Gadgetory

excellent a week ago I decided to finally tackle the power supply sleeping job for the arctic panther it was the main thing holding me back on the project and I figured I would spend maybe an afternoon getting the hang of it and then maybe finished the next day right now I don't necessarily have a lot of power supply sleeping experience so I'm not going to say here's how to do this in this video but I will talk through some of the steps as well as explain how I worked around some of the problems I encountered I'm using all of the existing wires from the fractal Newton art 3,000 watt power supply this includes four non modular connectors the 24 pin and eight pin for the motherboard and two 8 pin PCI Express graphics connectors I've also got two more modular 8 10 peg connectors three modular peripheral cables and the pup wires to worry about that makes 81 total wires to sleeve and over 100 pins to first extract and then eventually replace so the benefit of sleeping the existing PSU cables is if all goes well I don't have to crimp any pins onto the cables which can be a pain in the butt just check out Kyle's video on doing a cable extension the drawback is you have to deepen all of the connectors first this did simplify my equipment list initially though so all I needed from mainframe Kustoms was the proper amount of sleeping to cover all my wires plus about 20 percent just in case a good amount of heat shrink some cable snips and the invaluable ATX PIN extractor since I was learning as well I decided to start small with a modular PCI Express graphics cable and since there's not a universal standard for modular power supplies I of course began by making a diagram of all the wires and where their pin locations were on both ends you should be doing this for every cable that you might be sleeping what I'm going to start off with right now though is doing another one of these another peg connector 8 pin just like the one I did up there it has the unique situation where it's got a double peg connector on the end and I'm actually snipping one of them off because I don't want both of them on there so these are the 80 expert extractors and I'm just gonna show you how these work real quick if you're looking at the actual plug you can see the pins inside each little pin connector so you just line up the prongs on the extractor you're going to go like side to side or one on each side if you're looking at the plug from side to side like this with the latch on top you just got to slide it down into the little space between the plug and the pin and sometimes it takes a little finagling there we go it'll push down in like that now you want to double check and make sure that the prongs are actually outside each side of the pin that'll be a pretty tight fit in there once you get it pushed down all the way you should be able to extract the pin however it's still pretty tough to do so get a good grasp on it or if you really need to use some pliers down at the base right here just don't squeeze too hard because you might crush the actual cable and should be able to wiggle and pull it out it's not coming just give it a harder tug and it should come out and so should depend extractor so after getting all the pins out these cables can just be separated one at a time and then I can sleeve them before putting the cable back together my pattern for the eight pins calls for four black cables and four white cables I started off measuring the sleeving for each cable by hand but later I used a tip from Mike aka Lou TRO and made a fixed ruler board so I could measure quickly and accurately which I definitely recommend just don't stretch this leaving much while you're measuring it each piece should be cut to line up at a very specific spot between the wings that grip the wire and the two that stick up closer to the end of the pin remembering that these are up will help later on too so keep that in mind but when you step the ends of the sleeving here go ahead and just put the edge of your flame up against them for just a second feather them down and that will help things from fraying put that done go ahead and feed in the end of the cable like so just keep pushing it until you can't push it any further in eventually you're going to need to bring up fines where the actual cable is and start to do this push it through grab it let go push it through grabbed it and on and on down the line we go alright so now the end is out here check the other end and see how close we are so this is this is pretty good when I stretch this out the sleeving along the cord here it's going to push this end down all the further so that should be where it needs to be it's probably going to push down to the end here even a bit further so that should be fine okay so here's the deal with securing this end on basically we're going to put the heat shrink over the this leaving we're going to shrink the heat shrink down while also melting thus leaving the heat shrink is going to compress the sleeping right here and create a bond with this to tip with this specific point on the plug this plugs a little bit fatter right here because it's one of the ones I had two wires going into it originally but that's okay we're going to use that to our advantage we're going to go right around it we're going to push up to in between that and these upward set of prongs right here there's so there's like wings on the outside we're not looking at those we're looking at these upward set we want to be able to sit in between there we don't want to touch them and but we want to be over enough so that if we can actually grab on to this little bump right there for that so let's give this a shot here leave that on we're going to put our little piece of heat shrink over it I'll let the heat shrink creep out just a little bit over the end we're