Building my first desktop computer, part 3: The finishing touches

Find Part 2 of the series here.

Now that the computer is functioning, it is time to close up the case. Before that, though, I really needed to finalise the insides, which necessarily means cable management!

Cable management is often seen as that unenviable thing not strictly necessary yet has to be done to avoid the look of a sloppy assembly job. I, for one, see it as a form of art, right up there with case modding. In fact, the reason I chose a case with both side panels of glass is to display my skilful taming of the marine-like flowing beauty of long cables.

The cables
My cable management paradigm, which I share with at least one YouTuber, is to treat the cables as having distinct start points and destinations, and grouping and splitting them as necessary. The end result is what looks like a network of highways each going to where they are going for a reason. My strategy is liberal use of zip ties; I am strongly against letting adhesive spoil the fine paint job, so I try to avoid using cable clips. The In Win 904PLUS does not have very many holes to which I could secure cable ties, but I ended up not needing them.

Building my first desktop computer, part 2: First build in an In Win 904PLUS

Find Part 1 of the series here.

Now that I had chosen the parts, it was time to put it together. One thing about ordering parts from different sources is that they rarely arrive at the same time, and so there is an excruciating wait while your hopes are up. They all came in eventually, so it worked out in the end.

I was quite surprised with the size of case's carton. It was much bigger than the actual case, probably because of the generous protection for the tempered glass inside. The salesman even commented on its size, despite the case only being a mid-tower!

Opening that box, I found the case inside a cloth bag; nice! I will definitely be keeping that. After removing both side panels, I proceeded to install the power supply:

Building my first desktop computer, Part 1: Choosing the parts

So my current computer, a Dell Studio XPS 8100, is starting to show its age. Apart from not natively supporting USB 3.0, I am also getting random errors I cannot reliably reproduce. With eBay's 20% off sale on computer parts, I think I found the best time in the foreseeable future to upgrade, as well as learn how to build my own computer. As a highly proficient computer user, that learning experience was bound to arrive sooner or later.

The use case
This computer will be used for midrange computer gaming, so it will need to, at a minimum, be able to handle graphics for moderately demanding games, as well as those I may want to play in the future, including World of Warcraft, Fallout 4 and Borderlands 2. Otherwise, I may also need to burn the occasional Blu-Ray disc, watch the occasional Blu-Ray film and transcode the occasional video. Of course, a computer that meets these requirements will be more than enough for web browsing and emails.