Improving Your Desktop PC with Cable Management

Thermal Performance Improvement

Time and again I’ve highlighted (especially in lowyat.net forum) the importance of casing airflow.

Most people think that they need to change their CPU or GPU coolers to make their components run cooler but little did they know is that all it takes is a little cable management to make things better.

Here’s an example of a messy casing, not the worse out there but it’s certainly classified as messy.

The system uses a Cooler Master N200 casing, with an
Asus Vanguard B85 motherboard and Intel Core i3-4130, a stick of Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3 1600, 2x DeepCool 120mm fan at the front, 1x Cooler Master JetFlo 120mm on the top, a Gigabyte R9 280X (GV-R928XOC-3GD) running on Cooler Master V550S power supply unit.

The N200 might be small but the case panels were designed as such that it could accommodate cable management, so what I did was to put as much of the cable towards the area under the motherboard, which is the opposite side of the casing.

What I got after some 15 minutes of meddling with cables and such was ………

The V550S semi-modular PSU made it a lot easier to cable manage. While the above is certainly not a work of art in cable management but it sure got the job done! Let’s have look at the results.

I used Furmark’s Burn Test to load the GPU. Why GPU? It’s because it is the hottest component within the system. Why Furmark? For consistency in test load.

All the fans in the casing were set to run at full capacity. Room temperature was maintained by air conditioning, temperature was around 25°C.

With just 15 minutes spent on cable management and no additional cost incurred, I’ve improved the thermal performance of the GPU by 3°C, plus I get a much neater system now. 😀

Final Words

Cable management is a good practice and should be practiced regardless of whether your PSU is modular or not. Just a little effort goes a long way, your system will not only look neat but it will run at better temperatures.

As mentioned earlier, my cable management examples are viewable at casemod.my. For even more advanced (and I must say POISONOUS!) cable management setup, please visit my buddies at APES.My.