going to let our lighter we're going to bring it down here and we're going to warm this up try not to burn our hands and we're going to it's going to take six seven eight seconds to shrink down on there get nice and hot and that should be good there now we're going to give it a quick little pat here just really quick it's hot but not terribly hot also going to get some in our hands is something to be concerned about when we're doing the whites leaving because you don't want to mess up the lights leaving but uh that's done on there give it just a couple seconds to cool a bit but then sniff up the side here this is my clue trail Lanen burgers at least that's where I learn this pull that off the heat shrink came off entirely and all we have left here is the melted plastic from the actual sleeving which is now kind of shrank down there and gripped on and that will at will hold very well that's a pretty decent one actually I'm surprised I did an okay job considering that I was recording but hey luck was with me so now we need to do the other end so from here we're just going to kind of pull down this way and give a little bit of pressure as we pull and as I predicted the sleeving pushed down and came out to about there now that's a little bit too long so this would be rent one reason to measure a little bit more accurately because you could not have to do what I'm about to do which is clip off the end of this leaving alright so trimmed off about this much sleeping I didn't show you that part because you're not supposed to do that you should just measure carefully when you first when you first start out but fortunately you're on the other end I've managed to pull it down I can actually still pull it down to where it gets to about here but it snaps back pretty dramatically because it's being stretched pretty tightly but I'm right about where I should be again so I should pop on my heat shrink since I did not do the no free thing on this I don't want it to free on me and I got to keep a little bit of pressure on the cable here to keep that heat thus leaving from from sliding back but here goes again I will rotate a little bit this time trying to use the blue part of the flame I'm messing up because I'm filming at the same time okay I probably held that a little bit too long that time got a little bit of smoke you don't really want that but live tap it down a little bit and here comes that heat shrink again and how'd that go not terrible could be better what you really want is this kind of look right here where it just melted down all around the outside I don't have that quite completely but now both ends of our wire sleeved and we just got to do this eight more times you I have now eight of these sleeved cables but the next step now is going to be to plug these into the actual plug so I'll start with this side now since these are modular cables and not extensions I need to pay very close attention to which plug is going in where again that's why I made that chart earlier and I'm going to start off by plugging in these the other thing to point out when you're plugging in these plugs back into the plugs there's two sets of wings on each of these little connectors there's two on the side right here and there's two little tiny tiny ones that stick up on the top right there which can cut you like that slice I have in my finger right there fortunately didn't go too deep but these two little prongs you want to face up with relation to the latch on your plug so that's pretty much all you need to know other than that you just push straight in until it snaps into place and it might take a little bit of pushing to get the sleeving part to go into the plug again depending on how how well I guess how well you did your job at the end there you can see it's starting to slide through like there and then should make a little click when it actually snaps into place now this was very very silent but yeah it made a little snapping sound and now it's in there snugly and it shouldn't pull back out you should need the extraction tool to get that back out of there so all right let's do the other seven those are the basic steps for this process and it's not terribly difficult to get down after a few tries but it can be pretty rough on your fingers and your patience for that matter remember how I thought I would finish in a couple days I was wrong dead wrong so I was feeling pretty good after I finished a couple of the modular cables I even set up a three SATA connector inline custom job for my drive cage that will look good from the front I promise but then I ran into troubles that you might have caught in my sleeping snack in this video from last weekend I broke an ATX pin I didn't have all the tools I needed and I also discovered that soldering would be required thanks to some of the pins of the 24 pin connector actually having two wires leading into them which would just look awful if you tried to sleeve both of them I was a little discouraged but I pressed on I got the crimper I needed from Kyle and I picked up some solder and I moved on to draining my loop so I could get at those pump cables I also finally pulled the whole power supply out of the case my plan was to leave all the cables back into the power supply housing which probably meant I needed to expand the hole something I'm usually pretty good at so I did my power supply sleeving snafus video but I didn't mention this one I hadn't gotten this far along coming directly from this power supply we have some thicker gauge cables that split out into two or three other cables this happens a good no.23 inches outside of where the power supply the hole exit hole is so like I can't sleeve these down this direction I would need to get thicker sleeving to sleeve over all them once which I don't have but the and I can't really sleep from the