How to cable manage your PC like a PRO!

today i'm gonna do one of the videos that i've been requested to do over the years over and over and over and i was like i'm probably never gonna do that until today we're gonna do it today today we're gonna teach you how to cable manage like a pro not like me like a pro drop your temperatures and get maximum performance from your processor with corsair's new a500 air cooler intuitive slide and lock fan mount system allows for variable mounting height providing the largest range of ram compatibility and ease of installation while the ml 120 fans provide high static pressure at low volume levels to learn more about the all-new a500 from corsair click the link in the description below actually i need to tear the cables out now that was just the intro oh yeah so i think this is about where most people find themselves right after they've put their components in their system and then they're like now this isn't as bad as it could be we could have corsair's commander pro system in here which although the lighting is great i absolutely hate the way corsair has handled their wiring it's like module into a module then six wires coming out of that and another module over here and it's just it's it's awful so what i chose with this particular system these are the um fractal design rgb fans they're called prism prisma prisma fans i think they're called prismas but anyway i like them because they are agnostic they do not they just use regular 3-pin rgb headers and you can find these on pretty much every motherboard now there's a couple of extra things that you're going to want to do this cleanly so you're going to want to take your happy butt down to your hardware store pick up some small zip ties there's 800 of them we'll be using 400 in this build alone also get yourself a nice pair of fine side cutters you don't want the big ones you want the big giant clippers like you would use to cut cable you want these small ones that you can work in between cables to trim now some other things that i've got in here to make this a little bit easier i have got two pigtail pwm fan headers so it's a single plug onto the motherboard terminating to three to handle three fans and then i've got two of these obviously and then i've got one double fan one right here that goes from one to two and believe it or not i actually take that off of one of these so i end up with four fans on a single header now to kind of address that real quick pretty much all modern motherboards can handle at least three fans most fans are only like .14 amp or something like that and most fan headers can handle an amp so you're gonna have to do the math to determine how many fans that you can plug into a single header worst case scenario you burn out that header it stops working and then that you're just unhappy what happens here with uh fractal design fans is they give you one header that you could plug into a source in this case it's going to be our motherboard which is a zenith extreme and then they give you one male which is the p that's the pin side and then this is obviously the side that has the holes um you can use this to daisy chain onto other fans and such now most rgb headers that are digital can handle a certain amount of leds it's not a certain amount of fans it's a certain amount of leds usually it's something like 200 leds a single header can handle and we don't have nearly that many leds in our fans so we're going to actually be daisy chaining all of our fans together and then using a single drgb or digital rgb header you obviously want to pay attention which header you plug it into because sometimes some brands like to have it be a four pin hole on the end and it's not plugged off like that one and then you plug it into a 12 volt rgb header which is not digital which is 5 volt and then you blow up all the leds in the controller in your fans so make sure you plug it into the right header just double check anyway moving on um i think this is where most people start and what happens is people start going okay especially if they're new builders they're more concerned make sure everything's plugged in in the right way so they start going okay this is my 24 pin and then they start you know plugging it in and there's no concept of order there's no order around here order in the cart [Music] so what i personally like to do is i like to kind of separate my cables and just sort of move them off to where they're kind of by themselves and as you can see i've got it right now the the psu loose because one of my major tips i'm going to show you here in a second is i don't plug everything into the power supply first i plug everything in to where they're gonna be plugged in on the front side first run them through and then plug them into the power supply because then it's a lot easier to manage the excess because it's managing the excess that makes your system clean finding places to stuff it the other thing too is making sure you get rid of any 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 in this instance we have our 24 pin which is for our motherboard power we have our pci express which is for obviously our graphics card we've got two of those they are split so that you can have a six pin or an eight pin your power supply depending on which cables they come with might have a little daisy chain or a little pigtail coming off of it where one cable can power 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 only have one sata which gives me one two three four headers here to plug into something now i don't have that many stated devices in this system i don't have any extra rgb controllers i don't have a water cooler or an aio in here which tends to use a sata plug for its pump um some of the older coolers use molex or like custom water cooled we use a molex but aios usually always sata now but the case has its own sata header on it for built-in lighting that would be in here because this is a 710i so it's an intelligent and it has a its own light stuff but we also have a single 10 terabyte hard drive down here and i don't think i have anything else in here honestly that uses says that's why i've got this one cable and then over here you can see i've got two eps eight pins which are just actually four four pins because believe it or not cpu powers and pairs of fours 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 are going to only need a single