Too... tired... to... finish... assembling...

You can find the parts list here and part II here.

Yet more proof that I'm getting to be an old man. A few years ago this would have been an all-nighter... but my knees hurt and my eyes are tired of squinting at tiny writing. However, for some reason I'm going to stay up and blog about it. I think I have a disease (truthfully, it will chill me out before trying to sleep).  Anway, here are some snaps of the progress so far:

I started off by taking the empty motherboard(above) and attaching the adapter bracket so my Zelman heatsink would fit the new 1366 socket. After that, it was time to take out the chip placeholder and put in the real thing. Then I slathered on some thermal grease before screwing the mammoth copper monstrosity on top.

With all that done and it was time to snap in the memory in tripple channel configuration and put in my beastly graphics card. I quickly learned that putting the video card in was pretty damn stupid, as it makes the assembly impossible to maneuver... so if you're following along at home, don't put your PCI cards in until you've got the MoBo screwed into the case. But anyway... pretty sexy, eh?

The next step is screwing in the motherboard, which generally involves lots of cursing.  Once again, my problems here, though minor, involved putting things in their places too early.  I put both my hard drives, the optical drive, and the power supply in before I placing the motherboard, which just made it hard to screw the damn thing in...  not to mention that the graphics card was so big that it bashed up against the hard drives.  Luckily it's a "tooless case", so I hadn't used any screws to that point, so it was easy to move the hard drives down to the lowest slots and take out the power supply.

Beyond that, the only frustration was that Cooler Master included various mysterious screws of differing length with no real explanation of what they were for.  Presumably this is for all the different types of motherboards that can be accomodated by the case, and to be completely honest, I only really glanced at the manual before deciding it was worthless...  so maybe it would have been obvious if I RTFM.  Anyway, there was one instance when I used an entirely too long screw that necessitated removing the entire board and starting again...  hence the cursing.  But all in all, it wasn't too bad.

So here's where we stand now:

Everything is in place... pretty much... but I have yet to connect any wires, so there is still a fair amount to do tomorrow, before I even get to the "push the power button and pray I didn't screw anything up stage".  But anyway...  off to bed.