Phorce Unboxing!

Finally, my Kickstarter funding comes to me!

 

My First Time Building PC

Here is the build: http://pcpartpicker.com/b/sKhqqs

Building PC looks like Lego + Gundam, but from my experience, I want to share some advice.

I like smaller cases. Everyone told me it will give you trouble fixing the parts, and boy I must agree. But I can take that. What made me stressful was following the chassis instructions. PSU first, then motherboard, then ODD and HDD, then expansion cards (in my case, chassis fans were already installed). What is not put in there is plugging cable. And yes, that is a nightmare. One advice is that you don't need to put PSU first; you can put motherboard first, plug some cables then put PSU in. In such a small case, the PSU is on the way of the cable pins (lucky I have small fingers, so some left out cables could easily be sorted out). I had to take out the PSU after plugging in all the power cables because I have not plug in the front panel cables.

Another tips I can tell you is the CPU cooler from the CPU box already has a thermal paste applied on the cooler. If you have been seeing PC building videos, you might be thinking, "Shucks, I didn't buy any thermal paste." The answer is no need. I had to watch some youtube videos until some guy mentioned it.

One trouble I met in building my PC was the graphic card. When I finished building the PC, the parts are powered, but it was not booting. From online search, I took the suggestion to put only one RAM and to take out all expansion cards and yes it went to BIOS! Then I put in the other RAM, followed by installing Windows. Then I put in my wireless card. Everything still good. Then I put in my graphic card. Blank. BLANK. Oh my God. I spent the nights until 4 am only to know my graphic card caused the problem. So I went online, and some tips are to disable Intel graphics (for fear of graphic module crash) and to force enable PCI-E slot for graphics. Of course, not wanting to waste Intel graphics, I force enable PCI-E and... Wow, there is an option to enable both graphics there? Let's try! So I went to boot the PC again and BAM. Still blank. Wondering what is wrong, I try to plug in the HDMI to the motherboard instead of the graphic card and the screen is blue with mouse cursor! I tried moving the mouse cursor and it went missing to the side! That means that the system thinks that I have two monitors; one from graphic card and one from motherboard. This means my graphic card is working! So there you go, I uninstalled the graphic card, went into safe mode, disable Intel graphics, reinstalled the graphic card and finally, it works. That. Was. Painful. But worth it :)

Another confusion I met was IO shield. I didn't know why there are so many protruding pins on the IO shield, and Google search did not come up with anything obvious. Those pins are for grounding (prevent electric shock) the electric charge from the IO panel on the motherboard. They should touch the IO panel on the motherboard, but yes, you have to bend it! Otherwise you can't fit the motherboard with the IO shield on the case. It took me several attempts until I can fit my motherboard into the IO shield.

Oh, one more advice. Please have a screwdriver ready. I thought one of the parts would provide screwdriver, which apparently is not. In the end I used a cheap multi-tool with screwdriver that I owned to build the whole PC (ckck).