My First Go At Cable Managment!
Hello People,
Im pretty new to these parts of the forum but as I had my PC in bits tonight I thought I would make my first attempt at a spot of cable managment! I have never really bothered before and it has usually just been a case of plug stuff in and it will do.
I have an Antec 900 case which a lot of people speak very highly of. I have to say as a case it is quite nice but in terms of cable management I found it pretty tricky. A lot of people seemed to be recomending running cables behind the motherboard but as it has no removable MB tray and only 3 tiny holes (one of which is under the MB) it was a little tricky to do this.
Also the large drive bays made life quite difficult as they are basically 5.25" racks which the 3.5" bays fit into so there is no room around them.
My rig originally consisted of the basic bones of the system plus two SATA drives 3.5" Floppy drive, CD Drive and Fan Controller.
The biggest area I wanted to improve on was the fan cabling. The 900 has two 120mm intakes on the front, one 120mm exhaust on the rear and a 200mm exhaust on the top. This was quite a bit of cable to run.
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures before I started as I was dismantling the system to mount a new HD which I had taken from an external drive and it wasn't until I was halfway through unplugging stuff I decided to do the tidy.
The "new" HD is an IDE drive which was previously an External Firewire drive. I have been having a few problems with it and as I only use it for back up storage I decided to mount it internally. This gave me the first problem This drive is IDE and all the rest are SATA. This meant either I had to mount it down with the other HDs and run two bulky IDE cables (one for CD and one for HD) or mount it near the CD and use one cable.
I opted to remove my floppy drive and mount it with the CD drive and fan controler. I found that by positioning the fan controler at the top of the bank, the HD in the middle and the CD at the bottom I could utilise the gaps in the chasis, which are left where the drive supports are bent in, to feed a power cable down to the two intake fans. The rear fan i simply ran under the MB although I have to confess I was being a little lazy and I didn't completely remove the board but just unscrewed on pin and Pushed it under.
The top exhaust is right next to the controller so I had no problems with that. I also could use the space above the new HD to conceal the spare cabling.
The only downside with this setup is that you could see all the mess I had hidden through the front grills.
I decided to fix this by putting a piece of black card in behind the grill. Not the mos professional but it does the job for now.
Next up were another two flaws in the design of the 900. The PSU is mounted in the bottom and my mobo is clearly designed to be installed into a case with a top mounted PSU. Both power conectors are at the top of the board. You will have to excuse my ignorance here but I know there is the large ATX power conecter but there is also a small 4 pin one and I cant remember what it powers
Any way, the only way I could run the four pin to the top was under the PCI cards. The cable just wasn't long enough to take any other route!
I just pushed the excess SATA and power cables through to the back of the mobo and tied everything down.
Its not the best job I have seen but it is a lot better that it was. If anyone has any advice on how it can be bettered please let me know.
//edit: I should also note that I have a black cover for the fan controller and I intend to swotch it when I buy the correct sized allen keys to get the old one off!!!
Im pretty new to these parts of the forum but as I had my PC in bits tonight I thought I would make my first attempt at a spot of cable managment! I have never really bothered before and it has usually just been a case of plug stuff in and it will do.
I have an Antec 900 case which a lot of people speak very highly of. I have to say as a case it is quite nice but in terms of cable management I found it pretty tricky. A lot of people seemed to be recomending running cables behind the motherboard but as it has no removable MB tray and only 3 tiny holes (one of which is under the MB) it was a little tricky to do this.
Also the large drive bays made life quite difficult as they are basically 5.25" racks which the 3.5" bays fit into so there is no room around them.
My rig originally consisted of the basic bones of the system plus two SATA drives 3.5" Floppy drive, CD Drive and Fan Controller.
The biggest area I wanted to improve on was the fan cabling. The 900 has two 120mm intakes on the front, one 120mm exhaust on the rear and a 200mm exhaust on the top. This was quite a bit of cable to run.
Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures before I started as I was dismantling the system to mount a new HD which I had taken from an external drive and it wasn't until I was halfway through unplugging stuff I decided to do the tidy.
The "new" HD is an IDE drive which was previously an External Firewire drive. I have been having a few problems with it and as I only use it for back up storage I decided to mount it internally. This gave me the first problem This drive is IDE and all the rest are SATA. This meant either I had to mount it down with the other HDs and run two bulky IDE cables (one for CD and one for HD) or mount it near the CD and use one cable.
I opted to remove my floppy drive and mount it with the CD drive and fan controler. I found that by positioning the fan controler at the top of the bank, the HD in the middle and the CD at the bottom I could utilise the gaps in the chasis, which are left where the drive supports are bent in, to feed a power cable down to the two intake fans. The rear fan i simply ran under the MB although I have to confess I was being a little lazy and I didn't completely remove the board but just unscrewed on pin and Pushed it under.
The top exhaust is right next to the controller so I had no problems with that. I also could use the space above the new HD to conceal the spare cabling.
The only downside with this setup is that you could see all the mess I had hidden through the front grills.
I decided to fix this by putting a piece of black card in behind the grill. Not the mos professional but it does the job for now.
Next up were another two flaws in the design of the 900. The PSU is mounted in the bottom and my mobo is clearly designed to be installed into a case with a top mounted PSU. Both power conectors are at the top of the board. You will have to excuse my ignorance here but I know there is the large ATX power conecter but there is also a small 4 pin one and I cant remember what it powers
Any way, the only way I could run the four pin to the top was under the PCI cards. The cable just wasn't long enough to take any other route!
I just pushed the excess SATA and power cables through to the back of the mobo and tied everything down.
Its not the best job I have seen but it is a lot better that it was. If anyone has any advice on how it can be bettered please let me know.
//edit: I should also note that I have a black cover for the fan controller and I intend to swotch it when I buy the correct sized allen keys to get the old one off!!!
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Comments
The only thing that caught my eye was if you could pass the HSF wire under the fan instead of above it so you don't see it.
I have a corsair power supply too. I find those thick black cables a pain to deal with. I think rounded cables come out the best looking.
Looks slick! Great job!
DO it!
@ OP: Looks good and clean. The important thing is the airflow, and your airways are perfect. Nice work. Did your temps drop after rearranging the cables?
On the temp front im not to sure. As it was a spur of the moment type thing I don't know what they were like before. I dont generally have the fans turned up too high either as they can be a little noisey. I should really have some sort of temp monitor running but im fairly sure i dont have a problem.
The only concern I have is that the air flow around my newly installed HD isn't good. There aren't any fans nearby and I blocked the grill at the front to hide the cables.
I'm not really sure how sensitive HDs are to heat?
Thanks for the achievment too Prime! I have another project on the cards too.
You do want to do something about the hard drives. they are not like a processor but without a fan blowing over them, it has been my experience, they fail sooner.