eight pin header for any regular system so i started talking earlier about laying things out your every case is going to have its case plug so that's going to be a usb 3.0 pretty much everything has usb 3.0 if you have usbc you're going to have this plug which is a fair the connector is actually called but it's that guy and then you're going to have your your reset power button a headphone jack hd audio maybe a usb regular usb depending on the age of your case you might have an old-school usb 2 plug but these are the plugs that every case has to make the buttons do something oh 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 on here are very brittle if you leave this plugged in right there and you're moving cables and stuff around you could potentially break that plastic piece off inside the sata connector that's a bad day so i always plug these in last and set it aside so we've got our front side fans and rgb so we know those go to the front of the case so i am going to move those that way just to make it really obvious the cables are going to be coming from that direction these right here are the same fan headers i just showed you from the front but for the top so and then we've got the same headers rgb and fan coming from the rear fan right here since that's the rear i'm going to put that over the top as well so now i've kind of kind of got a bit of a visual representation of where stuff is coming from instead of having it all hanging in the back and getting all tangled and when all the cables are black it's just that much easier to get confused now this is the part where i said people will start going okay i'm gonna plug in my 24 pin i'm gonna 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 i keep if they're modular anyway this is going to apply to modular power supplies if you don't have a modular power supply then you are going to have to do this in kind of the reverse order of what i'm saying which is where you plug them in at the end but the concepts i'm going to show you in terms of routing bundling tracing all that sort of stuff is going to apply take this guy if it's modular set it aside this is going to sound really cliche very aesop's fables or religious i guess you will think of this as like a jar now imagine you had to fit a pile of rocks in this jar and this amount of sand in that same jar if you pour the sand in first the rocks aren't going to fit because the rocks go on top of the sand right and then there's all that free space in between all the rocks but you put all the rocks in first and then you pour the sand in the sand is going to fill in all those gaps and you can get it to fit it's the same concept i use when it comes to trying to cram rocks and sand into a computer which is exactly what we do now before i start plugging stuff in i take a quick look around the system to see where the case is designed for cables to go every case built in the last 10 years has some sort of cable management built in even if it's just holes for you to pass cables through that counts as cable management now the nzxt 710i is not designed for an eatx motherboard however as you can see i crammed one in here anyway so what that meant is the white piece that goes right here doesn't fit into its native spot anymore so what i actually do did at the end of this build is i just double-sided taped it in right here so it filled this hole and i'll be doing that at the end i just wanted to point that out right now if you guys have noticed that i have an edtx board in here that's why but our and our cpu power is right here that's kind of fortunate because most motherboards have the eps power up here in the top left but as you can see if you look right here that's where you would pass your cpu power through if you were going to be doing a more traditional layout but because i've got this nice big opening right here i can go ahead and just comfortably plug in my 24 pin and just let it dangle now to be confused with a little dangle if you watch reno 911. the nice thing about this case too is you probably saw on the other side when it was turned around it has these nice cable grooves right here which have zip tie or velcro built into it this is where your zip ties come in because i clipped about i don't know 50 of these zip ties off just to get this ready to show you guys i always zip tie like one two three four five along the way especially if it's a paracord like this which is very flexible and what i tend to do is use a lot of zip ties and then end up cutting some and redoing it because i want to keep it organized as i go and then i can change any zip ties or add more or take some away that i don't need later on so because i want this all to stay together nice and tight right here where it's going into this channel i'm going to sort of just put this on here loose not tight see how i can still move it that way i can put it where i want it get it here to the end right where the channel is then i can tighten that down a little bit and i'm going to take this velcro piece and i'm going to also just sort of hold my 24 pin in like that loosely right so i can still adjust it if i want but you can see by starting with the larger cable i can see now this cable almost by itself is going to take up this entire channel which is fine but you see how this is kind of flaring out right there and not wanting to stay on that bend is where i'm going to put another zip tie and the reason why i'm doing this is when they add these channels and stuff like this sometimes the case on the back does not have a lot of room between the channel and it because they kind of assume like oh you're using the hell was that they're painting our building and loud noises keep happening we're just gonna work through the noise that's fine but you can see right now i've got this bend here it's coming from the 24 pin it's nice and straight it's out of the way but i bundle it and zip tie it because i don't want it expanding and kind of fraying out because then what's going to do is it's going to take up more room and then i've actually had it to where it lifts up too high and then it's hard to put the case back panel back on and then i can just be like whoop because we know that's where it's going to go right so there's our 24 pin nice and managed now the next thing i want to do is going to be the well i guess i can do cpu power in this instance because normally i'd be putting cpu power