On the other hand, it feels great to no longer have a box of old cables...
Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
281–290 of 464 posts
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#282Obviously I'm going to keep the box, but the real question is how many hundreds of NEMA C13 cables should I keep?
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#283Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc. Grouping them is key to deduplicating. It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them. I a…
Yep. It's easy to get into the mode of tossing everything into a big box and then you can't find anything anyway. After a tire, I tossed a lot but I find I still need to organize a lot of things down to a manageable remainder where I can actually find things I'm likely use.
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#284You’re not serious about it if you only have one box
Depends on how big that box is
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
"USB", "TV/HDMI", "Networking", "Every Audio Connector Known to Man", and the inimitable: "Plugs-to-Wall"
We have the same. Do you know why the ‘every audio connector known to man’ box contain every audio connector known to man but yet never a stereo 1/8” headphone-jack to headphone-jack cable?
don't know any audio engineers? If your bboc is simply a mishmash of things you've accumulated over the years, and not intelligently designed, it won't, but don't make the mistake of extrapolating from your own experience and thinking it applies to everybody.
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
What marker do you use to mark them? Is the ink durable and easy to read?
I bought a cheap pack of 5 colors of 3m electrical tape. Each cable gets one or two pieces of tape: Data: White if usb2 Blue if it supports USB 3 data (because 5Gbps USB 3 ports are mostly blue) Green if TB/USB4/40Gbps Power: None if low/no Power Delivery Yellow for 45W PD Red for 65W+ PD
Love this, that sounds awesome. Thanks for sharing!
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
A PSU cable tester is valuable for this. They're much cheaper than a replacement PSU, and you can plug in cables wherever they fit on a PSU, and test whether the output is correct for the CPU/PCI/motherboard/SATA connector you want to plug it into. The PSU and cable might be a black box, but the output is always testable.
Couldn't you still fry a PSU if the cable assumed multiple common pins to the PSU, but the PSU had different voltages across those connectors?
At least for the layouts listed here: https://pc-mods.com/blogs/psu-pinout-repository
The motherboard cables do all kinds of different scary crossovers so never separate them, though you'll probably never have an "extra" motherboard cable in the first place.
None of the other cables bridge pins on the PSU side, they "just" scramble the pins they're attached to at the other end.
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#288Key for me is to "group" cables. For example, I have a bag of USB-C cables, a bag of USB-A cables, etc. Grouping them is key to deduplicating. It's easy to look at a single legacy USB A-to-B "printer" cable in isolation and think "I might need this someday!" Because you really might need it someday. However, if you group them you might see that you have ten of them. And then you can get rid of... maybe 8 of them. I a…
I just sorted through like 15 years of accumulated cables. I kept any that I knew I'd need for projects or things I knew I had a use for. Everything else got slimmed down to a maximum of two of each type and general length and only if they were good quality. Type C and Cat6 were the only cables I kept several of. I threw out so many USB micro and Cat5 cables.
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What do I need 8 HDMI cables for 5 for five generations of consoles into the same TV 1 for the audio bar 1 for the hdmi switch to the tv 1 for a laptop when nothing else works
What TV do you have that has 8 HDMI inputs?
They said there's a switch, so a bunch of those console are probably going through it.
Re: Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables
#290At some point I need to go through my USB-A-C cables and figures out which ones are actually USB 3. Which only have power and which are USB2... Thankfully I think I have tester that can do that.
When you do that, just throw away the ones that only have power. If they're skimping that badly on the data wires, the power wires probably suck too. And it's not giving them a meaningful improvement in flexibility/weight.