Ready to Rumble

SO here is the system, up and running.  I don't know what errors it's kicking up, because I don't have a screen, mouse or keyboard with me right now.  It passes POST with no errors, which is a good start.

There should be several things you notice immediately.

The comedy wiring system I've implemented would be my first port of call.

To explain the comedy wiring, first you need to follow me through the installation process.

I put the CPU and heatsink on with nerves and jitters.  The upshot was that I didn't do it properly.  For those using the stock cooler on an i7 2600K, you have to be quite brutal when pushing the corner pins into position.  Of course, brutal in my language might be something else in yours, so please don't sue me when you break it.  On my first attempt I didn't push them down hard enough, and the cooler came off in my hand.  Luckily, I suspected the cooler wasn't on properly, and gave it a test before turning the system upright.  (Disaster averted, phew.)

The second near-calamity came when I was placing the monstrous graphics card into the system.  Having mounted the board and screwed it into position with CPU and cooler attached, I gingerly placed the monster into the case.  It just about fit, but wouldn't sit low enough into the case for it to seat in the PCI slot. I took out the motherboard, added the spacers (onto another group of spacers, thinking it required extra height) and found the whole board raised too high.

After pondering the reason for these difficulties, I realised that the board is a double-width card, which means I had to take the placeholders out of the slot adjacent to the card.  (See above for the placeholders, there are three in this picture.)

Having installed the PSU earlier, I decided to place all the components before wiring everything up.  The time came to do just that, and the modular AX 750 (from Corsair, a brand I associate with memory products) proved to be both detrimental and helpful in this regard.

I hooked up the motherboard, graphics card and HDD without incident.  I turned it on, and nothing happened.

It turns out that the 12 pin (is it 12?  I didn't check) motherboard connector has 2 corresponding connectors on the PSU side.  Both of these have to be plugged in for it to power up, it appears.  This makes sense, as the two connectors are eight pins and four pins respectively, (or eight pins and six, I forget) which matches the total number going into the motherboard.  Without knowing anything about electronicals, I would imagine that it makes sense for a dozen pins to connect directly to another dozen, especially considering there is no magic box between the two ends, just a straight wire.

This does leave me with something of a dilemna however.  The graphics card utlises both an eight and six pin connector, and I've read that you should use separate lines to deliver both of these.  The problem is, there aren't enough connectors to deliver two lines to the graphics card, so it's essentially being fed two separate sources of power by the same line.  Not good.  I wonder whether this will have any impact on stability when I'm benchmarking it.  Furmark anyone?

So we come to why it's a multicar-pileup-on-spaghetti-junction kind of wiring affair.  Well, I had to disconnect and reconnect everything so many time that it just ended up like this.  I will (probably) put all the wires into the unused drive bays at some point.

All that remains is to boot it with peripherals and see if it runs.  If it does, I'll be relieved more than anything.