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Antec 300 and cable management.

jukki

I have antec 300 (first revision) case. I am pretty happy with the result, but i started to wonder if my cable management could be any better.

http://i.imgur.com/646p9.jpg

The 2 hdd I have there will probaply be remoced once i have moved everything inside them to my new 2 tb storage drive, creating more room and less cables. I also were thinking of sinply removing the 5.24 inc bay, since i di t realy use it that much, plus i am thinking of getting blu ray player same tile so it would be external. So far the biggest mess is in front of the hdd's and optical drive.

My current temperatures are 30 c on idle and 70 c max on prime 95. So it is not bad temperatures at all. Thats why i am thinking would it be worth cleaning it up at all.

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Cable management is horrible, but its not because of user error. How much room is behind the motherboard? If there is a lot i think its time to bust out the dremel. :)

2606bdk.jpg

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Hey Jukki,

The Antec 300 is a great budget case but unfortunately its cable management is non existent. I built a system in one for a friend and found the easiest way to tidy everything up was to run as many cables as I could behind the HDD cages and cable tie them down, This allows much better airflow at the front of the case. Replacing your two hard drives for one will also help you out. To be honest though 70ºC at full load in Prime95 is an acceptable temperature. Make sure you keep on top of dust as well though, as from what I can remember the Antec 300 doesn't have any dust filters.

Hope this helps.

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I've also got a case with very little cable management support, so I thought I'd throw in some more advice (you don't need to do all of this, but it's just some advise that may help quite a bit):

First off, are you doing this to improve airflow, or aesthetics? If it's for airflow then there's usually not much to worry about, perhaps try to keep the cables to one side, so they may not obstruct the airflow too much. It's not going to affect things much though. I'd assume the greater concern is aesthetics though, having a bunch of wires lying around can make it look rather messy. For that, I'd say starting over may be the easier solution, when I was working with my own rig, I found it easier to disconnect the cables first before doing it properly - just gives you more space and flexibility really.

First off, I would recommend considering every little detail when working with this, although certain things may not be noticeable on it's own, when you make a bunch of small changes it can really make the system look neater overall. A good example is the front panel audio cables attaching to the sound card, it's not that noticeable but making it cleaner can make a difference. Try to make it follow through the edges of the board so it's not extruding like that, or alternately if possible, route it through the small hole that's present to hold the power supply in place (don't have the case myself so I don't know if that's possible, but it's worth a try).

Another large cause of the messy look is the fact that all the cables are individually just scattered across the side of the board, which is probably the largest issue here. I would recommend to try keep the cables together when possible, as you can see with the image Helltech posted, the cables coming out the power supply don't look nearly as messy, as it looks like just a big, thick cable. Do take your time with that though, I would advise taking each individual cable and slowly bundling them together in a neat fashion.

Which brings me to my next point, the drive cages are one of the few areas which you can safely hide your cables without them being that noticeable, especially the back if there's enough room. This is especially good for the unused cables, which can be tied up there and neatly hidden. Not sure if you did this already as I can't really see, but bringing up the 24-pin cable behind the drive cages has hugely improve the looks of the system, at least from my experience.

Additionally, you can also try and hide thinner cables behind a bunch of others, this works really well with things like front panel connectors and fan cables, which you can simply wire behind a bunch of power supply cables and you won't notice it at all. As said, you often find that clean systems aren't necessarily perfectly organized, but it's just that everything is cleverly hidden away.

Hope that helps, working with cases like that is indeed a pain and does require time, but it's definitely possible to get a clean looking system if you put your mind to it.

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