The finished PC — it's in a Silverstone case made for media center applications. It sits on my desk at about 6½ inches high.
PC supporting monitor.
In the beginning, there was a big pile of boxes.
Gutz: Un-boxed parts.
After assembly but w/o the optical drive to better reveal the insides. 1. SSD (secondary; primary is "buried") 2. Housing for HD, in this case, a 2½ inch, 7,200 rpm HD used for backup. 3. RAM, 2x 8 Gb.
PC internals with optical drive installed.
Mother board. Everything plugs in here. The CPU plugs into a multi-holed socket, middle-top. Note: MB does not fully support Linux; no driver available for network adapter
The brains: AMD Ryzen-7 CPU.
Wraith, custom cooling for processor.
SSD — NVMe. Used a 250 Gb (not 2 TB) drive for the operating systems — dual boot Windows-10 and Xubuntu. Lotsa room to spare.
RAM: two 8 Gb units.
Video board.
Optical (DVD) drive, upside down in its mounting bracket. The height of the Wraith CPU cooler was such that the mounting bracket bumped it. A Dremel rotary cutting tool was used to the metal circled in red.
Supplementary 120 mm cooling fan.
Ethernet board: the mother board's ethernet hardware was not compatible with Linux.
TRASH: Power supply unit (PSU) — removed from the PC after it BLEW with a loud POP after only 2 months of light use. The user nearly jumped out of his skin.
Replacement PSU, "semi-modular," meaning one only uses cables needed to power components, making for a neater installation and no unused cables cluttering the interior and blocking air flow.
A closer view of the cables. Only one of them was needed to power the 2½" HD and DVD drive.
The cables plug into the sockets on the rear of the PSU. Semi: the main MB and a PCIe cable is hard wired — seen at right side of PSU.
Parts List / Lessons Learned
