Need advice for my first build (ordering tomorrow!)

Thanks Danny!

I turned on the computer and there was no smoke :)

However, I have the computer hooked up to a monitor over both VGA and HDMI and there is no video output from either the motherboard or graphics card.

What should I do?
 
HIt up the stickied "Basic Troubleshooting Guide" on what to do when the PC doe not POST.
 
Amazingly the first piece of advice I read in the guide (remove a stick of RAM) worked, and a screen comes up on the monitor now!

It says "CPU Fan Error!" though. Does that indicate that I hooked up the fan incorrectly?
 
Robotics Guy said:
It says "CPU Fan Error!" though. Does that indicate that I hooked up the fan incorrectly?
Click to expand...
Yes if you didn't connect the CPU fan to the CPU fan port on the motherboard. If the fan is spinning and the connector is connected to that CPU fan port, you're gravy.
 
E4g1e said:
Overall, not a good build for the money (in other words, a poor value) for the following reasons:

1) That Antec Nine Hundred case is extremely cramped on the inside, especially from front to rear. And the hard drive cage is arranged such that any installed hard drives will obstruct expansion slots enough to restrict the maximum length of the cards to be used. For example, if you install a hard drive in any of the three middle drive bays, the GTX 570 would then lo longer fit inside that case because the hard drive(s) would then restrict the maximum length of compatible graphics cards to only 9.25 inches long. The eVGA GTX 570 card, on the other hand, is based on a reference board design using a reference cooler and is 10.5 inches long.

2) I would not purchase a P67 motherboard at this point: That chipset is now outdated and is EOL. You really want a Z77 chipset for that CPU, especially since Z77 comes with native USB 3.0 support (the 6-series chipsets require third-party USB 3.0 controllers to even add such capability).

3) Speaking of the GTX 570, it is now too expensive for such an older GPU. The Radeon HD 7850 is about as fast, but costs $30 less. Plus, the latest version of Photoshop, CS6, is now no longer CUDA-exclusive. Instead, it uses OpenCL for GPU acceleration. What's more, NVidia GeForce's OpenCL performance leaves a lot to be desired compared to otherwise comparable-performance AMD Radeon GPUs.

4) That OCZ PSU is one of OCZ's (or Sirfa's) older and not-so-good designs, barely capable of even its wattage rating with the DC output getting close to being out of spec.
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Hi, I admit with this answer. Thanks
 
Maybe the mobo isn't recognizing your fan. Honestly wouldn't worry about it just yet.
 
I figured it out!

Apparently the motherboard outputs the error message if the fan is not at 600 rpm at the post screen. From what I read while researching this, this fan is quite large and so it takes longer than that to reach 600 rpm. I changed the 600 rpm setting in the BIOS to 500 rpm and no more error!
 
So, after placing my initial order, where I had decided not to buy the extra 8 GB of RAM to save money, I realized that was kind of a stupid decision since the RAM would only add $45 bucks to the ~$1,100 cost of the computer. After coming to this realization, I ordered the extra RAM and it arrived today.

Unfortunately, it seems that the fan on the CPU heatsink is just a little bit too wide, as it just barely overlaps the RAM slot and puts pressure on the RAM. I ended up removing the fan (in the process the heatsink slid around a little, which I hope is OK?) and I moved it up about a quarter inch. Here are some pictures:

http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff481/RoboticsGuy/heatsink and memory/20120825_112710.jpg
http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff481/RoboticsGuy/heatsink and memory/20120825_112720.jpg
http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff481/RoboticsGuy/heatsink and memory/20120825_112731.jpg
http://i1238.photobucket.com/albums/ff481/RoboticsGuy/heatsink and memory/20120825_112745.jpg

Is it OK that I moved the fan up like that? Will that affect the cooling?

When the heatsink slid around it occurred to me that I might be able to slide it to the left just a little bit (maybe 1/8") so that it doesn't overlap the RAM slot, but I'm not sure if that's OK to do or not.

What do you think?
 
You can lower the fan to the point where it's just barely touching the RAM. It'll be fine: I'm doing the exact same thing.
 
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