3. Go out and find your best prices..

I won't spend too much time here but suffice it say that with the advent of price comparison shopping on the internet, it's very easy to go out onto the web and find some competive prices for the components that you are searching for. Unless you are in desparate need for a part, save yourself some cash and look around. Make sure to buy from reliable places also. If it's too low to be true; chances are, it's not true. Use sites like www.resellerratings.com, www.bizrate.com to help you figure out what sites to trust from. We'll have an article out later on in the summer that will go over how to do go about looking for the best deals on the net and some of the sites to check out for this.

4. Laying out all the parts

So once I got everything in the mail, I laid out all the parts that I needed onto my dining room table. Go ahead and use whatever facility you feel is comfortable for you. Make sure you have ample light in your environment. So with that said, here goes the process of putting all of this together.

The Parts Laid Out	The Intel Pentium 4 1.6A GHz Proc

Order of installation

I didn't actually put an order down on paper but if you are new to this, then perhaps it's a good idea to put together a To Do list for this project. Yes you have all the parts but you'll want to put these pieces together in a definite order. Is there a right vs. wrong way of putting a system together? Probably not but there are ways that can make your life easier later especially in tight spaces like that found in the gBOX. With that, here's my plan of attack as it stood in my head at the time.

1. Open up the gBOX case and take off as much of the case as possible to free up space for my hands
2. Take CPU and apply thermal grease on it
3. Take bottom of heatsink and apply thermal grease on it
4. Insert CPU into motherboard socket and install heatsink/fan combination
5. Install memory
6. You could attempt to do a sample boot up process at this point to make sure that the processor is probably inserted and that the heatsink/fan are properly attached to the motherboard and dissipating heat from the processor. I did not do this step but I would still recommend it.
7. Install the storage device ribbons onto the motherboard.
8. Install the hard drive and floppy drive
9. Install the DVD ROM drive
10. Boot the machine with the onboard video
11. If successful, install the AGP card
12. Boot the machine with the AGP card
13. Configure the BIOS
14. Boot the machine a few times to make sure everything seems fine.
15. Check internal temps for both the system as well as the CPU
16. Install your favorite OS (Windows XP here in this example)
17. Stress test the machine

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