Cable sleeving isn’t something new, it’s been around in various industries for a long time. People sleeved bunches of cables together for neatness, or covered individual cables for increased robustness, and PC power supply manufacturers soon caught on.
Antec, Enermax, and others soon started sleeving the 24 pin ATX motherboard power cable as one unit, and this spread to other bunches of cables coming out the PSU. The only problem with these early sleeving jobs was they were half-hearted attempts to spice up an otherwise boring component.
Fast forward to mid-2008 and the enthusiast community decided to take matters into their own hands.
There are various suppliers of PC cable sleeving, but by far the most respected is MDPC-X.com. Based in Germany and run by a man named Nils, MDPC-X supplies a wide range of cable sleeving for almost any cable you’d find inside a PC, including SATA data cables.
The main problem with cable sleeving, it’s extremely rare in South Africa, thanks to a lack of local distributors. Local enthusiasts organise group imports of sleeving and other modding accessories from North America and Europe, however this turns out relatively expensive for what you’re getting in the end thanks to shipping fees.
Cable sleeving
How sleeving works
Before you’re able to start sleeving cables, you’ll need to remove the power connectors. There are various connector types, and for each type there are various techniques one can apply. A great guide on how to remove connectors so that you’re able to sleeve can be found over at the XtremeSystems forums, though be warned, it’s far more difficult than it looks in the beginning.
There are two parts to cable sleeving, the sleeve itself, and the heat shrink that holds the sleeving in place. Installing the sleeving once you’ve removed power connectors is a relatively simple process. Slide the sleeving along the cable until it’s in place, then slide across two pre-cut lengths of heat shrink over the cable sleeving to either end of the length of sleeve.
Heat shrink does exactly what its name says; it shrinks when you apply heat to it. With the heat shrink half covering the end of the sleeving, and half covering the cable beneath the sleeving, applying heat cases the heat shrink to grip the end of the sleeve, holding it in place to prevent it sliding along the cable beneath it. The heat shrink also prevents the ends of the sleeving from fraying which will eventually cause the weave of the sleeve to come undone.
Once the sleeving is on the cable and the heat shrink is holding each side of the sleeve, simply replace the connectors and you’ve got an original, unique power cable configuration that blends in with the rest of your gaming setup.
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