Gadgetory

excellent hey what's up everybody welcome back to the channel Paul here and it's just a kind of a lazy Sunday morning I am doing my thing working out some computers back here behind me and I wasn't really planning to do a video today but I decided to make one this is what is hopefully a tutorial I'm not sure if it'll be a tutorial because I don't know how things are going to turn out yet on how to deal with unsightly power supply cables specifically the 24 pin but this can't apply to others as well let me give you an example of what I'm talking about so this is the blue build that I did a month or two ago in the BitFenix ages case and this is going over to my cousin so I guess that answers another question I get asked often is what do I do with old hardware the builds that I put together this one's go to my cousin but I couldn't give them everything that was supposed to be and I had to swap out some parts so for instance I got a 960 instead of the 970 because it's my only 970 I need to keep that for benchmarking I have a thermal take ni CL 32 cooler in there because I using the NR max cooler for this month's build as well which is coming very soon stay tuned for that and then also I had to swap out the power supply because that BitFenix power supply I was actually borrowing from J now that power supply had really really nice sleeved cables I'm switching it out for the cooler for the Corsair CS 450 M but let me let me extract this really quick from my totally legit static free workstation it's a chair and bring over here to show you guys so this is the cs 450 M a little foreign 50 watt power supply since I'm using a 960 this will have plenty of juice this is a great power supply 80 plus gold rated and and lots of other stuff too it's got partial modularity it's got nice all-black cables but it has a very very common thing that I see with lots of systems which is this part of the 24 pin so if you've ever watched awesome Hardware the live show the cowl and I do every Tuesday evening at 5:30 p.m. Pacific time you might have heard us do the Pitt my PC bit that's usually on Kyle's half of the show and we often rail on this when it comes to builds as far as something that people could fix up and make better cuz it's like that I got nothing against a rainbow you know rainbows are pretty but like nothing matches here you got this kind of darker orange you got black you got rid you have like this teal and blue and purple and gray and it's just is hideous none of those colors match theoretically the color is line up with like different voltages and all that stuff so it's somewhat important I guess but if you don't want to do what I did and spends like half your life or half a month at least on doing a custom sleeping job which looks great but it's just it's insanely time consuming I decided I wanted to figure out a way to do it much quicker and much simpler and something that folks could at home without too much trouble so here's my solution basically I'm going to be spray-painting this section of the cables with plastidip in a very similar manner to what I did with the SLI bridge tutorial that I did a couple weeks back I know they're very very similar videos I have no excuses in order to do this if you want to do it at home you're going to need some Plasti Dip itself I'm using the camo version of black because it has a bit more of a matte finish as far as I can tell and I like that matte finish you're also going to need some painters tape or some masking tape because we are going to want to mask this off and that's about it you'll need an open area usually you should do this outside in a well-ventilated area and then I'm just going to be masking this off now I'm going to mask the sleeve itself up to about here I'm going to paint over this so it kind of keeps maybe a little bit more uniformity from there to where the cables go and then I'm going to be masking off the plug here the reason I'm using Plasti Dip is well there's a few different reasons one is it's flexible so since this cable is going to need to bend over yeah it's going to need to like Bend pretty significantly like that in order to plug in and route to behind the motherboard tray the the plastic enos of the Plasti Dip and it being flexible it's much better for that if you use regular paint it might crack or something when you actually try to plug it in i hope the Plasti Dip is stretchy enough to do that another reason is that it's completely non conductive and different types of paints can have different type of conductivity you really don't want to risk getting some paint up in up in here and bridging one of those connections accidentally so for that reason again Plasti Dip is just a bit safer third reason is this will void your warranty most likely but if you're really frugal or whatever and that's a concern of yours Plasti Dip does peel off kind of just like plastic if you want it to and there is a chance that you might be able to peel everything off right here now the the pitfalls that I might be dealing with here are going to be the paint getting kind of clogged up in between the cables right so hopefully by using the proper painting methods of starting to spray off to the side and spraying over the cables will fix that but yeah I'm just going to go ahead and mask this all off take it outside spray it down and we'll come back and see what the results are so I ended up actually doing a couple coats on this I trade the first coat on with the cables pretty much going straight I took it and based on where the clasp is under here I kind of bent the wires in the direction that they're going to be when they're actually installed in the case down there that sort of separated some of them and exposed some more of the places that hadn't gotten paint on them and I was able to go in and kind of do a little bit of cleanup now there's definitely some rough spots this is definitely looking to be more like a 10 foot mod but I think it's getting the job done so you can see where some of the the Plasti Dip has kind of fused together especially where the wires are coming together there's also spots like right under here where you know I didn't get full coverage I could go back and do further coats there but when this is installed it's going to be bent that way and I think that'll be okay also getting up like under here which is going to be kind of visible and then spraying even down towards the interior of this was something else I did to try to minimize just anything that came through I got a little bit of pooling of the Plasti Dip along the edge here but I think it'll be alright I'm just removing the last bit of masking here and then I'll give it a give it a shot in the case and see what it looks like one other thing I mentioned this in my SLI bridge video peeling this off can sometimes start peeling the Plasti Dip here as well I'm going to use an exacto to separate it but a tip I got and thanks to those of you guys who posted in the comments section on that video is that if you remove the masking while the Plasti Dip is still wet and it will just peel off and it won't start peeling up the Plasti Dip too so that's another possibility and there she is ladies and gentlemen the the finished product or at least to finish finish enough for now the whole bill doesn't put together yet but if you're wondering what I was going to do about the power supply itself I'm going to use the power supply cover at the BitFenix he just comes with and that will kind of block off some of the green from the cs4 50m the cable model or the modification of the actual 24 pin I have mixed feelings about I honestly was hoping it would come out just maybe a little bit cleaner than it did it's not bad by any extense but I mean you can just see especially where all the cables come together some of the kind of mishmash II stuff that happened with Plasti Dip there and and you know it just wasn't perfect it's it's as I said a ten-foot mod from further away it does I think what it's meant to do which is it blends in and it doesn't draw attention and it doesn't make it look like just a mash-up of color that kind of throws the whole color scheme of everything else off apart from that I have kind of a primary color scheme going with some red a little bit of yellow from the Crucial Ballistix memory that I threw in there and blue of course but I think overall I'm happy with this the fact that it is still morning right now and I'm done is a very very significant factor in that so let me know what you guys think though I think that's really what this is going to come down to is if you guys think that this type of little modification is worth it considering that it was like seven or eight bucks for the can of Plasti Dip which I actually already had masking tape and that's pretty much it maybe an hour worth of your time depending on how much you spend on unque blowing Andry cabling things and also how many coats you do I end up ended up doing a third coat and I think that's probably the the most significant thing that I learned in this little mod was that pre bending this section of cable in the direction that you wanted it to go and and twisting that so that it exposes any of the wires it might be kind of kind of laid out in that position it's really really helpful and doing that a third time and adding the third coat is what helped me pretty much cover up just about all the color that might be peeking through there let me know again in the comments guys what you think of this mod if you think it's worth it should it should you do something like this should you go for like paying for cable extensions which might cost you I don't know thirty to sixty dollars depending on what you get and how many of them you get or should you just go full out and likes leave your own cables like I did with arctic panther let me know what you think let me know if any of you guys are actually considering doing this mod that now that you've seen me do it and of course leave me a thumbs up on your way out if you enjoyed this video stay tuned for your s and benchmarking stuff coming up this week don't forget to subscribe for those and we'll see you very soon you