through here you can see they even give us a channel to come straight down to our power supply so if you have a more traditional case which i think like nine out of ten of you were going to have probably even more than nine out of 10. probably 99 out of 100 of you unless you're running a zenith extreme are going to have your eps power going up into your motherboard like that and then you're gonna have it come down like this to your power supply but that's not how this motherboard is laid out so once again i'm gonna turn the case back around and you'll be doing this a lot and this is when having some sort of a lazy susan that can handle a case is really nice or having a small enough table you can just walk around it a bunch these are the two headers let me plug them into right here and if i were doing extreme overclocking on this i'd be using a six pin pci express right there as well that's another supplemental power just shows you how much power these systems can draw if you uh if you allow them to so same thing in fact i think i might even come up through the top there we go so i didn't put any zip ties on that yet and that's fine because as you see i can pull some of the slack out there and i'm going to probably get two zip ties started on here the zip ties are also nice because they keep any radius bend you put in there kind of intact and now you can see why i said the small side cutters obviously going to make life easier for you big side cutters it's too easy to accidentally cut right through a wire because you can't tell because they're they're so thick so now i can pull this back through like this now you can you can see there's this fan header right here too i didn't unplug my fan cooler uh my air cooler this has a pwm splitter to two headers because we have two fans in here i just left that plugged in because it's pretty obvious that your air cooler is gonna have to plug in somewhere on the surface of the of the front which is gonna be either the cpu header cpu optional maybe a high amp fan same thing with an aio you're gonna find your aio header plug it in there and then kind of stuff the cables back underneath it or something where you can't see it which is exactly what i've done here so even though i have already cable managed this case this is where you start to realize like oh you have to move things around you know you're not committed to anything until obviously you're done and even then you're still not committed because you can see i'm doing it all over again right now um because initially i had the 24 pin and the and the eight pin coming out the side right here and i thought this time around maybe i'll try it the other way to see if it looks any cleaner and i like the way it looks from the front but because i'm now coming off the top as you can see instead of coming in the side with the 24 pin i need to move the 24 pin over to this side because the 8 pin needs to go there because i can't i don't want to cross it we want to avoid crossing cables as much as possible for two reasons one it adds height because they're on top of each other so next to each other and then two it just doesn't look good it's the same reason why people get all triggered when they see a water cooled loop that has crossing tubes depending on you know your aesthetic you're going for you can make crossing tubes look good but you're never going to make crossing cables really look very good and nzxt's thought of this too i know this is not a sponsored ndxt video but they thought of this which is why they've got this cut out right here for the cables to make it in it's a big cut out right there [Applause] so now what i'm going to do is because i know that these are going to be going together i'm now going to zip tie these together and when i do that i could then if i wanted to to make a little extra room or cleaner cut off the individual zip ties i put on you notice i only put two per cable and then we'll just made a single cable bundle out of these two so i'm not going to be really running too much more through this because i don't think i'm gonna run my pci express through here because if i did it would have to be coming out of the top right here like even if i let's say i move this guy up in some way to make room the pci express would be coming out the top and then going back down so i think i'm just going to let the pci express go through like right here which means i'll just come up next to this tray and i'm going to let this tray do nothing but manage the 24 pin and the eight pin for me and because here's our two eight pins we know the power supply goes over here we'll just get out of the way there mischief managed i'm a nerd so now that that's managed more importantly it looks it looks all right on the back but if you look at it from the front you can see it's clearly nice and organized the 28 pins going up there 24 pin coming out there 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 the rgbs for last because they believe it or not are going to be the biggest mess in this system all right so what i'm going to do next is handle the rest of the case wiring this as i already showed you is just the front panel uh reese power reset button what i do too is i like i said earlier jokingly i said i just like to stuff it quite honestly that's what i do i just find a place where i can hide the wire and i tuck it away now a real common place for that is a drive cage if you have a drive cage that's not removable like this one here although this is slidable stuff um and it is removable i guess if yours is riveted in and you can't remove it that's a perfect place to just take excess wires especially if you have a non-modular power supply just you know kind of fold the wires back on themselves like this put a zip tie around them and then do this with them so we've got 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 one like this is the best plug they could come up with but this is it's a stiff rigid plug it's huge it's ugly and half the time there's nothing you can do with it like you can't really bend it very much unfortunately these are flat other most a lot of times a big thick round cable is just ugly so what i'm going to do here is because it goes right here right under the 24 pin there's actually room for two of them i'm going to go ahead and plug it in now now i can see like what i've got left over wise cable wise or leftover cable ice here i think i want