How to Build a Mining PC: Step 2: Assembling Our Mining PC

After you've ordered them, received all of your parts, it's time to piece together the rig, meaning the mining PC. And this is going to be a lot of fun. But before we begin piecing this together, we've got to make sure that we have all the tools necessary as well as we have to make sure that we are not charged with static. You don't want to shock the computer, which could cause issues. And so what that means is this if we touch the pieces of the computer and we're charged with static from a carpet, it could actually damage the hardware. And just to make sure that you're not charged, what you can do is you can touch a metal surface before you touch the parts and make sure that you work on a solid surface if you want to. Meaning in a room that doesn't have a carpet up to you. Up to you. Now, I'm going to take the cage out of here, which is what's going to house our rig. And I like the open concept approach because it's easier for you to see all the stuff that I'm going to put together here. And it also keeps it cooler as well. And after I assemble this cage here, then I'm going to take the motherboard and drill it on to here. So I'm going to go into fast forward mode so I can save you time. Now that our frame is complete, I'm going to install all the components on this frame right now. And I put the microphone here so you can hear me a little bit better. And all we're going to need is this and this and that's it. And the screws, actually, it doesn't really matter what screws you use. The real purists will say you have to use certain screws for certain parts. I don't care. The only thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to use these little risers that came with it for static reasons so that the motherboard stays cool because it's elevated a little bit with these little things underneath. I'll show you in a second how to do that and also so that there's less static charge to hit the the motherboard. Now, people will complain a lot about static hitting their boards. I've never had that issue happen to me. But just in case, I'll put these risers here for you. Okay, great. So let me start. The first thing we'll do is I'll put in the the motherboard and I'm going to put these risers in right now first and then I'll screw the motherboard into these risers. And when you're using a screwdriver and a motherboard and any components, do it gently. Don't, don't do it as hard as you can or you could crack the board. And I use this a lot, but I make sure not to make it too tight so I don't crack the components. But these things are actually more resilient than you think than you think. The only thing you have to really, really be careful with, I think my humble opinion is the processor, when you put it on and there's this thermal gel underneath it, which is really cool. I'll show you in a second. All right. Let's move on. So what I'm going to do now and hopefully you can see in that camera there is I'm just going to screw in these these little components here. Okay. There ought to be too tight. Okay. This here. Oops. And when you look at your your frame here. There's a lot of holes in it. Don't worry if you don't have a screw in every single hole here through all of these, just a couple to make sure that it's secure enough. And I'll show you what that means in a minute. So, for example, these ones here are going to screw directly into the motherboard, but these ones here are not. And that's fine because I've just got these risers here that are going to support it slightly off the bottom of the case here. All right. Screw it in. Because it's been too tight. It's fine. Okay. Great. Now I will put this in and here we go. I'm going to align these right here. And again, there's tons of different types of screws that come with this this frame that I bought. It doesn't really matter which ones you use. They're all the same to me, to be honest. Some are shorter. Some are a little bit longer. Some people say, no, you have to use it for the hard drive. You have to use it for this. It doesn't matter to me. It's all fine. So let's put this here. Okay. Good. And then just to get them the teeth slightly in. I'll start with this. All right, good. And what we're doing is we're screwing these directly into the the risers. So these four will be on the risers. You'll notice that. And I'll pick this up in a minute to show you. But there's a little gap about the size of my finger just so it stays cooler. And so it risks shock or it doesn't doesn't shock. And as I mentioned before, I've never had shock issues with boards I've built in the past. Okay, let's go here. Good. Teeth are in a little bit in all four. I'll take this. I won't make it too tight. Make sure it's going the right way. Add some white stuff there because I was drilling into the drywall and the ceilings. My camera to be up there. Okay. So I'm fine. I know it sounds harsh, but it's not really tiny as much as you think. Okay. Get the teeth touching slowly. That's fine. Good. Good. That's again from the drywall. Okay. And that's secure enough. Again, it doesn't have to be too tight. I'm trying to get these to latch on to the little risers below it. It's fine. Okay. And