Clean Up

09 Clean Up

Great job on building your first computer! This is an excellent achievement that you have accomplished. While we have all of our parts installed there are still a few things left to take care of. We will have to tackle cable management within your computer so that there are no cables and cords hanging inside your computer. This can be dangerous by restricting airflow and can even get in the way of certain fans, plus it looks cluttered, and is difficult to see all of the hard work you put into your build.

Cable Management

Cable management is different for every case. You will want to check the user manual that came with your case for the best way to organize cable management within your case. However, let’s go over a few standard cable managing tips that will generally work well for everyone:

52 // How to Build a Computer • Take off the non-glass side of your case, if you don’t have a glass side it is the side facing the back of the motherboard. This is where you tuck cables out of sight.

• Using the zip ties or Velcro straps that came with some of your parts helps group cables together.

• Make sure you don’t group too many cables together; this will create a cable bulge and can prevent the case from closing.

• It is important to leave space behind the motherboard incase you want to change out parts in the future.

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Once you have all the cables out of the way, and it is looking nice and tidy, we can move on to peripherals you will most likely need when using your computer.

Peripherals

Input peripherals are more than likely going to plug into your computer such as a keyboard, mouse, drawing pad, scanner, etc. It is up to you which of these you would like to have for your computer. Output peripherals are items that will be receiving an output directly from your computer such as monitors, printers, or speakers.

Sometimes you can have peripherals that are both input and output. These are things like external hard drives, USB flash drives, external CD or DVD drives (also known as optical drives), webcams, headsets, microphones, etc. These all send and receive data directly from your computer. These peripherals can come in so many different shapes, sizes, and features. Lots of these items have RGB lighting that you can sync to the lighting in your computer. Once you have all the peripherals you need or want, then we can quickly talk about the operating system and what you should do to start installing it.

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