Cable management - excessive pedantry or a good practice?

Cable management is one of those particular discussion topics among PC users. Especially when it comes to the insides of a case. And cable management inside of a case is the topic of this short article.

When a discussion about cable management starts somewhere in Interwebz, two sides form up almost instantly. One is showing off their cable managed systems and the other says how much they don't care about it, that it's a waste of time and generally that it's just bollocks not worth their attention. I'm not gonna lie here - I'm mostly in the first group ;) 

So what speaks for spending a few moments to arrange your cables in the case? There are a few points actually and effects can be surprising sometimes. 

Airflow

In most cases, the way in which parts are arranged in a PC case, places where power connectors are, makes it that when you connect your power cables via the shortest route, you will end up with a massive cable bundle just in the center of your case. Exactly in the spot where the stream of air is coming from the front case fans. It's a great way to block that airflow, which is needed to deliver room-temperature air to all your components and push the hot air out of the case. If you try hard enough, you can block the airflow and raise those under load temperature of parts by a few Celsius degrees. Higher the temperature is the more trouble it means. On top of that, this web of cables is just perfect for dust to settle on, which will block your airflow even more. 

My first attempts at cable management, and effects are already showing :)

Ergonomics

Have you ever wanted to pull your hard drive or optical drive out of the case but cables blocked it? Or you couldn't plug a new drive, because entangled and ziptied cable couldn't reach it? And that's just the tip of an iceberg. Cables winding everywhere around your case makes doing any work inside of it a real drag. If your cables are neat and out of the way, you can easily find needed plugs to install a new hardware and it makes it easier to dust everything off. 

Aesthetics

Bundles of wires don't look pleasing at all. It usually matters only if you've got a window in your case side panel, but even if your beast's belly is hidden most of the time, it's good to make it look good for just that few moments when someone will look inside of it ;) 

So where to start?

So how do you actually go about cable management inside of your case? For beginners, the best option is to think about it as soon as you start picking your parts. Pick a case that allows you to easily  arrange cables and a power supply that has long cables. Bonus points if it's modular. Even if you just hide your cables behind the motherboard tray, it will be a gamechanger, and that's just the beginning of the long way to cablemanaged zen garden ;]

It doesn't mean that you can't cable manage a rig that isn't perfectly adapted for it. You will gain the skill and experience eventually, and guys (& gals ;)) that are really good at it can even cable manage those old IDE straps ;) I strongly encourage you to make some research on the Internetz - you can find awesome work, which might inspire you to how to go about cable management in your rig. 

It was harder back in the day ;) [Source: techwarelabs.com]