Installation Impressions

For the first fourth dimension in a while, I consulted the manual right away because I really had no idea where to begin. While the M8'due south SO-DIMM slots and CPU socket looked piece of cake to admission, I decided to leave them for last.

We started by removing the top rear aluminum arms and their connecting rods. In all, there are 4 large hex screws and 2 small Phillips head screws. The adept news here is that Asrock has supplied all the tools required for the entire build.

With those parts removed the entire top chapeau slides out exposing the PCIe x16 riser card and a few mounts for 2.v" and three.5" hard drives.

Having removed the bulldoze mounts we began to work out how to install storage, which didn't take besides long with some help from the manual. The primary plate tin can be used to install ane three.5" hard drive or two ii.5" drives.

Notwithstanding, be enlightened that if you want to install a 3.5" drive, the 2nd drive plate (which supports three ii.five" drives) can't be used. So with a 3.v" drive installed, the just other 2.v" bulldoze space is below the ability supply side by side to the optical drive.

Getting to the tray that holds the optical drive and the spot for the 2.five" bulldoze isn't easy, so it'south not something you will want to do frequently. With most of the distances from the SATA drives to the SATA ports extremely short, Asrock has included a few shortened data cables to help keep everything neat.

Once all the hard drives were connected we installed an aftermarket CPU cooler and a graphics card.

Of note, the motherboard tray lacks a cutout then the motherboard needs to be removed from the M8. In the end, this didn't turn into a huge chore, but make sure you become it correct the first time every bit it's not a procedure you want to repeat. With the Thermaltake AXP-100 installed, information technology can be tricky getting cables such as the 4-pin CPU ability cablevision back in.

Nosotros slotted a GTX 760 through the top of the example and fit snug in the steel expansion card holder. The hookup was complete after attaching two 8-pin PCIe power connectors.

To epitomize, we added a Core i5-4430 (3GHz quad-core) processor with the Thermalright AXP-100 cooler, a pair of Kingston DDR3-1600 4GB memory modules, a Palit GeForce GTX 760 JetStream, a Samsung SSD 840 Evo 1TB SSD and a WD Red 3TB hard drive.

That works out to a full system cost of $ane,800 or $one,200 without the 1TB SSD, which isn't far off from what we achieved with our custom Silverstone SG10 build a few months agone.