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Written by Tuan "Solace" Nguyen
Tuesday, May 29, 2001
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Page 4 of 5 Putting it All Together
Before you begin to handle the components, be sure you’re properly grounded. It’s extra good to have a ground strap that goes on your wrist like a watch. This way, you won’t have to keep remembering to touch your case every time you move around.
Now that we have all our parts, it’s time to place everything together to form the actual server itself. We start off with installing the CPU onto the motherboard. I recommend you keep the motherboard on a flat surface to install the CPU and heatsink so it doesn’t bend the motherboard when you’re installing the heatsink fan.
In the picture above you see that I’ve already installed the processor and attached the heatsink on to it. For cooling, I used Arctic Silver 2 thermal compound and an Alpha PAL6035 with a Delta 38CFM fan. This heatsink/fan combo should be more than enough for our 1GHz server. Since the motherboard is right there, I’ve also installed the two sticks of RAM just to speed things up a little.
After installing the CPU and the memory, it’s time to attach the motherboard to the case. When you’re putting on the screws, be sure to use those ring washers with the screws so that the screw doesn’t damage your motherboard. Using washers also prevents the metal screw from short circuiting any traces on the board. While this is rare, it’s best to be safe than sorry.
After the motherboard is completely and properly secured to the case, go ahead and attach the case power, reset and LED wires. This step is the easiest to go wrong on so be sure to use your motherboard manual as a guide if you’re shaking about connecting wires to your motherboard. It’s sometimes hard to tell exactly which direction to attach a wire in. Be extra careful as connecting wires to the wrong pins can damage your board and prevent you from starting the computer.
The next step is to begin installing all the expansion cards. This step is where you will be inserting your graphics card, controller card, sound card any other cards you want to use onto the motherboard.
Certain PCI slots on your motherboard have higher precedence than others in terms of IRQ sharing. Refer to your manual to see which PCI slot has its own IRQ and which one shares an IRC. If you’re using a hard drive controller card, install it into a PCI slot that doesn’t share an IRQ to ensure proper behavior. These days, most PCI expansion devices are Bus Mastered, meaning they can share IRQs with other devices without any problems. Just to be on the safe side, take a look at the IRQ listing on your motherboard manual. Any motherboard manufacturer worth its reputation will have PCI IRQ sharing tables clearly defined and explained in the manual.
After everything is installed, the system will look something like what I have above. You’ll notice that I have spaced out the distance between the video card and the SCSI card. Because the server will be running for long periods of time, it’s best to try and keep heat to a minimum. I also left space between the SCSI card and the network cards. The video card and the SCSI card are the two hottest expansion cards inside the case so I’ve made room for air to circulate around them.
Before attaching the hard drives and the optical drives into the case, it’s wise to set their jumpers before hand. Since we’re using SCSI drives, remembering to set jumpers correctly is crucial. SCSI hard drives require you to set ID numbers where no two drives share the same number. Take some time and do this step correctly. If something doesn’t work after you’ve installed everything, removing the drives just to be able to clearly set the jumpers again can be a real pain.
Because the hard drives I’m using for the server are of SCSI Ultra160 LVD (low voltage differential), it’s important to get the right SCSI cable to go with the drives and controller. There are many different types of SCSI and it can be a daunting task to figure out what belongs where and with what. If you’re using UltraATA 66 and or 100 drives, be sure to have some 80wire/40pin IDE cables around as using regular IDE cables will limit the drives to a burst speed of only 33MB/sec.
After everything is completed, we have what’s in the picture above! Everything is installed and cables are tucked away neatly to allow sufficient cool air to flow through the case. Before you proceed to close up your case, be sure turn on the server first just to see if everything is installed properly. If everything runs smoothly, seal the server up and begin the process of setting the RAID array -- if you’re using RAID -- and the operating system.
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