I got a pi 2B with an sd card with noobs. I´d like to access it later on with tight VNC.

My problem is the first boot up. I have the pi connected via an ethernet cable-

in the first scenario to my laptop: the idea was to run dhcp serv from my laptop, assign my pi an ipadress automatically and then ssh connect to it via putty

in the second scenario to my router, so as my router would assign it an ipadress that i could later on ssh connect via putty.

i have 2 ways of checking which devices with which ip adresses are in my network
 a) via accessing my router and checking the connected devices
 b) via the advanced ip scanner (scanning my network and subnetworks)

I seem to be doing something wrong as i just can´t figure out if the pi got it´s adress. i gues not because otherwise id see it somewhere.

Whole lotta sorry for the simple question, tried some of the widely spread tutorials already.