Spaghetti Junction

The power supply for the project is an older ATX 300 watt power supply, from a HP computer, and the original label credits the manufacturer as LITEON. This should have enough power for the intended use, of course, time will tell.

It has many connectors, but at this stage the important two represent motherboard and CPU power.

The yellow and black 4 pin cable on the left attaches to the ATX 12 volt CPU power connector on the motherboard, the primary purpose of this power connector is to power the VRM that supplies power to the CPU. The P1 connector on the right is a 24 pin and would usually connect to a corresponding socket on the motherboard, however, as the T1700 motherboard has many proprietary connectors, I needed that 24 pin to 8 pin adapter cable.

This is a bone of contention in the tech world, but HP, Dell and Lenovo all build in proprietary features to their systems, and I am of the opinion that those manufacturers do a great job at building solid, long lasting machines that are easy to maintain, so if they want to customize some parts, I have no objection.

The MOLEX 4 pin connector at the top of the picture is probably the one I will use to power the variable speed Antec fan I mounted at the front of the case.

Next, I installed 8GB of Crucial DDR3 memory.

As you see, there are 4 slots available, so as there is a pecking order I needed to consult the Dell technical manual once again to ensure I installed the memory correctly. It is odd that the owners manual does not have this information.

If you look at the slots above the first black slot is number 4, followed by number 1 then 3 and then 2. The correct slots for my 8GB of memory are 1 and 2. the information is also on the motherboard, but once installed it is often difficult to read the printed titles.