refreshing PC’s internal cabling as part of the upgrade. Sound cards and monitors should also be considered for reuse if it means that you can funnel funds towards more important upgra

Some cases have USB ports on the front, which need to be connected to the motherboard to be functional, the pins for which are situated next to the switch pins we just connected. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have a bundle of 8 cables which must connected one by one to the matching jum

However if you’re looking for sales, don’t expect to get exactly what you’re looking for (unless you happen to be extremely lucky). Rather, play a long game. Stay patient, purchase when the item you’re watching is at the right price and don’t rush into your upgr

A few months back I showed you how to install a second SATA drive , appropriate if your computer was bought sometime in the last 5 years or so. We also taught you all about partitions and formatting drives, and to completely replace your old drive with a new one – but I skipped over the subject of physically installing IDE hard drives as I considered them to be too old to warrant a tutor

This isn’t a how-to article though – I couldn’t possibly write about how to build a PC from scratch in one article. Instead, I will give tips and describe the process in a whirlwind manner, but you should maybe think of it more as motivation for you to try the same. The whole process took about 2 ho