it to go up in there it could also go like that it actually works out and just have it kind of smooshed in there like that you you really you want to avoid this as much as you can for the simple fact that you don't want to break the wire internally so i'm going to rethink that a little bit i'm going to come here so as you can see now i just have it looping back in that tray and then when i look at it from the front it just looks like it comes right out with the 24 pin and that's fine see 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 because i want it to maybe wrap around this puck and go back into that hole right there that little gap right here isn't big enough to let it happen so i'm going to trim it just a little bit which should be enough there we go see that now let me show you what that allows me to do if i need to get rid of some of that length [Applause] i can do it here see that and then do the same little trim here and that is way better because i will tell you right now i'm one of those people that subscribe to the i kind of don't care what's going on back here organizing it back 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 just shoved in there and you've got to deal with all this later at least now you can sort of trace it and have it make a little bit of sense and i think this looks perfectly fine that's actually exactly what that puck is for is for routing wires okay moving on this is our front panel we are going to go ahead and just route this down through okay so now we've got that as you can see coming up through here and then we've got this slack here and now what we can do is we can just sort of look at this and be like all right right there is where we sort of need it to be and we can fold it over like this and then we will let the velcro do its job and i know that this might seem like some really common sense type stuff but if you go and you look at pictures of people's builds see what happens is they become so focused on whether or not the system works they don't come back and do any of this so that corner is kind of done and yeah i know it's all flip-floppy and foldy but i can't do much with a flat cable that's too long i am not going to use hd audio i never plug hd audio in because no matter how much they try and insulate these wires or i should say shield these wires they always pick up buzzing noises from the computer especially if it runs right along any sort of a power cable so i am going to what i do in a lot of instances is i'll take the front panel off and just unplug it or even cut it off of the front header but i didn't do that in this case i'm just going to be doing the thing like i showed you earlier which is letting it sort of be like out of sight out of mind down there we need to do pci express so let's do that now grab the side that's listed for graphics card because your modular cables are going to be psu it's going to be a side label psu and then pcie so the one that doesn't say psu is obviously what goes to your graphics card push it through plug it in and do just like we did with the 24 pin now because these zip ties are going to be visible once you cut them off rotate the little coupler part to the back so you can't really see it from the front now the nice thing is on most chassis you're going to have these these little tabs and these are designed for you to have a place to hook a zip tie or any sort of cable management tie to you've got them all over the place where there's no channel and you got one right here too and you can see i actually used that for my usb header so i'm going to be doing that with this guy as well i'm going to run that through there and this is what's gonna be holding my pci express cables down there we go make sure it's not pulling too tight on anything metal edge make sure it can move freely and pci express cables are now done so all the major cables the exception of our sata are in there what i need to do now is usb 3.0 fans in rgb so i'm going to basically do this just like i did with our usbc cable the usb 3 cable is also keyed there's a lot of pins you want to make sure you line them all up before you bend the pin it should go in pretty smoothly without any need for force oh hey i see a mark right here apparently this is the way i had it before because that that's from where it was in here it's good to know i'm consistent consistently bad according to some people consistency's consistency bro see how much i have to like undo things like it's it's all velcroed down you got to undo it it's cause you don't want things moving around and while you're working on other parts of the case so always tie things down where they're gonna be and this is why in every single speed build competition i've ever had that i've lost has been because of this and i do this every time even in a speed build and what i'd like to point out is i've actually won some speed builds doing this having beautiful cable management and still built the pc faster and then other times barely lost by a matter of minutes and had it look this good that you're going to see at the end or like you saw at the start while the other system just looks like ass all right let's take a look at what it looks like from the front so far so that's how it's going to end up looking yeah believe it or not there's just double sided tape on the top right here taped up here if you look at the amount of wiring mess we have that ain't not too too bad next because i only have two stated devices i'm gonna go ahead and plug those in now and again that being the case plug and the hard drive plug so i'm gonna let the case plug have the one on the end and we're fortunate that this cable lets the one on the end be flat and not be a right angle like a lot of them do we are going to step down to our next size our next header plug that into our hard drive and we are going to take all the excess and shove it down there and that's over here now with the power supply cable so these are all of our power supply cables we could put this power supply in right now but i don't want to yet i want to get the rest of this all managed because if i do this the same as i did before we are going to have quite the bundle of wires zigzagged crimped down on top of each other zip tied and tied to these guys because i said i've got one two three four five six seven rgb headers and seven fan headers that i now have to make sense out of and i remember i