Workshop: Cablesleeving

Introduction

Within a good casemod the boring standard red, black and yellow power supply cables should not be visible. This workshop will show you how to sleeve those cables and make them look more attractive.

For quite a period there have been cablesleevekits available on the PC market. Those kits provide a proper modded look within a computer by putting a sleeve around power supply cables. In addition more and more power supply units (partially) already are equipped with sleeved cables. Our recent PSU review even showed that all power supply units already have a sleeved ATX-cable. Not only because of cosmetic reasons, but mostly because a sleeve binds the individual wires and maintains a flexible cable tree in contrary to tie-wraps. However on most power supply units all other cables, that divide molex-, SATA-, P4-power- and PEG-connectors, are not equipped with sleeves, so we will manually have to sleeve them.

For this guide we use a modern standard AOpen PSU. This model already has a sleeved ATX-cable, so we decided to skip the sleeving of that part. If you decide to replace this particular sleeve we recommend sticking tiny labels to all 20 or 24 wires, so they easily can be placed back in the correct order later on.

Materials

Cablesleevekits are available by different manufacturers, we will use Sharkoon products as supplied by Alternate. The Sharkoon kits are available in different colours and also contain a set of tie-wraps and shrink tube. Furthermore we use a special tool to open up the molex connectors, which however also can be done with a tiny screwdriver. Last but not least we use uv-active connectors to replace the standard ones.