Corsair, Asus, and others are making it easier to build a beautiful PC

theverge.com:

By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

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I hate cables. I hide them in the walls behind my TV, I make them disappear around my desk, and I try to eradicate them everywhere else in my life. So every time I hear about something in the PC building community that involves hiding or removing cables, I get excited. Over the past few years, some of the biggest names in PC building have been making it easier to hide cables away and build a PC that showcases your skills.

I’ve built a lot of PCs over the past 25 years, and the main part of the process I hate the most is cable management. It often takes me longer to tidy up cables and route them properly than it does to put all the parts of a PC together. It’s especially bad if you’ve decided to build a PC with a bunch of RGB fans and an all-in-one (AIO) cooler. There are more cables to hide and more lighting to reveal any mistakes you make. Thankfully, a lot has changed in recent years.

Case manufacturer Lian Li helped push the PC building industry toward daisy-chained RGB fans with its Uni Fan a few years ago. Instead of two cables per fan (one for power and one for lighting), the Uni Fans connect together, so you only need to route a single cable for a block of fans. It’s a design that takes away a lot of clutter, so naturally it led to many competitors launching their own versions.

Corsair was one of them with its iCUE Link system. Launched last year, it offers daisy-chained RGB fans and AIO coolers that hide all the cables away. Corsair has even