My £600 Budget PC!

[Ian Evey]

Hi all,

After buying this (£600 maximum budget) pc in december and assembling it, i just threw it all together and basically played games until yesterday when i thought i had better try to tidy the insides up a bit.

After a few hours yesterday of sorting out my cables i realised just how much work goes into cable management.

I used nothing else except what i had lying around from old pc's i had, but i think i should maybe buy some extension cables for most of the connectors especially for the hard drives as they look cluttered.

Dont even ask what it looked like before i started to try and get the cables neat.

My rig specs are,

Akasa Infiniti Zor

Asus P5ql pro (p43)

Intel E8400 (oc 3.6ghz air)

4gb Kingston 8500 (1066mhz)

POV Maxcore GTX 260 216sp

Artic freezer 7 pro

Soundblaster X-fi xtreme gamer

2x 80gb ide in raid0 (on ide raid controller card)

4x 160gb sata

2x 60gb sata for operating system dual boot (vista + xp)

It is used for games and media.

All things considered for my first attempt at cable management was it worth it?

 

[noobieocer]

heres a tip, take the motherboard out, cut holes in the motherboard tray and then you can route cables to the back of the tray hiding all your cables and make it alot neater.

 

[Youngie1337]

heres a tip, take the motherboard out, cut holes in the motherboard tray and then you can route cables to the back of the tray hiding all your cables and make it alot neater.

Yes good idea but be careful of the sharp edges! Cover with some form of rubber, do not let your wires cut!

 

[Ian Evey]

Good idea, I will have to buy 2x 1 meter ide cables and 4 ide power extensions and probably 4x 1 meter sata leads, arghh and sata power extensions. It does not look like PCI-E extension cables are available though? i would like to hide that also...

I'll have to wait till pay day and tell the missus i need them to prolong the life of the computer or some other lie.

 

[Brooksie]

Maybe get some rounded IDE cables aswell. Their quite cheap now.

 

[zak4994]

Wow.

£600 for that.

Dude you pwn!

 

[Ian Evey]

Haha.

Monitor was not included in the £600 and i had the speakers also. Some of the hd's i luckily aquired ... ahem...

The mobo is the only thing that lets it down for overclockability it will only do 415mhz fsb but for £70 it was a bargain compared to others at that time.

Well i have got some drilling and some pondering to do untill the next time i update my pics.....

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

[Lynx]

I say: ditch the ide, sell all the 80gigs, and buy a 250 sata. lol plenty of ppl without sata needing ide. and do wat they say ^ make holes!

 

[Ian Evey]

Only 1 problem, The ide is for raid as i had a pci raid controller but this p5ql pro does not have sata raid and i aint buying a sata raid controller for £40.

I could have taken this motherboard back in january for a full refund as i was sold it as having raid on their website, i could not be bothered dismantling the pc and driving to take the thing back so its still here.

 

[anonemus]

All things considered for my first attempt at cable management was it worth it?

Did you notice a drop in temps?

 

[Ian Evey]

Did you notice a drop in temps?

The ambient temp dropped by 4 degrees but the gpu 46c and cpu 32c temps are the same using speedfan.

I think that doing the job properly wont help my temps anymore it will just look better as this case is freezing inside.

 

[Santa-san]

Looks nice with the blue