hated this last time and i'm gonna hate it more this time so i'm gonna focus on fan power first so i'm going to go ahead and plug these three into my splitter and the nice thing about this is this sort of gives me a place to be like okay here's our links so i'm going to zip tie these together just for now and i might undo this later right here now that allows me to do is sort of just take out the slack and i can just sort of see now where does our mess go so i'm going to zip tie these along the way and i'm going to use a lot of zip ties because these cables just have a mind of their own see right there they're like fanning out and no matter how much you try and train this they're going to do that and it sucks but you're not going to see it so whatever but what i'm doing is i'm taking the slack out all the way back to where they're mounted so doing that that way i've kind of pushed the mess somewhere where i can manage it what i can do now if i want to to make this a little bit cleaner so i'm going to actually zip tie it to itself there's a hole that we're obviously not using on the fan and then zip tie it down to the fan and then i'm going to find the header on the motherboard i want to plug those into you can only kind of see it because the white wire is actually the ground wire on this one and it's uh visible on the top which kind of sucks but it's a white and black case so it just goes with the theme so now that you guys have seen like the concept of how i think about the wiring and stuff let me just finish wiring up these other fan plugs and rgb and we'll show you uh the very last step all right so here are all the rgb cables as you can see i sort of made a harness out of it and the thing is we're going to have some extra length obviously so what i've done here is as you can see i've zip tied it but every time i plugged in a daisy chain it's folded back on itself and zip tied fold it back zip tied to where we get to this because what we want at the end obviously it's just the one cable that's feeding all the daisy chain now i said earlier it was going to line up up here which is actually perfect because i've got this pigtail right here that can go up through there the header for the rgb is right the other side right here on the bottom and then as soon as i zip tie this up here it's going to be up and out of the way and clear of the power supply which will then just be our very last step literally is plug in our power supply so i'm going to use these hooks which are very nicely placed if these hooks were not here you can get they're just a little stick on cable management what they're called basically they just it's like a little twist deal it's got a little two little balls on the end of it and like you twist it and they'll snap together and you untwist it it opens up so like does that you can get those and put those in your cases anywhere you want to make it shut up phil to make it a lot easier to cable manage so i'm just zip tying these up out of the way i'll probably just do the two i'll do one more right there you see how these are like still like just got a mind of their own oh something else i did to you might have noticed is i put tape around each one of the rgb plugs they don't stay together very well and they'll they'll pull apart and if one unplugs every light after that won't light up so i just put a little bit of electrical tape around it to keep it from coming apart but now that that's done we just have to take our sata cable plug it in and i always plug it in right behind the graphics card because then it's kind of hidden shove it all in underneath the hard drive plug it in so what i'm going to do now is i'm just going to start plugging these into our power supply right through the back right here and what i tend to do is start with whatever goes on the bottom and work your way up because if you have all the top plugs in then it's harder to get to the bottom ones all right now that everything's plugged in we can go ahead and slowly push it in make sure wires don't interfere anywhere the last thing we're going to do is put on our back cover and then we're going to see if there's any wires poking out anywhere we don't want to see them ah stuff trying to teach people how to do something like a pro and you're an idiot yourself keep it up jay people are going to realize you don't know anything now it's all done and perfect the first time all right let's go and take a look at the front side there not bad so we're going to do now is we're going to take my little trim piece that really has no function anymore other than to look pretty our side panel for the back is white so if there's any wires that we don't like sticking in a spot we don't like them it's going to definitely show we also want to make sure that closes remember how i said if you put wires on top of wires they'll bunch up these fan headers right here these fan plugs are not causing it to close because unfortunately uh nzxt did not build any sort of like extra height into the back panel you can see it's perfectly flush a lot of case manufacturers will have it like pop out some and then go back so you actually have like a cubby built into the side panel this one doesn't have that so like i said earlier if you build it up too high in these trays then you probably won't be able to get it to close and that's exactly what i just dealt with right now so all i had to do was move those plugs where they can now just sort of chill out kind of over here it's not tied down but that's fine there we go and this is what it looks like for the finished product oh little piece of velcro sticking out there there we go less than two hours though of cable management got us this now this is something anyone can do with any system at any time if you're looking at yours going oh man you can always take it apart and rebuild it make the cables look nice and all we use are zip ties and side cutters and a little bit of electrical tape for the rgb stuff stuff that you can easily get at any hardware store this is something that you would definitely be much happier looking at than just seeing cable strewn about you guys have been asking me over and over and over jay please do a cable management guide there you go there it is what are your best cable management tips put them down in the comments below and as always guys subscribe if you're not thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,855,481

