In this episode, we're going to show you
how to connect your data cable and your power cables.
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Hello, ladies and gentlemen,
thank you for tuning in to more of our Hands-On PC Build.
Yes, today's show is all about connections.
In fact, we're going to go ahead
and get our power connections connected,
we're going to get our data connection on our solid-state drive,
and then the various connections in the case.
So here on the bench, we've kind of laid this on the side.
We've taken the sidewall of the case, both sides off,
the left and the right side of our case off.
Both of those panels are just off to the side.
And what we're going to do
is essentially we're going to take the power connections,
we're going to go ahead
and undo the connections from the case here,
and we're going to go ahead and rout them
and where we're going to rout them,
you're going to see there's some routing spots here
that we can actually do that.
So what do you say?
Let's go ahead and get started,
and I'm going to undo our power connections here,
and we're going to go ahead and start with
the routing of our cables.
Now, first things first,
what I'm going to do is I'd like to go ahead
and I'd like to kind of separate out these cables,
the ones that we're going to need.
Here is our CPU connector,
we're going to go ahead and route that one as well.
Then we also have our data
or our power connector for our SATA Drive, SSD here.
And what we're going to do is we're just going to connect this.
It's a L blade-shaped connector,
that connects the power on this side.
But then we also have to run a data cable.
So here's our serial ATA data cable.
And again, this is a blade-shaped L blade connector,
and it just snaps into place there.
So now we've got pretty much that cable ready to go.
What I'm going to do is there is a little routing hole
right here by the motherboard.
I'm actually going to just feed that through right there.
And let me try to get this around our motherboard
and we'll feed that through.
That'll be one of the very first ones
that we actually route through.
Now we do have a series of other cables
that we want to go ahead and get routed through.
So we're going to take our front panel headers
and some of these other cables.
And what we will do here
is just kind of pull them through as well.
And just be mindful of their position.
This is our USB 3.0 connector and we're going to go ahead
and run that through likewise,
and again, we're just kind of feeding these through.
And then we got our front panel connector.
This is actually the hard drive LED light.
So we're going to go ahead and feed that through likewise.
And then we've got our audio connection.
This is our HD audio connector.
We're going to go ahead and we'll feed that through.
Now we've got just a couple more
that we've got to kind of take care of here.
This is a SATA connector
and this SATA connector is actually for the LED lights.
And one of the great things
is in some of these power supplies,
we don't really have to feed this one through.
We can just go ahead,
make sure that the L blade is lined up appropriately
and we can just push and clip that in place
and that one is actually ready to go.
Now we do have some other ones
that we need to route appropriately.
Here is our 24+ pin connector,
and this is going to go more
towards the top of our case right here.
And that's because the main power connector is in that location.
And we're going to go ahead
and just kind of feed that one through
and we'll come back and once we know
that we've got our cables in the right position,
we'll have an episode on our cable management portion.
Now, we've got a couple of other connectors
that we want to make sure
that we are making a good connection
and that we are routing.
This is the PCIE.
You've got to be careful too,
with your main CPU connectors
and your PCIE connectors because these look identical.
The good thing is they're marked on it.
This one says CPU, this one says PCIE.
So we don't want to use that one for…
even though they look really, really close
like they're the same type of connector,
you want to be sure that you have the right one.
A lot of your power supplies today
will have these clearly marked like this one does
and again saying CPU right on that little clip.
And we're just going to take that.
And again, I'm just routing these through right here,
the routing positions that we have,
the little root holes, cutouts.
And now what we have to do is, for now,
I'm going to take these other connectors
that we're not using
and we're just going to kind of bundle them back up
the way they were.
And I'm just going to, for now,
roll them back into kind of a little ball here,
and then I'm going to just put this velcro on it.
Now, these aren't in a finished state.
Please don't think that I'm going to leave the cable
and cabling in this kind of condition.
What we're trying to do is just establish
the fact that we've got our cables kind of where we want.
I loose lay them first,
and then we come back and we do the cable management.
And that's more of the beautification side, if you will.
So what we're going to go ahead
and do is we're going to flip this case over
and then when we come back, we're going to show you
how to make all of those connections to your motherboard.
Well, we flipped the case over
and now it's time to make our connections.
And what we're going to do here
is we're actually going to start
at the top of the motherboard in relation to the case.
And we're just going to kind of go in an L pattern here
connecting all the connectors.
One of the first ones
that we're going to do is this eight-pin CPU connector.
And I can tell you right now,
this thing can be a little bit of a bear to get in here.
