How to cable manage your PC like a PRO!

Today I'm going to do one of the videos that I've been asked to do over the years over and over again and I thought I'll probably never do that until today. We will do it today. We'll teach you how to

manage

cable

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cable

s now that was just the intro oh yeah so I think this is about where most people are right after they've put their components in their system and then they say now this isn't it As bad as it could be, we could have Corsair's Commander Pro system in here, which although the lighting is excellent, I absolutely hate the way Corsair has handled their wiring, it's like a module within a module, then six cables come out of it. there and another module over here and it's horrible so what I chose with this particular system these are the fractal design rgb fans they're called prism prism prism fans I think they're called prisms but I like them anyway because they are agnostic they don't, they just use normal 3 pin rgb headers and you can find them on pretty On almost every motherboard, now there are a couple of extra things you'll want to do cleanly, so you'll want to get

your

ass happy Go to your hardware store and buy some small zip ties, there are 800 of them.

You'll use 400 on this build alone and also get a good pair of fine side cutters. You don't want the big ones. You want the giant hair clippers like you would use to cut wires. You want these little guys that you can work with each other. wires to trim now some other things I have here to make this a little easier. I have two spiral pwm fan headers so it's a single socket on the motherboard that ends in three to drive three fans and then I have two of these obviously and then I have a dual fan, one here that goes from one to two and believe it or not, I actually remove it from one of these, so I end up with four fans in a single header now for writing. direction that fast, almost all modern motherboards can handle at least three fans, most fans are only like .14 amps or something and most fan headers can drive one amp, so you'll have You have to do the math to determine how many fans you can connect to a single header, worst case scenario you burn up that header, it stops working and then you're not happy.

What happens here with the fractal design fans is that they give you a header that you can connect to a source in In this case, it will be our motherboard, which is a zenith end and then they give you a male which is the p, which is the pin side and then this is obviously the side that has the holes. You can use this to daisy chain other fans. and now most rgb headers that are digital can handle a certain number of leds it's not a certain number of fans it's a certain number of leds it's usually something like 200 leds that a single header can handle and we don't have so many LEDs. on our fans, so we're going to daisy chain all of our fans and then use a single drgb or digital rgb header.

Obviously you have to pay attention to which header you plug it in because sometimes some brands like it to be a four pin hole on the end and it's not disconnected like that and then you plug it into a 12 volt rgb header that's not digital, which it's 5 volts and then you blow up all the LEDs on your fans controller, so make sure you plug it into the right header, just double check anyway, move on. I think this is where most people start and what happens is people start to get it right, especially if they're new builders, they're more concerned, make sure everything is connected correctly. way for them to start working well, this is my 24 pin and then they start, you know, plugging it in and there is no concept of order, there is no order here, order in the cart, so what I personally like do is separate my cables and just move them to where they are by themselves and as you can see right now I have the power supply loose because one of my top tips I'll show you here in a second.

Don't I just plug everything into the power supply first? I connect everything to where they will plug in on the front, I run them first and then I connect them to the power supply because then it is much easier to

manage

the excess because it is managing the excess that makes your system clean, find places to fill it out, the other thing is also to make sure you get rid of the cables that you don't need, so what I think a lot of beginners do is they just plug all the cables into their power supply, but you'll notice that in this case we have our 24 pins, which are for powering our motherboard, we have our pci express, which is obviously our graphics card, we have two of them, they are divided so that you can have a six or eight pin power supply, depending on the cables you use Come on, you can have a little daisy chain or a little pigtail coming out of it where a cable can feed your power supply, but I only have one sata plug for this, so as you can see here, I don't have all the sata plugged in.

I just have a sata that gives me one, two, three, and four headers here to connect to something. Now I don't have as many devices listed in this system. I have additional rgb controllers. I don't have a water cooler or aio here which tends to use a sata plug for its pump. Some of the older coolers use molex or like custom water cooled we use a molex but aios is usually always sata. now, but the case has its own sata header for built-in lighting which would be here because this is a 710i, so it's smart and it has its own light, but we also have a single 10 terabyte hard drive down here. and I don't think I have anything else here, honestly, that I use, it says that's why I have this cable and then here you can see I have two eps, eight pins, which is actually just four, four pins, because believe it. or not CPU powers and pairs of four, uh, because I'm running a threadripper 3960, which is the 24 core, 48 thread variant of Phil's overpowered 32 core, 64 thread system, but most people will only need a Only eight pin header for any normal system.

