Hardware Corsair Premium PSU Cable Kit Review

£83?

£83??

I'll do it myself.

I can maybe see the appeal if you've got thousands to spend and don't have enough spare time to learn how to do this... but surely if that is the case you'll just buy a prebuilt system anyway?

 

A full set of PSU cables like this would take you way over 5 hours... probably more like 12. Even if you base your time on minimum wage you are losing out, that is before you factor in the costs of tools and materials.

Ok, it isn't pocket change, but if you are only going to do one set of cables, it is cheaper.

 

Personally I'd rather get a decent set of quality extensions made for me (Pexon / shrop on here) for the 'main' cables and then ignore the sata etc cables which you hardly see anyway. For a 2 GPU setup it'd cost about the same as above, for a 1 GPU setup you'd be saving ~£20 and you could pick exactly what you want...

Not for me...

 

I understand your point and agree.

Thing is, if I was after eyecandy... I'd want to do it myself. Always good to learn something new. For a hobby, though, I don't value my time in money.

And if I wasn't after eyecandy... I'd want to put the £83 toward something else. Like more RAM, or another HDD, or a slight better motherboard, or CPU or... well, anything other than some individually braided cables.

But then, I'm a monolithic black box and/or server guy. I want to focus on what is on the screen, not what's in the case.

 

Yup, custom cables are great for that, picking and choosing which you want. You can get smaller kits with these cables such as this:

http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/premiu...starter-package-type-4-generation-3-red-black

Pexon is amazing and I get on with him well, hell, I even sent him any business I had when I finished sleeving, but due to the time it takes him and the manual labour, a 24 pin PSU cable is £40(ish). It is worth every penny as I know how long it takes and you can get full customisation, but still, It is nice to see more companies giving alternatives.

Yeah, that is fair. A lot of people don't know how to sleeve cables at all, so it is just good having these options. I like seeing the options companies are giving people now though. Sleeving is a tedious task that some folks hate. There are many people who have made a living from just sleeving for others, hell, I used to earn a lot from it too .

It is very much personal preference, as someone who has sleeved thousands of cables, £83 is worth it haha

 

I can understand that. Solid reasoning.

It's like anything else I guess, some people like cooking, some don't, and so on. For me, some repetitive tasks give me time to think over another problem, so it's productive in many ways. Others, however, while repetitive, I have to think about too much to "tick over" anything else.

 

Yup, I sleeve whilst watching films and chilling out I have to keep my hands busy whilst watching anything as my attention span is rubbish with most films lately (I swear films used to be better!). Sleeving can do that, but a nice cold beer can keep me busy too

 

You're paying £83 for £1.50 of wire.

 

I'd take the cold beer any day

I think it's good that manufacturers are catering for all tastes though after having two client build Corsair PSU's go pop within weeks...

Not for me on that basis alone.

 

I guess you think of a CPU as 1p worth of silicon?

 

Ouch. Yeah, I don't blame you being wary after that run of bad luck. I am the same with XFX PSUs. Every time I have worked with one, I have cut myself to shreds sleeving the wires or I have broken tools.... no one else seems to have problems though. As a result, I don't bother with them now and tbh, it is of no fault to XFX... Strangely, I have no problems with Seasonic which is the OEM!

 

That sounds like my luck with the MDPC-X terminals. I actually prefer the cheaper Phobya-style ones now as they just seem to work better for me somehow, certainly the shorter wings seem to play more nicely with 16 AWG wire. I like to do a "dry fit" before sleeving so that I know the wire lengths are right and there are no pinout errors, removing the MDPC ones is a real PITA at times.

 

Shakmods does a full set of extensions for half this price, Corsair can keep these

 

And they're quite short.

I had him make a set of cables for a ITX PSU once. He quoted me £70 and ended up charging me £85. So that's £2 more for an SFX PSU.

I think the price is very reasonable. It's cheaper than "30% thinner than normal cable"mod.

If you are spending a grand on a PC £83 isn't much.

 

Shak is a good source though tbh, he is cheaper than other places, he doesn't allow you to customise as much though imo.

Also, the big difference with an extension and a replacement set of cables is that the replacement set goes from the PSU to the component, including all the SATA and Molex devices. This means that regardless of where you look, everything is sleeved.

With extensions, half of the cables are not sleeved at all (sata and molex) and the ones that are are not sleeved all the way to the PSU as they have to have the original wires to start off with. If you are tight on space in a PC, this can cause more problems as you have more cable to hide.

I use extensions a lot though in large cases and just make a quite PSU shroud to hide the ugly OEM cables. Oh, and if you have a non-modular PC they can help a lot if you don't want to void warranties

 

No, I used to work in a large retail electronics chain and know how much cables cost. for example a USB cable is 15p to buy wholesale.