Found in PC Extreme Issue #14

 Perhaps one of the most overlooked system enhancements of all amongst custom system builders is cable management. Learn how to manage all your system wiring in this complete how-to guide.

Tools & Parts Needed:
• Heat Shrink
• Rounded IDE cables
• Zip ties and cable wrap

Intro:
This guide is perhaps long over due on the pages of PCX. But then again, it’s easy to overlook something so obvious. Cable management is something that is so often times disregarded in the area of custom PC construction. We constantly get emails regarding many of our modded or custom computers here at PCX asking, “How did you get the case to end up looking so clean?” or, “Where are all the molex and IDE wires? Your case looks so spotless!” It’s to those people that we address this guide.

Cable management is by no means a new idea, and is definitely not uncharted territory; however, we are convinced we have some new tactics that you’ll be glad you read about as you proceed. Interior cable management has a few benefits: for one it should cost you no more than a couple £s to get the parts you’ll end up needing; cable management, when paired with the appropriate fans and cooling schematic, can dramatically decrease internal case temperatures; and probably most important of all, it just looks so much better than having tons of spare wires hanging and protruding from everywhere. Especially when you consider how many of us actually reading this magazine have some sort of acrylic or lexan window in the side of our cases.

If you take a look at some of the top PC manufacturers on the market you will notice that most all of the quality manufacturers incorporate some sort of cable management into their PC construction. Aleinware and Dell are a great example of this. They incorporate mild internal cable management into their systems as the assemble them and the end result is a structured looking PC. Compare this to some of the other, lower-cost independent PC manufacturers out there and your more than likely to find a nest of wires as you shed case.

As we proceed with this guide we will take you step by step down the best course of managing the tangle of wiry mess inside your PC. We will be taking one of our tried and true in house servers and reworking it from the ground up to show you the before and after effect of how cable management can work for you. Keep in mind, as we proceed, that we cannot offer a literal guide that you can follow step by step. This is mainly due to the fact that just about every ATX case available on the market has a different design and layout to follow. Instead, we can offer the best way to handle or deal with certain scenarios in general and some suggestions and tips on how to hide and run cabling and wiring within your PC.

The challenge in proceeding forward is not necessarily to find out how to jam all of your cables all into one hidden area. On the contrary, the challenge that is cable management is more often how to best hide and reroute wiring from point A to point B without it being seen. Nothing can detract from your expensive cases elegance faster than a huge mess of molex plugs and random wires so our best bet is to run most of our cables out of site if at all possible. Remember, creativity counts when considering the best routing for your systems wiring configurations.
 

Boxout:.
Computer Cooling and Airflow Basics (Boxout_Airflow.jpg)
Ever think about why your CPU socket on your motherboard is always on the top left corner? Come to think about it, have you ever noticed that the socket is always up on the top left at all? Well it resides up there for a good reason and that is so it can work hand in hand with proper case airflow and cooling dynamics.

Good case airflow should, in theory, start at the front of you computer case and from there the proper fan should suck cool air into the case from outside. You can tell the direction and rotation of your computers fans by looking closely on the housing of each fan. There you should find two arrows, one denoting the rotation of the fan and the other portraying the airflow direction.  After the cool air has been sucked into the case it should follow its current back in and up, inside the computer case. The reason that it flows upward has to do with a few things. As the air inside the case’s confines heats up it slowly rises; in addition, you should have at least one or two exhaust fans blowing the air back out of the case near the rear, under the power supply. As the airflow moves back and up inside the PC’s case it will naturally run overtop of the CPU and heatsink, in theory, cooling them both further on its way either up into the PSU (if you have a dual fan’d PSU) or else out the back door through the cases exhaust fan(s). In short this is how case airflow dynamics are meant to work; in the front and out the back.

Guide:.

