You can’t go wrong with a white, black, and RGB color scheme

TH OF TIME: 2-3 HOURS

LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM

1 FIX THE CPU COOLING BRACKET

AN ODD STARTING POINT, but regardless of what you’re building, it needs to be secure. Thankfully, that’s one thing our writer knew before starting. For this PC, we need to start on the back of our motherboard by screwing in the liquid cooler CPU mount. It can be tight inside the chassis, so be careful moving things around, take your time, and treat everything delicately. Lay the bracket on a table and gently align it with the four screw holes around the CPU slot. With the correct stand-off screws that come with the Corsair cooler, secure the bracket in place for later. With the back of the mobo prepped, we can turn our attention to the brain of the build: the CPU.

2 INSERT THE BRAIN

WHEN HANDLING Intel CPUs, it’s important not to touch the bottom pins. Lightly pinch the sides when placing it in the motherboard. To begin, raise the retention arm. When looking at it straight on, you have to push this outward first to unhook it, then lift the arm to reveal the socket. Leave the plastic cover in place. Thankfully, on our Intel Core i9-11900K, one of the corners has an arrow that needs to align with a corresponding arrow on the mobo in order to position the CPU properly in the socket. This is the brain of the build, so take your time, don’t apply any pressure, and it should all fall into place. Pull the retention arm down again slowly, so the bracket sits under the Torx screw, then push the arm back securely into the hook. Once done, the plastic cover pops off.

3 SSD STORAGE

WHAT’S A BRAIN WITHOUT MEMORY? We’re talking SSD, not RAM. We’ll get to that shortly. Our 1TB M.2 Samsung SSD will store everything in this build. Luckily, the MSI motherboard is labeled. Find the cover that has “M.2” written on it, and unscrew it. With the top facing you and the contact points to the right, we need to slot the drive into the M.2 port first. At a 30-degree angle, slide the drive in, then rest the SSD cutout above the screw hole. Secure this with one of the tiny M.2 screws, and your SSD is in place. Now to cover and protect it. Beneath the cover is a thermal pad, perfect for heat dissipation. Peel the protective layer off and align the cover over the screw holes, then secure it on top. Our SSD is now in place, with its sunscreen on, and is ready to hold all the 1s and 0s.

4 MOTHERBOARD MOUNTING

WE HAVE TWO STICKS of RAM for this build, which means one thing: We can’t just throw them in and hope for the best. There are specific slots that you need to use first if you are only using two. Look inside the motherboard’s instruction manual to find out which slots you should use. For our build, it was the far-right and the second from left slots that we needed. Before placing the RAM in, make sure the clips on each end are opened. If not, push the edges of these down to open up the DIMM slots. Then take your DDR4 RAM sticks and look at the pins; you should notice an indentation along the bottom that determines how they fit. Align this indentation with the socket, and push it into place. A satisfying click tells you that your RAM is now snugly in place.