Keywords: how to cable manage a computer, how to cable manage a pc, how to manage wires in a pc, how to make a pc look good, how to make a computer look good, cable management, best cable management tips, cable management tips and tricks, cable management ideas, nzxt, h710i, intel, amd, best tips for cable management, pc setup, pc guide, gaming pc, gaming pc tips

Id: c3dggnkaEs8

Length: 32min 50sec (1970 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shichiaikan]

Jayz coming through with the REAL content. :P

In all seriousness though, 90% of what he was doing I was already doing, but I still gleaned a few good tips. Great video.

[u/lyonspantap]

Applied a few concepts I learned from this video... and voila!

[u/hideallnice]

I prefer doing cable management using twist wire first (the more bright the color the better. making it easier to spot if you left some at the end) for temporarily holding the cables then, zip ties and velcros at the end. This will save you from those cutting and reusing of zip ties plus, twist wire are more reusable. This will make relocating/rearranging cable layout less of an ordeal. Just my two cents BTW.

[u/slipperytaco619]

Thanks for the link, was definetly a good watch.

I'm doing a build for a friend soon which will involve RGB fans. I don't think I have any electrical tape, will sticky tape be equally as effective at reducing the chance of the RGB connectors falling out?

[u/MyNameIsRAANDOM]

And still no youtuber dares to try manage a cheap PC with fixed cables and molex fans

[u/RevBG]

I personally wouldn’t use anything. As long as there’s no tension on the cable, and assuming the PC won’t be moved a lot, it’ll be fine as it is.