Case wiring redo chronicles

Hello everyone, haven't posted here in a while so I figured I'd talk about what I'm up to. A few years back I bought a S939 system (Biostar Tforce6100-939) with a dual core 3800+, and overclocked it to 2.5GHz. I upgraded the 6600 GT in it to an 8800 GTS 320MB last year, as well as going from 1GB to 2GB RAM. I have a 700W HiPower PSU and a Coolermaster case, as well as one 750GB Seagate and one 400GB Caviar RE2. The system is aging but very nicely :)

I decided this Saturday I’d take a break from everything and re-do the cabling inside the rig. There always was something that bugged me about it, in that it was powerful and compact and all, but not really well-done from a cabling aspect. I wanted the orderly look, and supposed it’d help a little with temperatures and everything. I wanted a rig that looked awesome and custom from the inside, not something just thrown together. The objective was to make this case as organized as possible, while keeping the ease of modularity. In other words, I didn’t want something that looked pretty but was difficult to take apart.

Below is a pic of the rig before. It’s not all that bad, but wires are just strewn about all over the place, if you really look at it. The front panel wiring is disorganized, the front panel audio wiring slinks over the motherboard and a lot of other stuff just looks sloppy.

http://i38.tinypic.com/2vx0utk.jpg
Riggus Beforicus.

The first thing to do was to take everything out so the wires could be replanned. First, I removed the HDD cage to get create some room for judging distances.

http://i35.tinypic.com/15g8g0o.jpg
Harddrivus Caginium.

Okay. With that out of the way, it can be seen that the SATA wires are causing some confusion, and those other wires back there need to be pulled out of their plugs in order to reorganize them.

http://i35.tinypic.com/2roi0bp.jpg
Messus analyticus.

So I removed the video card, unplugged the SATA cables, and unplugged the PSU cables and got them out of the way. Then came the tricky part: organizing the front panel wires. I had seen some other rigs on ocforums.com, some “showcase” rigs if you will, that look neat and orderly. Why do they look neat and orderly? Because their wiring is simple, and it’s not serpentine and all over the place.

One technique of simplifying wires is to run them behind the motherboard wherever possible. This way, extra lengths of wire can be hidden out of view, with the clean, organized wiring showing. Applying this, I decided to make the front panel wires as straight as possible, making them look like they’re going into some mystery connector right under the motherboard. To do this, I straightened out the wires, separated them into a parallel-cable style, and held them down while hotgluing them to the chassis. This was the only way to ensure they’d hold their position for a long duration of time. I also rotated the intake fan 90 degrees to make the input wire come out at the chassis. Its wire is carefully routed north of the front panel wires. As you can see, this is incomplete, and the excess wire is still showing next to the front-panel connectors on the motherboard. The next step required was to remove the motherboard from the case.

http://i37.tinypic.com/jgr5h3.jpg
Frontpanelus nice-us.

Here’s the mobo. Second pic is with the video card for scale. As you can see, things are rather dusty but I cleaned them up.

http://i33.tinypic.com/2882syc.jpg
Mobos sideviewicus.

http://i33.tinypic.com/29nt155.jpg
Mobos graphiccus hugeicus.

http://i37.tinypic.com/28anos4.jpg
Mobos fronticus.

After taking the motherboard out, I carefully laid out the wires that I could hide in the area beneath where the motherboard sits, and held them in with electrical tape and hot glue. Then I put the motherboard back in.

In the pic below, I have moved the extra amount of front panel wiring behind the motherboard, and routed the USB cable behind the motherboard as well (it’s the one entering near the DIMM slots, and re-emerges next to the southbridge heatsink). I also moved the front panel audio wire so it was strung along the bottom of the case. To top it off, I cleaned up the wire routing of the northbridge fan (it connects to the PSU directly).


http://i38.tinypic.com/2dt61xl.jpg
Casus organizes notfinishus.

The serial ATA cables were a bit of a mess, and are hard to give an organized appearance, so I hot glued them together. They look like a single wire now, not some random offshoots of a plant or something.

With the basic wiring in place, I put everything else in. Hard drive cage, video card, SATA cables, etc. I cleaned up the CPU fan wiring (the exhaust and CPU fans run off the same temperature governor). I reconnected all the other wiring as well.

Behold, the finished product:

http://i36.tinypic.com/20kt8w0.jpg
Riggus aftericus.

http://i36.tinypic.com/2ii7v9w.jpg
Riggus aftericus.

Compare this last pic to the first one.

My compliments, nice job. Like the idea for the case wires. I think the only bit I'd do different would be nylon wire ties on things like the SATA cables instead of hot glue.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by leprechaun_40

My compliments, nice job. Like the idea for the case wires. I think the only bit I'd do different would be nylon wire ties on things like the SATA cables instead of hot glue.

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Yeah, if I had any money right now I would've bought sleeving, ties etc. I may do a slight "overhaul" of that in the future.