So I started talking earlier about how to design things. Each case will have its plug, so it will be a USB 3.0. Virtually everything has USB 3.0. If you have USBC, you will have this plug, which is just right. The connector is actually called, but it's that type and then you'll have your reset button, a headphone jack, HD audio, maybe a USB, a regular USB, depending on the age of your case, you might have a plug Old school USB 2, but these. are the plugs that each case has to make the buttons do something and then we have our sata plug for our hard drive which I always plug in last because these connectors that plug into the back of the hard drive right here, the little plastic tabs These are very fragile, if you leave it plugged in right there and move cables and things around you could break that plastic piece inside the sata connector, that's a bad day, so I always plug them in last and leave them at a side so we can We have our front and rgb fans, so we know they go to the front of the case, so I'm going to move them that way just to make it really obvious that the cables are going to come from that direction, these here are the ones The same fan headers that I just showed you from the front, but for the top, and then we have the same rgb headers and the fan that comes from the rear fan right here, since that's the back, I'm going to put it on top also So now I have kind of a visual representation of where things come from instead of having it all hanging in the back and getting tangled up and when all the wires are black it's a lot easier to get confused.

Now this is the part where I said people would start performing well. I'm going to plug in my 24 pin. I'm going to plug in my EPS and all that. I don't do it that way. I always keep the power supply out of the system and then follow if they are modular anyway this will apply to modular power supplies, if you don't have a modular power supply then you will have to do this in the reverse order of what I'm saying which is where you connect them in the end, but the concepts that I'm going to show you in terms of routing, grouping, tracking all that type of stuff will apply, take this guy, if he's modular, put him aside, this is going to dream.

Really cliché, very Aesop or religious fables. I guess you think of this as a jar. Now imagine that you have to place a bunch of stones in this jar and this amount of sand in that same jar. If you pour the sand first, the rocks. It's not going to fit because the rocks go on top of the sand and then there's all this free space between all the rocks, but first you lay out all the rocks and then you pour the sand into the sand that will fill everything. those spaces and you can make them fit, it's the same concept I use when it comes to trying to get rocks and sand into a computer, which is exactly what we do now, before we start connecting things, I take a quick look at the system to see where the cabinet is designed for the cables to go.

All cases built in the last 10 years have some sort of cable management built in, even if it's just holes to run cables through, that counts as cable management now, the nzxt 710i is not designed for an eatx motherboard, however , as you can see, I stuck one in here anyway, so what that means is that the white piece that goes here no longer fits into its native place, so what I actually did at the end of this build is I just pasted it in with double sided tape here to fill this hole and I'll do it at the end.

I just wanted to point it out right now if you've noticed I have an edtx board here so but our and our CPU power is right here that's a lucky thing because most motherboards have the EPS power here on the top left, but as you can see if you look here is where you would run your CPU power if you were to do a more traditional design, but because I have this large opening right here, I can go ahead and comfortably connect my 24 and let it hang now to confuse it with a small pendant if you look at Reno 911.

The good thing about This case you also probably saw it on the other side when it was turned over. You've got these nice cable slots here that have a zip tie or velcro built in. This is where the zip ties come in because I trimmed them, I don't know. I removed 50 of these zip ties just to prepare this and show you guys that I always tie like one two three four five along the way, especially if it's a paracord like this one, which is very flexible and what I usually do is use a lot of zip ties and then I end up cutting some off and redoing them because I want to keep them organized as I go and then I can change the zip ties or add more or remove some that I don't need later because I want all of this. to stay together nice and tight right here where it goes to this channel.

I'm going to put this here loosely, not tight, to see how I can move it that way. I can put it where I want, take it here. the end right where the channel is, so I can tighten it a little bit and I'm going to take this piece of Velcro and I'm also going to hold my 24 pin like this loosely so I can adjust it. Yes I want to, but you can see it starting with the largest wire. I can see that this cable will almost by itself take up this entire channel, which is fine, but you'll see how this expands right there and it doesn't want to do that. stay on that curve is where I'm going to put another flange and the reason I do this is when they add these channels and things like this, sometimes the case on the back doesn't have a lot of space between the channels and it's because they assume that, oh, you're using hell, it's just that they're painting our building and loud noises keep happening, we're just going to get over the noise, that's fine, but you can see right now, I've got this. bend here it comes from pin 24 it's nice and straight it's out of the way but I tie it and zip tie it because I don't want it to expand and fray because then what it's going to do is take up more space and then I've had it to the point that it lifts up too much and then it's hard to put the back panel back on the case and then I can scream because we know that's where it's going to go so there's our 24 pins nice and managed now the next thing I want to do will be good I guess which I can do CPU power in this case because normally I would be putting CPU power over here.

