tidy cables

[sheepy]

HOW?? mine are ok but still messy, ive hid most of them inside my 3.5" and 5.25" bays but they still look messy, hints and tips any one [especially TL]

[Dr Sadako]

Rounded cables might help?

[sheepy]

i have round cables in yellow. its just all the cables coming from the psu. even though they are raped in clear cable rap they still look messy

[Gandalf]

:lol:  :lol:  :lol:  :lol:

[Stryker]

sheepy, your seeing double.  Wait till you sober up, take another look and as if by magic there will only seem to be half the cables you saw before!  :lol:

[Stryker]

tip sheepy.  Behind the motherboard backplate (the side with the solid case side panel) makes a most excellent place to hide spare cables and slack.

I'll have to post the latest pic of my rig.

[sheepy]

and what drill holes in the backplate to put the cables back through???

i dont see how to get all the cables round the backplate again.
im thinking of getting some wide corrugated tubing [like hoover tubing] but with a slit down it and fit all the cables in it.

[[XLII] CK]

i have round cables in yellow. its just all the cables coming from the psu. even though they are raped in clear cable rap they still look messy

Routing and minimalization.

I have an Enermax 430, and it's got like 5 or so big long bundled groups, each set having 2-3 connectors.  I only have 6 drives, so I only need to use two bundles that have 3 each.

And I only use the long one for the bottom three drives, and it's wrapped/tied in such a way that all you see is the one main bundle coming down to the 4th drive, then a hop of two strands to the 5th drive, and the final lone strand hop down to the bottom 6th drive.  These hopping strands are all wrapped or tied together, so that you only see a "single cable" hopping down from the top of the case from drive to drive to drive.

Same kind of thing with drives 1-3 near the top of the case, but use only a bundle that's just long enough for the furthest drive.  

Take the other un-needed 2-3 bundles and neatly wrap them and lay them down on top of the top 5.25 inch drive (I have a CDROM at the top bay in my case, and there is enough room up there for the entire 3-bundle bundle of extra power connectors.  Same thing goes for the Motherboard connector, I bundle all it's excess up together and put it above the top 5.25 inch bay, with just enough to reach the MB.

http://blacktower.dyndns.org/N42/cmpt/CKWW...an_DCP_2371.jpg

That looks worse than it is because you can see up into the space above the 5.25 CDROM, and I've still got one flat ATA cable to round (and I want to use a shorter rounded cable in place of the one commercially bought one that's too long for the job).

But *my GOD* is it an improvement over what my case used to be.  Think of 6 flat long ATA cables, totally unrouted hairball of a nest of power cables with the extra's hanging down to the bottom of the case.  I couldn't get at anything on the MB without unplugging half of everything!!  Now I can get at everything without touching anything else.

I suggest we hunt down and execute whoever decided to use flat cables in cases, and anyone still shipping computers with flat cables.

[TeaLeaf]

Sheepeh - I did pretty much the same thing as described by CK with a couple of additional things.  My case looks like this:



Starting at the top:  If you look real close you can see the wad of cables exiting my Enermax PSU.  They have been cable tied into a neat snake and the minimum number of cables needed to power all the below equipment have been separated out.

All spare power leads have been loosely cabled tied to the top of the case in the drive bay area.  The are also routed to neatly avoid obscuring my case's top blow hole fan.

The mobo power snake has been loosely cable tied to the drive bay area as well - this takes the unwanted slack out of the viewable window area and keeps it in the unseen drive bay area.

All IDE cables are round......AND......if you look carefully you will see that where they follow the same path they have been cable tied.  Two cables look messy, but tie them together and they seem like one.  

Cable ties are nice, but they are not always able to 'pin' a cable to particular spot on the case side or wall.  If you look real carefully at the lower righthand corner of the picture, you will see my hard drive removable cage (with holes) and a cable snaking down the side of it.  Slap bang in the middle of the drive cage is a silver alloy clip that has double-sided stickytape on the base.  The clip is easily bent with the fingers to either grip or release a cable - I have used these all over the place in the case - for example, they are the mounting points for my cold cathode, the retaining clip for cables in the base of the case etc.   With these clips you can pin back any cables that do not easily lend themsleves to being cable tied.

All other cables I have routed NOT down the back of the mobo/tray, but instead I have routed them down the righthand side of the case, using cable ties and clips.  So all the unwanted cabling has gone out of sight behind the CDRW/DVD drives (top right), then the floppy drive (middle right) and then the HDD cage (lower right).

Et voila!  A neat case.     Well, I think so anyway  :lol:

TL.  

[suicidal_monkey]

my personal solution was to avoid putting clear panels on my pc...

when I get back to bristol on the weekend I'll stick up a photo to make you feel better So long as none of the fans are badly impeeded and nothings overheating noticeably I'm happy to let it look messy until the day I consider beautifying the innards of the case.

How often do you guys clean the insides of your pc's to get all the dust and fluff out? Or have you taped up all non-filtered airholes?

[TeaLeaf]

How often do you guys clean the insides of your pc's to get all the dust and fluff out? Or have you taped up all non-filtered airholes?

Never and No respectively.  It's been in situ for about a year now......it will get cleaned by being replaced by something else  

TL.  

[suicidal_monkey]

mmm, fluff and dust in that blue colour

[Stryker]

Just to aid TLs walk through, here is mine.  Notice the lack of ide cables, they are all round the blind side of the harddrive mount points.
All spare power cables are behind the motherboard

[Gh0st Face Killah]

I have taken a similar route and all cables run from the psu to the top of the drive bays and then down either side out of site of the window. Because I have a number of extra lights and fans the pass through cables give me the extra length I need to be able to do this. Now the only problem that I have is the noise the beast makes, It sounds like a mothership warming its engines up on start up. Hmm I can see a watercooling kit being bought out of the redundancy money. Was it easy to fit Stryker?

[sheepy]

i think the problem is that i have a shitty little 300w psu, and im using EVERY connecter on it, and even daisy chaining about 7 things.

im going to use a method that i have seen similar things done by others, i need a bit of tubing a bit like on the back of a vacume cleener, only with a slit along it to push cables inside it, this will meen that i only have one big cable going down the drive bays


GFK - noise wise, have you thought about one of these, me and stryker are running this or similar to great effect.

http://www.pc-look.com/boutik/product_info...490&language=en