Part 10 - Cable Management
The power supply sported a vast array of power connectors meant to stretch the distances found in mid-tower ATX cases. I didn't want a mess of power cables obstructing air flow, so I decided to remove the unused cables and shorten the length of all the others to the minimum needed. I was not going to change the length of the ATX power cable (what a nightmare that would have been!) as I wanted to route it under the SuperDisk drive and across the inside base of the front panel to the motherboard header.

I temporarily installed the rear panel, power supply, and hard drive tray/CD-RW drive/SuperDisk drive bracket assembly for reference and measuring. I routed each cable I would use and marked its length with permanent marker where it would be cut.

I decided to use one of the two floppy drive power connectors to power the top cover case fan (12V). The other would be used for the SuperDisk drive. The power-on LED (5V) was connected directly to a spare hard drive power connector. The lengths of the fan and LED cables were shortened considerably.

I needed one separate power connector for the front panel logic board, one for the hard drive, and one for the CD-RW drive. The lengths of these were all shortened.

The remaining power cables were all cut off, their ends sealed with heat-shrink tubing.

	Power supply cables all cut down and reassembled.

	Power supply completed (shown upside-down).

With the power supply all tidied up, I wanted to address the issue of ribbon cables.

The ribbon cable that connects the front panel logic board to the motherboard was much too long. I only needed a 3" cable to bridge the distance with generous leeway. Instead of cutting down the original cable, I made a new one using the original connectors.

	Cable mess. The FireWire 24V power cable and the sound cable were looped and taped to tidy things up. Note I did not use the HSF shown in the photograph. I replaced it with a passive heat sink that had a tighter fit. I used Arctic Silver thermal paste, for those who want to know...

	Cable mess close-up. Note the shortened front panel ribbon cable.

	Cable mess wide view. Note the custom-length gPort ribbon cable.

For the hard disk drive, I used an 18" 80-conductor, three-connector, ATA/66 cable. It was modified by cutting one of the peripheral connectors off and then carefully splitting the conductors in small groups. I used zip ties to bind the bundle together. Its length was just right to reach from the hard drive to the ATA/133 PCI controller card.

For the CD-RW, I used the original 80-conductor, three-connector, ribbon cable with the notch in the nth conductor. Somehow it became damaged, but I was able to salvage it by moving the drive connectors and cutting off the damaged portion. It was carefully routed to reach the secondary IDE motherboard header, running over the top of the PCI expansion cards.

For the SuperDisk, I used a standard 80-conductor, three-connector, ribbon cable. It was carefully routed to reach the primary IDE (Ultra ATA) motherboard, following the same route as the CD-RW cable.

Due to the fickleness of the Plextor CD-RW, I could not attach the SuperDisk as a slave on the same cable as the CD-RW. It took a lot of trial and error to configure this correctly.

The FireWire auxilliary power cable (24V) and CD audio cable were not modified, the excess cable was just looped and taped.

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