If you’ve been following this series over the past few weeks, you’ve probably been wondering what the finished system looks like. Here it is, at home under my office desk. The Micronics case has tinted tempered glass sides to show off the lighted interior. I felt pressure to keep my cabling at least somewhat neat. I was tempted to buy a video card equipped with lighted fans and mounting it sideways to show them off. But I’m more subtle in my ways.

In addition to the components I mentioned in my earlier posts, this system includes a 2TB hard drive in the lowest of the two bays at the bottom. This computer will primarily be used to replace my aged (but serviceable) iMac. So my primary boot device is a 1TB solid state drive with MacOS installed on it. I’ve configured a 500GB solid state drive to boot Windows 10 on occasion There is an optical drive for Blu-ray, DVD, and CD burning accessible from the front panel.

This was my first ever attempt to build my own computer from scratch. It took pretty much one whole day to complete the hardware configuration on my own (with a lot of pauses to shoot photos). My son helped me through the software installation. That took about six hours the next day. It takes a lot of manual editing in order to get a MacOS installation to work on non-Macintosh hardware, but it was so worth it.