Installing the Power Supply

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Allen and welcome to Expert Village. Today I'm going to show you how to build your very own personal computer. I put the motherboard in first so a lot of times it's really up to you if you want to put the motherboard. Don't connect anything really on the motherboard first so you can still get the CPU in. Especially if there?s a tight amount of space and if it is tight then I do recommend putting the power supply in first. But right here I know there's enough room and I'm not working with too much stuff so I can do it right now, but maybe the best recommendation is go ahead put this in first so you know where the wires are going, but not a big deal though. So I'm going to go ahead and put this in. Again this is only going to go one way because you've got all the screws that are going to line up through the back. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. So let's watch as I probably put it in the wrong way here. See, see right there. See this way it doesn't line up so you know it doesn't go that way, because the screw holes are all in the wrong places. So obviously you can't screw it up. Well you can screw it up putting it in but you know it's not going to be in the right spot so you can always just take it right back out. So here, you see how the screws all line up right on the back of the case. And now I'm going to go ahead, grab one of the screws and just tighten it down real quick. Little bit of a pain in the butt, but I'll get it. And a lot of these will come with the actual screw too. So just go back here and then you got that. And then you're going to do it on all four of the slots that it has on it, with the same screws. And the power supply is going to be right in place. Next what your going to want to do since the board is all fastened down and now we have our wires running off the power supply is we're going to plug in the power supply to the board. Now this board is just a typical ATX board. Before they released that twelve volt power rail which I talked about before, but again this only goes one way. You have the snap clip which is right there and you'll see there's a little clip right here. So you can only plug it in one way. So nice and easy just line up the cables and put it in, you'll hear a click. You're plugged in good to go. Next all these other cables are pretty much cables that are going to go to your drives so right now we don't have any drives in it. Don't worry about that too much. A few other quick things with power is, like the CPU fan things like that you'll see cables that come off of it. And there are actually connections on the board or almost, usually on the board, some of the newer boards definitely have it and some of the older boards might not have it depending on what you do pick up. But look for it and you'll see a connection says like CPU fan things like that. And this one is actually it's up in this area here, so I'm just going to go ahead, little bit tight, plug it in. And the CPU fan power supplies they work a little bit different on the boards because they actually report data back to the bios of the system and it'll tell you fan speeds and make sure everything's running at operating temperature all that fun fun stuff. And so that's in, power's pretty much ready to go. The next step is going to be connecting these bad boys which as I told you before is a little bit of a pain in the butt. You want to, might want to use your magnifying glass and perhaps a flashlight if you don't have good enough lighting. So some of these cases have ones that are definitely not going to work with your system and you can just leave those out and not worry about them. But the typical ones that you're going to have is like the hard drive LED, the power switch, the power LED and the reset switch and of course the internal speaker which is this this monstrous speaker which really delivers great sound. NOT. And you'll see here as I said it's a bunch of prongs usually towards the bottom of the system and as you can see here. And there are little, little words on it right there somewhere, hard to see. But if you look closely you'll see like a plus and minus obviously the color is plus, the black is minus for negative on your wires. And if it's not black if it's white would be the negative and the actual color would be the positive one. And the newer boards, some of them have on the plus side like a little color coding so you know which ones plus. These ones just tend to have a plus or minus so you just really got to look very close and plug them in. So right now I'm just going to plug them in and the first one speaker is going to go right down here. You might have to take these out and just make sure they're right. They are a little bit of a pain in the butt. We have the reset switch so I'm going to look on these and we have the power reset, and a pain in the butt here. And it shows negative to the left so we're going to have the white going to the left. Next one is the power LED and it shows again the negative to the left so we're going to do the white to the left. Next here is the, lets see, getting a little bit harder to see here the hard drive LED which is this red and white one which is going to go right here. And then finally is the power on/off switch which is going to go this one. Now on a lot of boards they are different so make sure you do read it in the manual, I've used this board a lot so not to worry about this one, but manuals will definitely tell you where things go and how to hook everything up. So that's all good your case is pretty much wired up and ready to start. If you want you have the fan inside the case if you have one. You can just go ahead and hook it up not a big deal. Ready to go less to worry about."