MOTHERBOARD OR MINBOARD: recommended brand: Abit, Asus, Gigabyte. Any one of these companies makes solid motherboards. Note abit board; (and a few other brands) use soft menu. This is allows jumper less configuration of the board: that means, it will take the hassle out of configuring your motherboard. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU MAKE SURE YOUR MOTHERBOARD SUPPORTS THE CPU HAVE CHOSEN! We needed an ATX motherboard.

A WORD ABOUT DRIVE JUMPER SETTINGS: hard drives, and CD-ROM/DVD-DRIVES need to be given an ID. This ID tells the computer in what order to access the drives and allows it to identify multiple drive on your computer. For our project we are installing two drives. For this reason, we will need to assign one drive as the master and one the slave. As you saw in the video, our drive has a sticker on the back that tells us which jumper settings are used to set the ID we want. Your drive may have this information on the top of the drive, or somewhere in the packaging that came with it. Most new drives also have the jumper pins labeled like this: MS, SL, CS. these are master, slave, and cable select respectively. To set the drive as a master, you would jumper the MS pins. We are setting our hard drive as the master because we plan on adding a DVD-ROM drive as the slave. If we were not adding another drive, we would choose the CS jumper setting, also known as the single drive setting. If for some reason you cannot identify what your jumper settings are, try contacting the manufacturer of your hard drive or visiting their website; most of the big hard drive manufacturer have all of their jumper settings online.

IMPORTANT WORD ABOUT JUMPER SETTINGS: as we have mentioned in the video, our abit motherboard is jumpers. That means it is configured using software called SOFTMENU ll instead of by selecting jumpers. If you are not using a jumper less board it is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT YOU CONFIGURE YOUR SETTINGS at this time. Doing this is relatively easy. Simply consult your motherboard manual. Inside you should find a table which lists the exact jumper settings for your particular CPU. Sometimes there may be 3 or 4 jumpers you have to change. Double-check your work and make sure you have your board configured properly before you continue.

IF YOUR CONNECTIONS ARE DIFFERENT: check your motherboard manual. All good motherboard come with a detailed manual, which has diagrams for your particular board. By referring to these diagrams, it is very easy to see which connectors go where.

IF YOU ARE USING AN AT STYLE MOTHERBOARD: if you are using this type of motherboard, the power connector that goes from the power supply to the motherboard itself will be in 2 sections. They will be labeled P8 and P9 these must be connected properly if you wish to see the motherboard ever work. THE BLACK WIRES MUST BE PLACED TOGETHER WHEN PLUGGING THEM MOTHERBOARD!!!