Cable Management. Does It Really Matter???

MisterEd said:

Back in 2002 I bought a case that had a removable tray for the motherboard. The case wiring had connectors in the middle so could be detached. That allowed me to wire up the motherboard on the tray outside the case. After I pushed the tray back in I could connect the wiring using the connector. The case is totally obsolete now. The case did come with six case fans but they were all 80mm ones. Unfortunately, that is the only size fan the case could use.

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One of the first things I did on the Corsair 780T I have is modify the front intakes from the anemic 140mm to dual Noctua 200mm. Much quieter but a massive increase in airflow.

My case only has 5 fans, six if you count the P/S fan. I believe they're around 120mm in size. I have zero cooling issues, I know that.

garlin said:

When I started working in online services, our racks looked exactly like that.

It was always "I hope I'm unplugging the right network cable from this (retired) computer, because there's no free ports on the switch". About 10 min. later you'd get a call from network operations asking if you're still in the DC and did you touch anything?

These days, they just hire cabling experts to neatly bundle everything. It's time consuming, but if they do it right, it only needs to happen once.

Another trick is they started ordering entire 42U cabinets from HP, with all the systems already racked and cabled. They would roll the cabinets into place, lock them into the floor, and string the power and network links. Plus HP would send us a complete HW manifest with every S/N and MAC address in an Excel spreadsheet so the asset management team was happy.

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I wish I could do that for my humble home LAN. But $$$$ would be the issue. Plus I don't need even 1 42U rack. :)

gunrunnerjohn said:

I've been assembling my own and other folks computers since the 1980's, and so far I can't point to a single incident where the problem was cable management. I don't go out of my way to make it sloppy, but I don't do handstands to make it perfect either.

I have no problem with folks that want to go crazy with the cable management, but my firm belief based on a whole lot of builds is that it a very minor issue.

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Admittedly, I've only been putting PCs together for about a quarter century. I recall one PC brought to me that really had an annoying issue. I thought it was toast. I could turn it on but it would immediately shut off. At first I thought it was a bad switch but that proved not to be the case. After hours of trying all sorts of things I pulled the rear/side panel off. Now I don't know exactly how it happened but one of the SATA power cables was stripped of insulation (I found the pieces at the bottom) and shorting out on the metal. There was absolutely zero cable management so all the wires were just left to dangle. My guess is that one of the cables got pinched (and stripped) when they were putting the panel on but I can't prove it. Fortunately they were using a modular PSU so I just completely eliminated that cable not knowing if any damage was done to the PSU as a result of damage to the cable. I got it up and running and made sure all the remaining cables were secured. The panel slid on smoothly and everything worked like new so I didn't bother testing the PSU. I did mention it to the fellow and he was happy to pay me 50 bucks for my trouble. So, yeah... I think sometimes it really matters.

Marie SWE said:

not that hard to document.. make a really hard knot on a cat cable and measure how much speed it drops on 10Gbit.. or make a hard 90 degree bend on a optical cable.
Or roll up a really long 220Volt cable that you have current running thru and put a cat cable next to it that you also rolled up and put the two rolls ontop of each other, or even better the network roll inside the 220 roll so you get a really good and strong induction field.. then it becomes easy to measure.

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Someone gets it!