Step 1: (photo / Step 1 – Worst Case)
This is the guts to one of our internal file servers here at PCX. We would like to think of this as somewhat of a worst case scenario. This is “zero” cable management, basically when this server was put together it was more a case of “plug and go” rather than any form of cable management. Note* we didn’t even mount the new 120gig Western Digital HD we installed.

Step 2: (photo / Step 2 – Supplies)
In order to get this ball rolling we need the right supplies. Though the gear we need may seem small, it is somewhat irreplaceable. From left to right we have acquired some zip ties, heat shrink tubing, cable sleeving and some rounded IDE cables (assuming you haven’t gone SATA).

Step 3: (photo / Step 3 – Gutted)
Basically to start you should pretty much gut the PC. Start by yanking the board and pulling all the PSU cables out the back side of the case. Mount all your internal IDE devices how and where you want them and start from ground zero.

Step 4: (photo / Step 4 – Unwire)
Before we actually get to the case itself lets start on the motherboard while we have that pulled. Pull the heatshrink off of the socket and use a small screwdriver (like those found in an eyeglass kit) to depress the small tabs on the end of the fan interface of the heatshrink. This will free the wires up so we can run them down through the board and out of site.

Step 5: (photo / Step 5 – Heatshrink)
After the end piece is free of the fan wires slide a long portion of heatshrink tubing over the wires. The heatshrink will serve a few purposes. It will encase and protect the wires further as well as stealthing them via the black, out-of-site tubing. Use a lighter sparingly to shrink the tubing around the wires.

Step 6: (photo / Step 6 – Down Through)
Before you clip the end piece back onto the Heatsink fan header run it down through one of the holes around the socket. These holes are available for a bolt-on style Heatsink or water block but will serve our purposes nicely for hiding this wire. After you have run the wires down in you can reapply the fan header.

Step 7: (photo / Step 7 – Northbridge)
We ended up using a very similar approach for that untidy north bridge fan header wire. Again, we removed the fan header end piece and wrapped the wires in heatshrink. Then we ran the whole mess down the closest screw hole we could find and then back up again. The slack of the cable tidily resides beneath the motherboard and out of view.

Step 8 (photo / Step 8 – Sleeving)
We chose to up and sleeve our whole wiring harness cluster for the power switch, reset, LEDs and such. Sleeving is very patience-oriented to deal with though the end results are unrivaled. Make sure you heatshrink both ends of the sleeving to keep a nice tidy look and feel.

Step 9: (photo / Step 9 – Mount)
Go ahead and mount the board back onto the motherboard tray. Make sure that everything you can possibly run under it and out of view has been run down there before remounting the board back into the case.

Step 10: (photo / Step 10 – Backside)
Go ahead and flip the case over and pull all the PSU wires around back. From here you can hide all of your useless wires, fan headers and everything else you won’t be needing for the computer in questions. Run the molex plugs and everything else you might need along the backside of the drive bays and out of site.

Step 11: (photo / Step 11 – Rounded IDE)
Though you will never get rid of every cable in your case, rounded IDE cables are about the best you could hope for. These round cables help to increase air flow in your case by not blocking currents of air that big flat IDE cables tend to do.

Step 12: (photo / Step 12 – Main ATX)
We also took the liberty to sleeve the ugliest cable of all. The main ATX PSU cable powering the board got some nice black sleeving treatment. When running this cable try to jam as much of it as possible back behind the motherboard, lurch the rest of it up, around and down the board to the ATX socket.

Step 13: (photo / Step 13 – Molex)
The molex connectors in and of themselves could be the most challenging piece in the puzzle. It would be ideal to sleeve each and every one of these, however, this is amazingly time consuming so we decided to let you have the fun. When running molex plugs lightly bend the cables over themselves at the molex connector itself. This will allow for less of the cable to be seen behind the plug itself.

Step 14: (photo / Step 14 – Done)
And there you have it, all done! We have not yet installed our PCI and AGP cards yet but we are convinced you’ve learned enough about cable management by this far to undermine that on your own. The biggest challenges you might face are your video cards external molex connector.