The big turn-on

The first signs of life

Well, the time has come to flick the switch and see what happens ...... big drum-roll please ......  But first we need to connect our new computer up to a monitor and keyboard and mouse.  For the keyboard and mouse we just used old ones that we had lying around and for the monitor we used the HDMI input on our TV.  We'll need a new monitor eventually but for the moment this will do.  And ..... what happened?  Well, no fireworks, so that's good, and the first screen we saw is the top picture here.  Fantastic!

The first screen in the BIOS settings

Remember that there is no operating system installed yet, so what we can see here is the program called the BIOS, which is already installed on the mobo.  Hitting the Delete key got us into a bunch of blue setup screens - too many to show them all but here are a couple.  We looked at them all, but didn't change any settings.  It's mainly just reassuring to see that the computer thinks you have installed all the same components that you think you have.

CPU temperature: 28 degs

One thing we couldn't help noticing though is that the computer sounds like a jumbo jet!  Sounds like we've overdone it on the fans!  You might not be able to see it clearly, but the second blue screen here shows that BIOS has measured the temperature of the CPU at 28 degrees Centigrade.  From the Intel specs for our processor, it seems like this number could safely be as high as 69, so we have a little room to play with.  We plan to tinker with the fans a bit to see if we can reduce the noise without raising the temperature too much.