Cable management is for tryhards. I said that to myself until a few weeks ago, when I found myself separating the large, tangled seabed from Ethernet cables to vacuum my office.
While wireless connectivity is the norm for movie buffs and even audiophiles these days, gamers have made it difficult for ourselves. We have called latency our enemy. So we’re still slinging our three HDMI connections from our three consoles to our televisions, while still wrapping three Ethernet cables from our modems to those three consoles. And of course we still plug those three consoles into the wall. After staying at home for a year and collecting both gaming gear and office gear, my floor looks like the bottom of Strega Nona’s pasta pot.
There are, of course, solutions. Look up a video meant to guide gamers on their cable management journey and you’ll find a YouTube thumbnail of a normie with a bleached smile holding a drill and several finger traps (these are cable clips) – high-stakes and high- power “home improvement” projects. “Personally, I’m not about to have surgery at my desk. And if I have an extra six hours on my hands, I’m not going to spend them with my stomach on the floor of my office. spend.
It is possible to do cable management in a lazy way. Here are some clever yet effortless ways for gamers to keep their floors and walls tidy.
The cables you have
This doesn’t have to be rude, but you wouldn’t have that many cables to manage in the first place if you just bought the right length. If you can’t tell your floor apart from your local forest’s, it’s probably because your cables are too long.
If you have the money, consider new cables. Measure the path of your cables through a room and add an extra eight inches – better a little too long than too short. By purchasing high-quality cables with minimal slack, you are less likely to have to rewire in the future. And since it can be tedious to swap cables when they’re hidden behind a wall-mounted cable car, swing for a durable, premium high-speed HDMI, which you’ll probably want for your Xbox One X or PlayStation 5 anyway. in the long-term.
Cable management equipment
What you need depends on your configuration. For example, if your PC is on your desk, you may want to mount a surge protector at the bottom of your desk so that only one cable is plugged into the wall. If your television is wall-mounted and you hate those dangling HDMI cables coming out of your Nintendo Switch, you may want to buy some paint to match the color of the cable car with that of your wall.