How to Build Your Own Dell Computer
If you love Dell computers and you want one of your own but you don't actually want Dell to build it for you, you can actually make one yourself. You can customize it to make it out of as many or as few genuine Dell parts as you want. You just need to know where to get the parts and what you want to build.
- Difficulty:
- Moderate
Instructions
Things You'll Need
- Motherboard RAM CPU CPU fan Video card Sound card Network card Hard drive Optical drive Power supply Computer casing Mouse Keyboard Computer monitor Operating system software
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Finding the Parts
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Figure out just what you want. Knowing what you want to do with a computer and what parts you need or want is the most important thing to know before starting. If you want to do video editing, then you want a lot of hard drive space, a big monitor or two and a good video card along with some other specific needs.
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Go to Dell's regular website and pick out a computer that looks close to what you want and customize it to make it as close to what you want as possible (see Resources below). Going through this process will give you a price before you have to commit to buy it. Knowing this price is good because it may be cheaper to just buy the customized Dell and then make any extra changes you need once you receive it than to build the whole thing yourself.
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Get a Dell case and monitor. For the most part, what makes a Dell computer a Dell is the system case and the monitor. You can get the case by going to the Dell accessories website (see Resources below) and clicking on "Computer Components" on the left-hand side, and then clicking on "Shop All" under system cases in the middle part of the site. Choose a case from here and buy it. Buy the monitor by going back to the main menu and clicking on "Shop All" under the "Monitors and Accessories" box about halfway down the site on the right side.
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Purchase the remaining parts you need to build a computer. You can either buy your parts at a local computer store or an online retailer like Newegg, or from the Dell accessories website. PCMech has a good instruction on how to build a computer if you need to learn more about building a PC (see Resources below).
Building the computer
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Assemble the main pieces of the computer. Put the motherboard into the case followed by the CPU and any fans. The case usually comes with pins that hand screw into the bottom of the case, but they have an opening in the top for the motherboard to be screwed into. Once these pins are in place, put the motherboard on top of these pins and screw the provided screws through the motherboard holes and into the pins. Make sure you install the pins so they line up below the motherboard holes. The CPU will fit into a matching square on the motherboard that has holes to match the CPU pins. The CPU fan has matching connections outside the CPU area where you will attach the CPU fan directly onto the motherboard and on top of the CPU.
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Put in the drives. Put all of your optical drives and hard drives in next. Screw the drives into the drive bays with the screws that came with the case. Connect the power plugs as well as the drive cables into the back of the drives. Be sure to set the drives to the correct master or slave setting depending on which drive will be the master. The only important drive to be the master is the main drive with the operating system. Otherwise either drive can be master or slave if sharing an IDE cable.
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Insert the cards. Put all of the cards in the card slots, such as the video, sound and network cards. These cards usually just snap right it, but be careful not to force them. Now screw the cards into the case to make sure they don't come loose. The cards have little openings that match up to the case for this purpose.
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Make the final connections. Make sure the power supply is connected to the motherboard and all of the drives are connected to the power supply. Insert all of the little cables from the case to the motherboard, including the computer power, reset and hard drive lights. These case connections are just tiny cables with two little holes at the top of a little black plastic rectangle that connect into two tiny pins marked on the motherboard.
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5
Connect the peripherals. Connect the mouse, keyboard and monitor to the back of the computer. The motherboard will come with a sheet detailing where to connect each piece in case you are unsure.
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Install the operating system. Insert the operating system disk into the CD-ROM. Set your BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM and reboot your computer. The BIOS will detect the operating system disk and boot from it. At this point the operating system will guide you to make user based settings as it sets up.
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