other end either because I'm not going to desolder the stuff inside the power supply I'm not I'm not that good so here's my solution for the first bit coming out of the power supply until it goes back behind the motherboard tray I'm going to be using this so some other sleeving that's the cable organizer com don't worry about them and they've taken this sleeving which is actually tech flex PT expandable sleeping now this generally isn't as good for sleeping a power supply because it's not nearly as like thick I'm sorry it's not nearly as densely woven but the reason hopefully I'm going to get away with it is because I'm going to be painting all the cables black I'll probably I might double up on this too then I'm going to bring that out part way until a point where it will be a behind the motherboard tray and everything else I'll sleeve up to that point so the other thing I've been doing is pulling the caps off of these permanently wired in power supply cables so I've ripped them all up and I've taped the ends serving two purposes one is to protect the plug themselves from the paint when I think it well so I've labeled each one so I know when I put them back together where each one goes and I've done that with each and every single one and I'm going to make sure I stay very diligent as I continue to do that with the power supply cable right here after that things got a little hazy but I do recall putting the power supply in a paper bag to protect it well I did my best to spray-paint the wiring I mainly wanted to avoid hitting the PSU internals the paint on the wires could be terrible as it's mostly there to keep the colors from shining through thus leaving after the paint dried though I used the tech flex leaving which can expand a lot thankfully to fit all the cables through I doubled up on it izip tied inside the PSU and then I was able to close the housing back up without widening the hole which was a nice benefit grant from then on out I just had more sleeving to do working on the eight pin peg and CPU connectors and hoping that I hadn't sprayed over the labels on my little wire flagging system I actually did on a few of them but I was able to peel back the tape and shine a flashlight through it to read them thankfully my method was to remove a flag sleeve that cable then plug it into the proper pin out on the connector before moving on to the next wire this kept things in order I also used a black sharpie on the wire to cover over anywhere that the paint had chipped off when I was finally down to the last connector the dreaded 24 pin I fired up my soldering iron which promptly died because it was a really cheap one from a Roseville tool kit after getting a new one with fancy features like an on/off switch and a light I again used the Aleut ro Kustoms method to deal with the four double wire cables I'll post a link in the description if you want to check out the how-to video on this basically remove a section of sleeve from one wire then you splice in solder in the second wire down away from the connector where it will be hidden by the motherboard tray then cover it with heat shrink of course this is the part I feel least qualified to give instruction on so check out Mike's video for more information after that I was free to sleep the last 24 wires ok 23 wires actually there's a blank pin on this power supply but I made a dummy wire for the connector side just for looks after all the connectors were back in I was finally finished but that wasn't all there was that final moment of truth plugging in the power supply tester to see if I was successful or if there was smoke and flames and this all was for nothing thank God and there you have it this is this project is finished this portion of this project is finished this power supply has been sleeved but let's let's do a little finals summation summary here am I happy with this project yes I am very happy with this project so far I'm particularly happy since I plugged it in of the power supply so it still works that I'm still like red and higher for that would I do this again I wouldn't do it again with this power supply to be honest it was just the little complexities that it threw in there were a little bit too much to have to deal with at least a second time I would do this again possibly with a different power supply a fully modular power supply I think would be a an easier thing to do this project with so if you are thinking about doing this maybe do that that or just get cable extensions just go over to a mainframe custom and get get your own you know just have them do it for you save a bunch of time that's that's easy enough to do but yeah I mean I am happy I did this because of the experience I gained I got some soldering experience I got to kind of work around some problems that I ran into and that's always kind of challenging and fun and ultimately I'm happy that I have a workable finished project product now there are obviously some some really rough spots here like you know some gaps in places like your on the cable connectors and fortunately where as at least as far as I planned most of those won't be visible and the finish build but I'm speaking of which the finished build coming up very soon though is going to be the finale of this project the installation of the drives I got a couple 512 gig SSDs from Samsung as well as the intel SSD 750 I am going to be reinstalling all of the water cooling stuff I'm going to be pulling out the rest of the water cooling stuff I'm going to do still but um this was the most major of it the most time consuming and all the rest of that stuff I'm really looking forward to so I'm going to get to that ASAP stay tuned for that video very soon thanks for watching this one don't forget to subscribe grab hit the like button of course we'll see you next time on Paul's hardware