Gadgetory

in our very popular and not at all infamous series the workshop we did an episode where we demonstrated that cable management tucking away all your cables in most cases pun intended has no tangible effect on performance or even cooling so then when we set out to do this cable management guide sponsored by our buds over at Kim law we figured well hell if deep down it's just about the looks let's make sure it looks as good as it can so here is how to cable manage like a pro the first thing we needed was a test subject so we borrowed our triple headed VR project machine it already looked reasonably clean from the front but as for the backside well eivin's excuse was I was Russian now in fairness to him though this machine has six hard drives seven RGB fans with individual leads to their respective light controllers and to make matters worse it's older-style 900 D chassis has no power supply shroud so there is a visible rat's nest down at the bottom to tame the overgrowth then we'll need some tools we recommend a pair of side cutters a set of small and large zip ties and some double-sided tape and also some basic cable mesh or sleeving goes a long way next you need to visualize remember guys to have your wiring looking its best you need to avoid any diagonal lines and try to minimize crossings so you can't just start tucking things away without a clear end goal in your mind's eye in fact this is so important that if you're having trouble I would legitimately suggest that you draw it out in paint if you need keeping in mind of course that due to small variances it is likely that you'll end up having to make a few tweaks as you go next assuming that you're working on a system that's already built begin by yanking out the larger cables completely to get them out of the way and cleaning up the small ones with your small zip ties you should use existing case crevices to hide these small cables and you can also use that empty cavity behind where DVD drives used to go remember those oh that's that's a good spot to hide the extra length of front i/o cables on the motherboard side use memory slot lines to hide your runs and then while you're at all of this keep in mind where your thicker runs go you can use those to hide your thin runs later on planning pro tip number one leave the SATA cables for last because the drive side connectors in particular are really flimsy and they are surprisingly easy to accidentally break off while you're running or tightening something else pro tip number two sometimes rotating a fan can give its cable a cleaner run pro tip number three label your fan connectors this makes it easier to reconfigure your airflow and your RGB patterns once it's not obvious anymore which cables belong to which fan pro tip number four if you have a modular power supply hide your unsightly power supply side modular cables in the cavity behind the psu tip number five if you can't hide a thin cable run some basic wire mesh makes it look a lot more professional and flattening the run beforehand helps to avoid snake meal mesh bulbs tip number six replace your existing double sided tape on things like your RGB controllers it might still be residually sticky but it is much more likely to fall off after a reapplication than not hot glue is also a pretty good one here if you've been following along so far you're well on your way but you've probably run into some situations where you have no choice but to commit a cardinal sin sometimes your stock cables are simply too short to avoid diagonal lines what would you do so one way around this is to use the area between the motherboard and the cases motherboard tray wherever possible this technique is also popular for making the front i/o cables look cleaner on the motherboard side just make sure you don't put anything too bulky in there flex is not good for your motherboard as for your graphics card you got a couple of options here you can run the power cables from the top down for a little bit of sag support or you can run them from underneath for a cleaner look we opted for the straight down method since the extra two PCI Express power pins ended up looking really ugly otherwise there is also the new option by the way of using a vertical GPU adapter but these are for single card setups only they are somewhat reliant on case compatibility and the last issue our machine has more than one GPU so a time lapse later and using all the tips that we just gave you you can behold then the fruits of our labor our system looks way cleaner both from the front and from the back so thanks for watching it no actually I'm just kidding this wouldn't be much of an ultimate guide without some custom cables from kala mod would it now for many people only front side looks are important so cable wat extensions are a quick easy and relatively inexpensive way to spruce up your machines looks you only need a few of them to make a noticeable difference to the look of most machines for others though extensions are about like putting a park bench on a Civic and calling it a spoiler so for them there are the prepackaged cable mod replacement kits which are available in a variety of colors and patterns and for pretty much every modular power supply model under the Sun we are going one step further cable mods ultimate offering custom length and colored cables so to cut out your system the first thing you need to do is measure your run lengths but you can't just do this any old way like don't use a string we actually recommend using a wire so we cut a 12 gauge wire because this helps simulate the way that the custom cables will actually Bend once they're installed we're also gonna try to address the clump of PCI Express cables by the power supply by calculating which cables we can run hidden behind others it's important to get each length of run exactly right and make sure you're checking exactly the terminal that you'll use because if you measure the model to the same one the end result might not align as perfectly as you might like with our lengths at hand we dialed them into the configurator which allows details like the number of pre-installed comb and distance between SATA connectors and then about a week later our pro cables with thicker wires and pre-installed combs arrived when you're looking these up we actually suggest pre bending the cables into the desired shape before you install them it helps more than you might think then right last but not least we mentioned cable combs but you should probably explain those cable combs can be used not only to keep your individually sleeved wires apart but to ensure that parallel runs are indeed parallel and they stay there ok then so since all the cables were pre-made to lengths installing them was an absolute breeze and this is our real end result so as you can see the front looks cleaner er the clump on the bottom is minimized and then the biggest difference is on the back especially when you look at the before and after I mean it went from something that we'd really rather hide to something we'd actually want to show up I mean maybe that's the next trend in computer cases windows on both sides oh wait they've actually been doing that so thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or even consider checking out our sponsors cable mod at the link below to where you can buy their stuff also link down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join