I recently did a quick cable management job (about an hour of work) on a victim's... err... I mean customer's PC. He needed some other troubleshooting work done with the O/S, so to 'add value' to the job I cleaned out the dust with and did some cable management for him.

Since this is a cheap Micro-ATX eMachine PC that doesn't have a side-window, I took some snap shots for him and thought I'd share it here.

Marvel at the majestic beauty of this super tricked out gamer rig, with a whopping 250W PSU, super-duper on-board video and triple PCI slots. Whoot! Watch as we get a whole 2 fps playing Pong! Here's the original PC's wiring mess...



PSU removed is a pretty ugly OEM thing:



I picked up some more practice with my poor man's pin removal method (2nd sleeving job for me):



Molex and ATX connectors removed:



PSU sleeving part-way done. I removed an extra 4-pin molex connector since it wasn't being used and no sense adding another drive to such a cruddy PSU:



PSU sleeving complete:



Final look of the PC after complete wire management (no cable channels added, just sleeving and tucking):


After all of that work, I found out the power supply was faulty to begin with, doh! I should have tested this out thoroughly before I decided to invest time in a work-horse with a broken leg, lol. I ran through testing it with a PSU tester and my multimeter only to discover that the A/C voltage was sporadically shorted on the DC 12 volt rail after it was on for a while... no wonder this guy had weird PC problems. We ordered a pre-sleeved 330W Seasonic PSU for him, and hopefully no other components were hosed from the crappy PSU.

Oh man it sucks to have spent 2 hours sleeving a PSU only to find that it is bad! I have experienced this first hand, so I feel your pain! As far as the pre-sleeved order goes, I have never been happy with a premod job like this...I have always seen a PSU arriving with a half-assed sleeve job that is at least an inch or two short on every wire. Also it's cheaper to do it yourself (just takes a while).

At least now it will look good when you throw it inthe trash....J/k

Joe

Quote: Originally Posted by Sn0wMan Oh man it sucks to have spent 2 hours sleeving a PSU only to find that it is bad! I have experienced this first hand, so I feel your pain! As far as the pre-sleeved order goes, I have never been happy with a premod job like this...I have always seen a PSU arriving with a half-assed sleeve job that is at least an inch or two short on every wire. Also it's cheaper to do it yourself (just takes a while).

Thanks, yeah, it was a bit depressing. Oh well. I try to look at the good side of things, so at least it was good practice.

I hear ya about the half-arsed pre-sleeving jobs (my Enermax Liberty came with a super-crappy sleeving job, multiple inches short on its modular "sleeved" cables). Being short on the ATX connector is understadable, but not 3 inches short on a P4 12V 4-pin connector and every other 4-pin molex connector.

I don't want to waste any more sleeving on his system (I had some extra to do it only once), so we ordered one that at least would be easier to manage its cables than unsleeved. $54 for a true 330W Seasonic with sleeving was too good of a deal to pass up, especially considering this system will probably never use more than 210 or so watts, lol.

Quote: Originally Posted by Paintball & Modding At least now it will look good when you throw it inthe trash....J/k

Lol, hahaha. Yeah, I disected this dying CPU and removed all of the power cables at their solder points to save the sleeving. Chances are, I'll try to use this for my test PSU since I only need like 1 molex, 1 floppy, and the ATX connectors. So it's not completely for naught.

It was satisfying to break that PSU's circuit board in half over my knee.... ahhhh, modder therapy.

Yet another fine example of how a good cable management job can improve the inner appearance of any computer... Even an eMachines... YIKES!!!