Round Cables, I Don't Get It?

[drdan]

I will be receiving my computer parts tomorrow. I was looking through the motherboard manual (from website) and was reminded that I wanted to use round cables. The red ones might also look good with the red MSI board inside the blue see through case (of course I don't care about that anyway).

What I don't get is the connections. I have a hard drive, CDRW and DVD to connect and the max connections I could find (so far) only have connections for two devices. How do I do this? Heres a pic of a supposed "3 head" cable. Am I just seeing it wrong? It looks like the "three" heads are one for the motherboard and two for IDE devices.

http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?image=12-104-506-01.JPG/12-104-506-03.JPG

[Deagle]

Well I know that round cable gives you better airflow but anything else I'm clueless. :(

[Steve]

Hi Doc,

You have it right. IDE cables have three connectors. One for the motherboard and two for drives. There are two IDE connections per motherboard. Each able to handle two devices. Total of four drives for each motherboard.

Put your HDD on the primary IDE port and the opticals on the secondary. That's the easiest setup.

When you get the cables, you'll see that the connectors are marked motherboard, slave and master.

[Budfred]

On a decorating theme... I wouldn't go with the red cables unless they match the shade of the board completely. Different shades of red together can be disturbing to your eyes over time. I have some ivory colored glow-in-the-dark cables that look good and the clear ones are cool as well. Yellow would go well with a red board and blue window also....