Building a computer for a friend

Recently I have been helping my good friend get into blogging on Hive. You may know him as @lost.ryulincoln. I gave him an old laptop of mine, though when it comes to rendering videos that have been edited or needs encoding the laptop really struggles. It is great for writing posts, uploading images and most of the blogging. But the video editing part, especially on a small screen is pretty rough.

So I went through some of my old computer parts and pieced together an entire machine, so he can plug in two large monitors and have a decent desktop machine for video editing.

Using some computer parts I would otherwise scrap for their metal resources this machine will have one more life before it is turned into scrap metal.

The case already has stand offs in it and a few old drives and fans.

The case has seen better days, some rust appears to be forming on the bottom of the computer case.

Seems a spider died in the case at some point, got to remove that before installing the motherboard.

I had a few old IDE hard drives laying around, nearly obsolete but they will make for good storage for his video projects.

I also had a 2.5" SSD it only has about 32GB of storage, but thats more than enough for a Linux OS and the apps needed. This will make his boot times very fast, but then he uses his IDE hard drive for storage.

Mounting the SSD to a 3.5" enclosure it will fit in this old case.

The motherboard goes in next, and I make sure the stand offs match this boards layout.

I start plugging in the case's ports like USB, the power and reset buttons and the hard drive indicators.

Plugging in the IDE ribbon cable went pretty smoothly. Been a long time since I dealt with IDE drives.

Next the power supply goes in, I seat it and then add the screws to hold it into place.

While I was trying to plug in the 8-pin power supply cable I realized I probably should have done this before screwing the motherboard to the stand offs.

Ended up taking the fan off to reach it better, it helped a little but still was a tight fit for my large hands.

Finally I got it in, with the aid of some needle nosed plyers. Next up is plugging in the molex power cables to the hard drives.

Just about finished, just need to add the video card. It is a basic 2GB card. Worthless to me as it cannot mine anything with such a small memory spec. But it will work fine for rendering video. Much better than the laptop's mobile CPU/GPU was using before. I would not be surprised if this machine renders twice as fast if not even more.

With the video card in, I realized the front audio port plug would not fit. So I had to leave it unplugged, he can use the back audio ports that are built into the motherboard.

A little wire cleanup, I really suck at wire management. But I took a few minutes and cleaned them up the best I could.

And it is all done, I brought the PC over to my test bench and all worked great. Just need to install Ubuntu and the needed apps like Kdenlive, Handbrake and a few others.