You can see they even give us a channel to go directly to our feed.feed, so if you have a more traditional case, which I think nine out of ten of you would probably even more than nine out of 10. Probably 99 out of 100 of you, unless you're running on a top end, the power from your EPS will go up to your motherboard like that and then it will go down like that to your power supply, but that's not how this motherboard is laid out, so once again I'm going to turn the case over again and you're going to do this a lot and that's when having some kind of lazy susan that can handle a case is really good or having a small enough table, you can just walk around it a lot, these are the two headings, let me connect them right here and if i were doing extreme overclocking on this i would be using a six pin pci express right there, that's another supplemental power just shown.

How much energy can these systems consume if you allow them to do the same? In fact, I think it might even go all the way to the top, there we go, so I didn't put any zip ties on that yet and that's okay because As you see, I can loosen up a little bit and I'm probably going to start putting two zip ties on here. The flanges are also good because they keep any radius curvature you put in there intact and now you can see. Why did I say that small side cutters will obviously make your life easier?

The large side cutters are very easy to accidentally cut through a wire because you can't tell because they are so thick, so now I can remove them. So now you can see that there is also a fan header right here. I didn't unplug my cooler fan, uh, my air cooler, it has a pwm splitter for two headers because we have two fans here, I just left it plugged in because it's pretty obvious that your air cooler will have to be plugged in somewhere on the front surface , which will be the CPU header, optional CPU, maybe a high amp fan.

Same with an aio, you'll find your aio header. plug it in there and then put the cables back under or something where you can't see it, which is exactly what I've done here, so although I've already dealt with the cables in this case, this is where you start to realize that oh, you have to move things around, you know you're not committed to anything until you're obviously done and even then you're still not committed because you can see I'm doing it all over again right now because initially I had the 24 pin and the eight pin coming out the side right here and I thought this time maybe I'd try it another way to see if it looks cleaner and I like how it looks from the front, but because Now I'm coming out of the top as you can see, instead of going in through the side with the 24 pin, I need to move the 24 pin to this side because the 8 pin needs to go there because I can't, I don't want to.

To cross it we want to avoid crossing cables as much as possible for two reasons, one it adds height because they are on top of each other, next to each other, and then two, it just doesn't look right, it's the same reason why people They activate when they see a water cooled circuit that has crossover tubes, depending on if you know the aesthetic you're going for, you can make the crossover tubes look good, but you'll never get the crossover cables to look really great and nzxt's thinking This too, I know it's not a sponsored video from ndxt, but they thought of this and that's why they have this cutout here for the cables to come in.

That's a big cut right there, so now what I'm going to do. What I do is because I know these are going to go together. Now I'm going to zip them together and when I do that I could, if I wanted to make a little more room or clean up, cut the individual zip ties. Keep in mind, I only put two per cable and then we'll just make a single cable bundle with these two, so I'm not going to go into this much further because I don't think it's going to Run my pci express over here because if it did it would have to exit from the top right here, even if I say I move this guy up somehow to make room, the pci express would come out over the top and then back down, so I think I'm just going to let the pci express come through like here, which means I'm just going to go up next to this tray and let this tray do nothing but manage the 24 pins and the eight pins for me and since here are our two eight pins, we know that the power supply goes over here, we just we'll get out of the way.

The shenanigans were taken care of, I'm a nerd, so now that that's handled, the most important thing is that it looks good. on the back, but if you look at it from the front you can see that it's clearly nice and organized, the 28 pins going up, the 24 pins coming out and if you look at it from the front you can't see those wires at all and I'm going to save the fans and RGB for last because believe it or not, they're going to be the biggest disaster in this system, so what I'm going to do next is handle the rest of the case by wiring this up like I already showed you what it is. just the front panel, uh, the Reese's power reset button, what I do too is, like I said jokingly before, I said I just like to fill it in, honestly that's what I do, I just find a place where I can hide the wire. and I put it away now, a very common place for that is a drive case if you have a drive case that's not removable like this one here, although it's kind of slide-in and it's removable, I guess if yours is riveted and you can.

Don't remove it, that's a perfect place to just grab the excess wires, especially if you have a non-modular power supply, just know, fold the wires back on themselves like this, put a zip tie around them and then do this with them, so I have pci express power, but before I do that I want to handle our um usbc connector here and I want to handle our usb 3.0, this is the one that sucks, this is the best plug they could come up with, but this is a hard plug , it's huge, it's ugly and half the time there's nothing you can do with it since you can't bend it much.