So I'm going to kind of struggle with it for a second here
and hopefully, we can get this in there fairly decent.
There's one of them.
Sometimes it can be a pain
depending on how tight the cables are,
because the cables coming off of the power supply,
they can be pretty tight sometimes,
and sometimes they can give you a little bit of a hard time
just trying to move them.
So we'll just try to get that connector in there and again,
try not to put too much force down there.
You definitely want to get a good tight connection.
So if we take a look here,
you can see we've actually got that connected.
That is our eight-pin power connector.
Now kind of moving down the line here,
the next one I want to connect is our CPU fan here.
You could probably see that it says fan and a U,
that's actually the CPU fan.
And earlier when we attached our heatsink,
I said that I would save this and we would come back
and we would show you how to connect that.
Now this one's pretty straightforward.
It is just a simple connection on the motherboard,
and it does have a locking connector like a lot of these do.
So you should be able to line it up fairly easy.
And there we go.
That one is connected.
I tied that knot in,
it kind of help with some of the cable management.
Now, if we walk on down the line,
one of the things you'll see here
is that we have our 24 pin connector,
and this is a good power supply
in the fact that it really supports going way back
to the original ATX standard, a 20 pin connector.
And what you can do is you can put both of those,
the 24 pin P4 connector
and the 20 pin connector into a solid connector here.
And then this is another one that sometimes can give you
a hard time getting these lined up and in there.
But for the most part, this case is giving us a lot of room
to work with, which is really nice.
And there we go.
That seems to be connected, we have our power connector.
It is now firmly seated and we are good.
If we move down the line,
the next one that we're going to go ahead and connect
and that's going to be our USB connector here.
And this one has a… one of the pins is actually missing.
It's a solid plate, if you will, and that actually lines up
with the other side of this connector
and it is also a locking connector.
So I'm just going to go ahead and plug that in.
Now I will tell you the other one that we have right here
is a system fan,
but we're actually going to have an episode
on attaching our system fans
because I want to attach our system fan
that came with the case,
and I also want to go ahead and attach
a couple of fans on the front side of the case.
And I want to show you how to do that.
So we're going to leave that for a little bit later.
The next one is going to be our data connector.
We want to get our data connector.
That's to our serial ATA drive, our solid-state drive.
And that's actually going to connect right down here.
And we're going to use the 45-degree angle here.
Let me kind of tuck this back a little bit easier
and we're just going to go ahead and we will plug it right in,
and you'll hear that audible click.
That's what we want.
We're good to go on that.
Now, if we move down the line,
the next thing that we're going to do
is we're going to connect our power switch, all right.
Our power switch actually comes off the front panel up here,
and that's where we turn our power on.
Now, pay attention to the motherboard and your case
and verify that you have the proper arrangement.
For me, the power connector actually gets placed
in this position here.
That's not always going to be the case
on every motherboard that you do.
So again, just pay attention to whatever the specifications.
The next one is the hard drive,
and in this case, we got a solid-state drive,
but drive light LED so we know when the drive is actually moving.
That is actually going to be in this position right here.
So we'll go ahead and we'll connect that up.
And again, I would say, just pay attention to the fact
that depending on how your motherboard is arranged,
you want or what the vendor says will dictate
how these actually get lined up here.
Now, moving down the line here,
the next one that we have is actually our LEDs for this case.
This case comes with some interesting LED lights,
which may or may not be your thing.
Hey, I figure, why not?
Originally I was kind of skeptical
on whether I was going to actually use something like this.
But hey, it came with the case,
so we're going to go ahead and we will plug this in
and it's just a four-pin connection right there.
There we go.
Connect it up, we're ready to go.
Again, moving kind of down the line here.
One of the last ones that we're going to connect.
This one is all the way over
on the other side of the street here.
This is your high definition audio connector,
and you'll see this actually has a pin that's missing as well.
And that actually lines up down there to the pin
that's missing inside of that connector.
Now I know my hand, maybe even a little bit of my head
will get in the way, apologize ahead of time.
But you've got to kind of see what you're doing here.
And let me go ahead and I will just click that in place.
And you can kind of feel it go right in and it's perfect,
it fits just fine, we are good.
And these essentially are our connectors.
In this episode, we looked at their main power connectors,
the CPU power connector, we've seen the USB 3.0 audio,
the front, the audio as well, and the front panels,
the hard drive light indicator, as well as the power button.
So there you go.
We've made our connections
and that's how you do it when you build your PC.
Thank you for watching ITProTV.