people call them standoffs as well. Okay, great. So as you can see, it's slightly elevated here. Let me see if I can get you to see it in that angle. You can kind of see underneath there kind of peek into it. All right. Great. Okay. Cool. All right. Now, next up, what we're going to do is I'm going to put the processor on which which is one of my favorite parts. Let me go grab it. And so my AMD processor it shipped with with a fan as well. Most of them do. And what you'll notice is that there's this thermal gel that's on it. It ships with it on it. And I'm actually going to put this on here. And sometimes you have to align what's called the little golden triangle. You can see it there. Cat and you align it with with the corner here when you put it on and I see a little triangle here now I'm going to put it on incorrectly on purpose. Watch this. It doesn't fall in. You never force the processor. It doesn't fall into those little slots there. This is the right way. I'm going to do it wrong again, just to show you it's not falling in. And then I'm going to do it the right way. Ooh. Just fell in there. It's pretty cool. Okay, great. I'll push that down. All right, now, next up, what I'm going to do is we've got the thermal gel already on there. I put this on before I'm doing it again now. That's why there's a little bit of gel already on that. But it usually just comes on this part here. And the purpose of this is to keep the chip cool. The same thing with the gel. The thermal gel. Right. To make it cool. And this is a there's a fan on here as well. And remember when we were looking at the second. We were looking at the Raspberry Pi. I left this on the floor. This was one of those little cooling units on the on the Raspberry Pi as well. And remember when we were looking at the ant miner? The one I took apart and voided the warranty forever. Like it matters. It's old that had devices like this just to cool down the unit. So let me put this Raspberry Pi pi piece aside here. All right, cool. If you have kids, you should buy a Raspberry Pi and assemble it with them. It's a lot of fun. So I'm going to put this here and then we're going to clamp it down. You see the clamps. So I'm going to clamp one side here. Can you see that? Okay. And then I'm going to put this here. Let me get the clamp. They're good. Okay. I want a force that would be gentle with it. Okay. Okay. All right, hold on a second. Okay. That site is on. This site here. Good. Now I'm going to clamp it in. See here. Clamped in. And this here is so that we can power this this fan here. So I'm going to plug this in and they're labeled as well. So hold on 1/2. Here you go. You see that? There it says CPU fan. Might be tough to see. Right. But and when you get your when you get your motherboard, if you look at the the instructions, which is usually just a couple of pages, you can see that they clearly lay out what is what here on on the the motherboard. Or you can just go to the internet and download a PDF for it or go to YouTube if you're not sure. All right. So I'm going to put this here. Okay. Hold on a second. Good. Okay, great. We're done with that. And sometimes this gets caught in there. So what some people do is they tie it very gently. So let me let me do that here. I'll tie it into a little bit of a knot there, just very gently. And that will kind of get the excess wires from from getting caught in the fan. That's good enough. It's fine. I think you get the idea. Okay. Great. All right, we're done with the processor. Now I'm going to move on and we're going to put in RAM random access memory and recall that we bought this, which is just this is from Patriot, not the best brand. I recommend getting something that's a little bit higher quality like Crucial or Micron, but I wanted to get this in time to film this, this video. So we've got four gigs of Ram here, four gigs of Ram, one stick. And usually when you put these in and there's usually two slots, at least you want to match them. So if I want to have eight gigs, I put a four and four. If I wanted to have 32, I put 16 or 16. But since this is just a mining PC or mining rig, it doesn't matter how much RAM you have. We're just going to do one thing with this computer and that's it, which is mining. If we wanted to have PowerPoint, Excel, word in Fortnite, which my kids play a lot open, we'd have more RAM. Okay, let's move on. So when you put these things in, you pull these apart, see there and then you just click them in and you'll see that you can align these here, right? So I'll plug it in. It doesn't matter which slot you put it in. So let me just grab that there. Okay. Good, good. It's fine. It's good enough. Okay, great. So we're done with the RAM. And what should I do next? I'll do the hard drive now. I'll do the hard drive. So let me go grab that. It's right here. Now, when we install the hard drive, what you can do is you can actually skip this hard drive, which I bought. It's it's a pretty cheap drive, but you can actually you'll see here, see the USB ports, you can put a thumb drive in there, hard drive, and that's good enough, right? I chose this because it's a little bit faster. And when we install windows very soon, I'm going to show you