Unfortunately, these are flat. Most of the time, a big, thick round cable is just plain ugly. What I'm going to do here is because it goes right here, right below pin 24, there's actually room for two of them. I'm going to go ahead and plug it in now, now I can see what I have left over. As for the cable, or the ice remnants of the cable here, I think I want it to go up there. It could also be like that. It actually works and just having it squished there a little bit, like that. You really want to avoid this as much as you can for the simple fact that you don't want to break the cable internally, so I'm going to reconsider a bit.

I'm going to come over here, so as you can see now, I've got it putting it back on that tray. and then when I look at it from the front it looks like it comes with the 24 pin and that's fine. This is the part that sucks because I want to use this tray, but I really feel like they should have made it bigger. I'm not afraid to modify my stuff and since I want it to maybe wrap around this disk and go back into that hole over there, that little space over here isn't big enough to allow that to happen, so I'm going to trim it out. . just a little bit, which should be enough, let's look at that, now let me show you what that allows me to do if I need to get rid of something of that length, I can do it here, look at that and then do the same little trim here. and that's so much better because I'll tell you right now, I'm one of those people that subscribes to the program and I don't care what's going on here, hosting it here definitely makes it better because if you have to unplug something and replace something it's easier than just having a ball of wires stuffed in there and you have to deal with all this later, at least now you can trace it and make it make a little sense and I think this seems perfectly fine, that's exactly what that disk is for, is for routing cables, okay, let's go ahead, this is our front panel, let's go ahead and just route this down, okay, now we have it, as you can see through here. and then we have this slack here and now what we can do is we can just look at this and say okay, this is where we need it to be and we can fold it like this and then we'll let the velcro do its job and I know this may seem like a bit of sense. common, but if you go and look at photos of people's builds, you'll see what happens: they focus so much on whether the system works or not.

Don't go back and do any of this to get that corner done and yes, I know it's all flip-floppy and foldable, but there's only so much I can do with a ribbon cable that's too long. I'm not going to use HD audio. I never connect HD audio because no matter how much they try to insulate these cables or should I say protect them, they always pick up hum from the computer, especially if it runs through any type of power cable, so what I do in many cases is remove the front panel and just disconnect it or even cut it off the front header, but I didn't do that, in this case I'm just going to do that. as I showed you before, allowing it to be out of sight, out of mind, down there we need to do pci express, so let's do it now, let's take the side that is listed for the graphics card because your modular cables will be psu.

There will be a label on the side psu and then pcie, so the one that doesn't say psu is obviously what goes to your graphics card, push it in, plug it in and do the same thing we did with the 24 pin now because these zip ties go to make it visible Once you cut them, turn the small coupler part back so you can't see it from the front. The nice thing is that on most chassis you will have these little tabs and they are designed to You should have a place to hook a cable tie or any type of cable management tie.

You have them everywhere where there is no channel and you have one here too and you can see I actually used it for my USB header. so I'm going to do that with this guy too, I'm going to run it over there and this is what's going to hold my pci express cables in there, we're going to make sure it's not pulling too much on any metal edges. I'm sure it can move freely and the pci express cables are already ready so all the main cables except for our sata are there. What I need to make now are USB 3.0 fans in RGB, so basically I'm going to make this the way I did. with our usbc cable, the usb 3 cable is also keyed, there are a lot of pins you want to make sure you line them all up before bending the pin, it should go in pretty smoothly without any force needed oh hey i see a mark here apparently this is the way that I had it before because that's where I was here it's good to know that I'm consistent consistently bad according to some people consistency is consistency bro look how much I like to undo things like it's all closed with velcro You have to undo it because you don't want them things move and while you work on other parts of the case, always tie things where they're going to be and that's why in every speed building competition. have I ever lost has been because of this and I do this every time even on one speed setting and what I would like to point out is that I actually gained some speed settings by doing this with beautiful cable management and still built the PC faster and other times I barely missed it in a matter of minutes and it looked so good that you'll see at the end or like you saw at the beginning, while the other system just looks like an idiot, okay, let's take a look at how it looks from the front so far this is what it's going to end up looking like yeah believe it or not there's just double sided tape on the top right here taped here if you look at how much of a wiring mess we have.

That's not so bad because I only have two devices listed. I'm going to go ahead and plug them in from time to time, being the box plug and the hard drive plug, so I'm going to let the box plug have the one on the end and we're lucky that this cable allows the one on the end be flat and not at right angles as many of them do. We're going to go down to the next size, our next head we plug into our hard drive. drive and we're going to take all the excess and push it in there and that's here now with the power cord, so these are all of our power cords.

