is it ok to bend cables?

[MKSanic]

is it ok or bad practice to bend cables like 180 degrees or braid/twist the cables to have a neater look and shorten excess cable? please tell me if there are certain cables that can be bent a lot and which cannot. thx

[Arika]

Avoid it as much as you can.

 

Curves are fine, bends/folds are not

[bedsheet]

You shouldn't bend glass fibre cables, because the glass will literally snap.

[LogicalDrm]

Do not kink any cable. The wires can and will snap, eventually breaking whole thing.

[Anus_McSphincter]

Sharp bends baaaaad.  Loops goooooood.

[lal12]

Usually thicker cables like from the PSU can take pretty hard bends without a big problem. It  would be one if there is always movement or stress on them, but if they aren't touched (or at least rarely) it is fine. However I would be careful about more delicate cables like USB/SATA connectors or the wires for the chassis power button/LEDs.

[Bombastinator]

The issue is radius.  There is a bend radius a cable can withstand a limited number of times, and a radius they can’t withstand at all.  Cables are copper wire with sheathing on them, so there is work hardening to deal with.  Copper does not act like iron, and it is not truely ductile.

[juandeag2k]

Do your best to avoid bending/folding.

[07_Sev]

I can see everyone here telling you to avoid sharp bends but I honestly don't know why you would avoid them.

Of course, if you bend the cables too sharply the insulation could get broken and that might open up some dangerous situations but the same thing can be said for cuts on the sharp edges of cheap PC cases.

Electrically there is no harm in bending a cable sharply as most cables will fail mechanically long before signal degradation becomes an issue.

And other than your front USB ports I doubt you're carrying any high frequency signals over your cables. Probaly just power in which case signal degradation isn't an issue at all.

[RonnieOP]

4 minutes ago, 07_Sev said:

I can see everyone here telling you to avoid sharp bends but I honestly don't know why you would avoid them.

Of course, if you bend the cables too sharply the insulation could get broken and that might open up some dangerous situations but the same thing can be said for cuts on the sharp edges of cheap PC cases.

Electrically there is no harm in bending a cable sharply as most cables will fail mechanically long before signal degradation becomes an issue.

And other than your front USB ports I doubt you're carrying any high frequency signals over your cables. Probaly just power in which case signal degradation isn't an issue at all.

Because the coper wire inside the cable is very thin and brittle. 

 

So its very easy to ruin a cable by bending it tightly over and over.

 

Its not really about degradation of the signal. But a total lack of signal due to a break in the copper wire.

 

[07_Sev]

6 minutes ago, RonnieOP said:

Because the coper wire inside the cable is very thin and brittle. 

Yes, that's an espect I haven't looked at. It is true that cable can break and completely lose signal if you bend it sharply over and over again. However, because of the thickness of the copper cable due to the high currents that need to flow through it and the fact that most people aren't re-cablemanaging every day, I don't think this is an issue worth worrying about.

Edited April 7, 2020 by 07_Sev
spelling

[Kochiha Ichihara]

Remember kids, folding is for proteins, not cables. Some hard bends are fine, just don't do them often. Don't be like one guy I knew who fiddled with his cable management every single flippin' day until he shocked himself on a busted cable.

[BinaryShadow]

coaxial or similar and fibre optic no, you'll break the core.. anything else is likely multi stranded and will be fine unless as said you repeatedly bend it in the same place

[king113]

in my opinion PSU its ok
SATA cables by bending them there is a big chance that you will break ports on mainboard 

[Ravendarat]

If we are talking about regular cables coming off a psu than the "thin copper inside" is not brittle. Ive been working with similar wiring for 20+ years. If you were to sit there and bend them back and forth over and over again for some stupid reason than EVENTUALLY you could have a problem but if you are talking about bending something during cable management or coming off your gpu and doing a 180 degree bend to run under the card then you are perfectly fine. Only way a PSU cable breaks from bending is a manufacture defect

[Pickles von Brine]

25 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

If we are talking about regular cables coming off a psu than the "thin copper inside" is not brittle. Ive been working with similar wiring for 20+ years. If you were to sit there and bend them back and forth over and over again for some stupid reason than EVENTUALLY you could have a problem but if you are talking about bending something during cable management or coming off your gpu and doing a 180 degree bend to run under the card then you are perfectly fine. Only way a PSU cable breaks from bending is a manufacture defect

I was about to put this. Copper = Okay to twist around (not a ton, but you can). Fiber optic= NO! NO NO NO NO NO! Never due that. 

[Bombastinator]

38 minutes ago, Ravendarat said:

If we are talking about regular cables coming off a psu than the "thin copper inside" is not brittle. Ive been working with similar wiring for 20+ years. If you were to sit there and bend them back and forth over and over again for some stupid reason than EVENTUALLY you could have a problem but if you are talking about bending something during cable management or coming off your gpu and doing a 180 degree bend to run under the card then you are perfectly fine. Only way a PSU cable breaks from bending is a manufacture defect

It does start out soft.  The more and more severely the metal is bent the more brittle it gets though.  Some cheap cables can also be aluminum not copper and will do this much faster.  Stranded copper wiring in cables takes a long time to do this though, and it’s the number of times they get bent.  Computer cables don’t actually get flexed all that often especially after a desktop system gets set up so not worrying about it is totally acceptable.  It can only even become a thing in very old cables.

[mr moose]

A 180 once or twice is fine, you won't ruin the cable doing that.  If you try to use it as a hinge it won't last long at all.  The only exception to that is solid core wire (which is hardly used in PSU's or pc cables (occasionally in permanent run cat cable).  The industry standard for mass wiring of exchanges and control circuitry (think computers controlling train signals and big factories) was to wrap the wire around a 1mm  standoff 5-6 times to form a connection. 

 

 

EDIT: I just want to add that a lot of the warnings in this thread are over cautious and not really necessary.   Consider how many audio cables get bent and folded through out their life and don't stop working.   I literally have 4 tubs of mic cables, speaker cables and power cables that get bent, taped, tied folded up stood on used to drag mics stands across the stage and it's never the cable that lets go, it's always the connector.   And that's not too mention the curly headphone cables that spend there entire life being flexed.