how to do it. I do it on a little USB drive as well. Okay, cool. So in order to install this, we're going to need the power cable to be plugged into this as well. And you don't have to screw this in what I'm going to do just to keep it simplistic, I'm actually going to screw it into the top somewhere here just because I want you to be able to see everything here. So what I'll do is I'll put this down here and I'm going to get the power supply down. Okay? Okay. So this is the power supply we're using here. And before I go ahead and put the power supply on to connect the cables, I know I've said this a lot, but. But but I care. I always want you to have this available or another fire extension. I've actually got to here just in case. That's how careful I am with this stuff. Because what's going to happen, I promise you. I promise you, if you play around with computers like this and using power supplies over many, many years, decades, for me, I'm dating myself. You will see smoke sometimes if you put the wrong cable in. And what happens is, if you smell burnt plastic even a little bit immediately the first, and sometimes you won't see the smoke, but the first thing you do right away is you unplug the power from the wall. Then you grab this right away and you look to see and if the smoke is stopped, you don't have to use this. But if you still see smoke and it to see a flame, obviously right away. Right away. Okay. And I taught my kids how to use this as well. So anyway, moving on. So there are just a ton of cables that ship in this thing here. And this this looks pretty cool. Isn't that cool? So we're going install this in a second. There are a gazillion cables that come with these things and they're labeled as well. And B for motherboard, CPU for central processing and it's VGA for the graphics card, SATA for these things and to power other devices. Well, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do this now. Let me let me put this down for a second. Grab a bit of water. All right. So with these things, everything is really nicely labeled already for you. So you've got here and I don't know if you could see it up there. Maybe you can pause that Chris and post at it. But I'll hold it right here. You've got Motherboard here. Okay. CPU here. VGA here, which is for the graphics card. Then you've got SATA, SATA, which we're going to use here for for for powering a couple of things. One of which is the hard drive. And then you've got peripheral one, which I'm not going to use. Okay. And then on the side of this thing, there is echo, which is I guess if you want to save money, you can turn the fan off. Just leave it on. Always. Better safe than sorry. Ken, this is obviously the on off switch. Okay, great. So what are we going to do is I'm actually going to install this right here and it's not perfect, but I want to put it right here so that you can still see into my rig as we continue to build it. Great. So let me do this. So I'm going to turn this around just so you can hear me speak as I install this here. Put the hard drive there. I know where my fire extinguisher is. Great. All right, so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to install it loosely here, and the power supply doesn't have to be too tight. Just make sure that it's it's secured enough so it doesn't fall on on your motherboard. So, again, I'm installing it this way so you can you can see me. All right, hold on. I'm going to screw this in here. It's good enough. Yeah, it's fine. Okay. And I am actually going to tighten this a bit. And these things aren't as powerful as you think. If you turn a screwdriver as much as you can, as hard as you can, it's way more force than the single ever give. So I want you to know that as I'm screwing this in, I want you to think that I'm tightening things too much. And I'm going to do something a little crazy. And hold it this way. Just. You can see there. See here. So I'm plugging it in here. It's good enough. Okay. And I have a little bit of drywall material left over here from when I was screwing in the camera up there. Just try not to have dust like I have. So it's good enough. It's. It's it's secure enough so it won't fall over on my motherboard. And now I'm going to turn this this way so you can see what I'm doing. It's good enough. All right, cool. Now, what are we going to do is I am going to plug the power into this guy here, and I'm going to install this. It's the hard drive again. You don't have to use a hard drive like this. You can get a USB stick and just put it on there. I like to use it, though. All right. So good. So, again, there's just a ton of cables in here and you can't take all the cables out one by one. All right. Okay, cool. All right, let's see if I can do this all in one take. Okay, so this one here on the side, it says VGA. So this one here is going to be for the mother card or pardon me for the the GPU mother card having confused all my stuff here. It's going to drop that there. This one here. Keep in a Braille press this here it says. And on the side you see that and B. And that's going to be for the motherboard. This one here is for the CPU because it says CPU on it. Simple enough. And then this one here, it says SATA on it.