Day 5: Let the Building Commence! - Wyatt Quillin

Wednesday, January 17th, 2024
On Wednesday, the day after the freeze, we started to put together our PCs. We were all very excited to get building, and we didn't waste a minute. Our first order of business was prepping our cases and securing our CPUs safely in our motherboards, which required some serious caution, as the CPU is the most fragile part of a computer. We had to wear static bracelets which removed the risk of accidentally shocking our CPUs with whatever electrostatic charge we had built up on our bodies. I was especially paranoid about this step and I wore the bracelet almost the whole time I was building my PC. The next steps were getting the motherboards into our cases, installing our power supplies, and installing all of the wiring. 

With our motherboards secured, we needed to add the rest of our components to complete our computers. We didn't get everything installed in one day, as there was tons of troubleshooting, relocating, and reinstalling of our parts. The majority of us finished the day with our RAM and storage installed, and we could test to see if our computers had power and display capabilities. Some of us even got as far as entering our motherboard's BiOS and installing an operating system. Overall, it was a very busy but invigorating day!
It was special to see everyone constructing their own devices that they had spent an entire week researching and designing. Collaboration was definitely key when building these computers, as this was a first for almost all of us. Personally, I made incredible progress on my PC, leaving only the GPU to be installed tomorrow. I'm looking forward to another day of building, and eventually taking my PC home!

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