We could put this power supply in right now, but I don't want to however, I want to handle the rest of this because if I do this the same as I did before, we'll have a bunch of zigzag wires, crimped on top of each other, zip-tied and tied to each other. these guys because I said I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven RGB headers and seven fan headers that I now have to make sense of and I remember I hated this last time and I'm going to hate it more this time so I will concentrate. first I turn on the fan power so I'm going to go ahead and connect these three to my splitter and the nice thing about this is this gives me a place to be okay here are our links so I'm going to zip them together. just for now and I could undo this later right here, now what it allows me to do is just remove the slack and I can see now where our mess is going, so I'm going to tie these up along the way. and I'm going to use a lot of zip ties because these cables just have a mind of their own.

Look,there they are like a fan and no matter how hard you try to train this, they will do that and it sucks, but you're not going to see it, so whatever, but what I'm doing is loosening the slack up to where they're mounted, so by doing it That way I have pushed the disorder somewhere. where can I handle it what can I do now if I want to make it a little bit cleaner so I'm going to tie it to itself there's a hole that we're obviously not using in the fan and then the tie goes down to the fan and then I'm going to find the header on the motherboard.

I want to connect them. You can only see it because the white wire is actually the ground wire on this one and is visible on top. what kind of it sucks, but it's a black and white box so it goes with the theme, so now that you've seen the concept of how I think about wiring and stuff, let me finish wiring these other fan and rgb sockets and I'll show you the last step, so here are all the rgb cables, as you can see, I made a kind of harness with them and the thing is that obviously we are going to have some extra length, so what I have done here is as you can see, i have zip tied it, but every time i connect a daisy chain, it folds back on itself and zip ties, fold it back zip up to where we get to this because what we want in the end is obviously just the one cable that feeds the whole daisy chain now I said before that it was going to line up here, which is actually perfect because I have this pigtail right here that can go through there, the header for the rgb is right on the other side right here on the bottom and then as soon as I tie this up here, it will be on top, out of the way and free of the power supply, which will be our last step, literally, plugging in our power supply, so I'm going to use these hooks that they're very well placed, if these hooks weren't here you can get them, they're just a little stick on the cable management, what they're basically called, it's like a little twist, it's got two little ones. little balls on the end and like if you twist them and they come together and you unscrew them, it opens up so you can get them and put them in your cases anywhere you want, shut up Phil, to do.

It's much easier to manage the cables, so I'm just zip-tying them out of the way. I'll probably just do both. I'll make one more right there. You see how they are still like they just got an idea of ​​their Oh, something else I did to you you may have noticed is that I put duct tape around each of the RGB sockets, they don't stay together very well and they will separate and if one disconnects all the lights after that, it will not do so. it turns on, so I put some electrical tape around it to keep it from falling apart, but now that that's done, we just need to take our sata cable and plug it in, and I always plug it in right behind the graphics card because then I know something hidden, put everything under the hard drive, plug it in, so what I'm going to do now is start connecting them to our power supply right in the back, here, and what I usually do is start with whatever is on the back bottom and move up because if you have all the top plugs plugged in then it's harder to get to the bottom ones, now that everything is plugged in we can go ahead and push it in slowly to make sure the wires don't get in the way anywhere, the last thing What we are going to do is put on the back cover and then we will see if there are any cables sticking out somewhere that we don't want to see.

Ah, things that try to teach people how to do it. do something like a professional and you yourself are an idiot, keep it up haha, people will realize that you don't know anything now, everything is done and perfect the first time, okay, let's go and take a look at the front, no . bad, what we're going to do now is take my little decorative piece that really has no function other than to look pretty, our side panel for the back is white, so if there are any cables that we don't like if they get stuck in a place we don't like will definitely be shown, we also want to make sure it is closed.

Remember how I said, if you put wires on top of wires, these fan headers will come together right here, these fan sockets are gone. causing it to close because unfortunately, uh, nzxt didn't build any kind of extra height into the back panel, you can see it's perfectly flush, a lot of case manufacturers will take it out a little bit and then come back so you really have like a cubicle. Built into the side panel, this one doesn't have that, so like I said before, if you put it too high on these trays you probably won't be able to close it and that's exactly what I'm just dealing with now. so all I had to do was move those plugs where now they can relax like they're not tied down, but okay, there we go and this is what the finished product looks like, oh, little piece of velcro stuck on.

It took us less than two hours there, although cable management got us this. Now this is something anyone can do with any system at any time. If you're looking at yours, you can always take it apart and rebuild it. The cables look good and all we used are zip ties and side cutters and some electrical tape for the rgb stuff which you can easily get at any hardware store. This is something that would definitely make you much happier to watch than just watching cable. scattered around you guys have been asking me over and over again Jay please make a cable management guide there you have it what are your best tips for cable management write them in the comments below and like always guys subscribe if you aren't already. thanks for watching and see you next time