Blatantly Random

Tidy Your PC’s Internals. Do It Now.

Filed under: PC, Tech — Malcolm Owen @ 5:05 pm

Inspired by the John Chow Cable Folding Craziness, and prodded a bit by the BSOD and “Won’t Boot” scare from last night, I decided to tidy my own PC’s internals. I hadn’t done it in a while, and it gives me a chance to check all the connections to the drives, just in case moving the PC caused it.

So, I disconnected the monitors, peripherals and power leads, shifted the main PC box to my custom made kitchen-worktop desk, and prepared to work…

As you can see the computer has no window mods on the side. My last computer had windows all over it, including the top, oddly. It also had blowholes, but I figured it would be better to have a much larger fan instead of a window and a tiny fan this time. Cue buying a case with a built-in ubersized fan. Really.

Anyway, my internals looked like this:

I first off moved the hard drives up by a space each. This allowed for more freedom with the power cables, and less stretching between the components. It also gives a bit of space at the bottom of the drive bays to put something extra there if I need to in the future.
Secondly, the SATA cables to the DVD-RW and one of the hard drives were routed through the other side of the drive stack, minimizing their visibility. the old fashioned ATA cable got folded along the same section, downwards under the lower hard drive, folded up to the drive connectors, and then the remainder got pushed in between the drives. There’s no real airflow traveling there, so there’s no problem with doing this.

I did use too many power extension cables when I added the second drive many months ago, partly because I was trying to take as little time as possible to install it. With more time available, I could remove most of the extraneous extensions that I didn’t need, reducing the number to a single splitter due to the fans. The fan at the back got lowered a bit to give more available cable so things could be connected sans extensions this time. I don’t see the real need to use an extension cable for something so trivial. All the peripheral molex connectors are now congregated at the bottom and in one place, making it easier to connect them all together. The cable for the large fan, although tightened to keep the system tidier, has enough of a spare “loop” so the door can be removed without disturbing too much of the insides, but not too much that it gets caught up in the large fan’s blades.

The most difficult bit was the audio cable that feeds from the front bays to the back of the case where it connects to the motherboard. There isn’t really enough spare cable to maneuver it to a tidy place, but I ran it between some PCI slots, but only just. The cable is falling out of that tidy place, but if any extra cards are put in it won’t interfere too much.

You’ll notice the lack of card components in the PC. I’m using onboard sound etc, because these ones serve me just right. All that’s there is an Nvidia card and some random wireless networking card. There’s less components to make the system warm.

The last things I did were to de-dust the system, and remove the fluff from the fans. That big fan had a surprisingly low amount of fluff, probably because it spins so slowly compared to other case fans (About 1/3rd of the speed). It was put back together, turned on, and worked again. Only time will tell if it gets any cooler.

And now, for the “After” photos…