PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Managing Internal Cables and Connectors

When you pop the cover of a PC, the first thing you’ll notice is cables all over the place. These cables carry power and signals between various subsystems and components of the PC. Making sure they’re routed and connected properly is no small part of working on PCs.

The cables used in PCs terminate in a variety of connectors. By convention, every connector is considered either male or female. Many male connectors, also called plugs, have protruding pins, each of which maps to an individual wire in the cable. The corresponding female connector, also called a jack, has holes that match the pins on the mating male connector. Matching male and female connectors are joined to form the connection. Rather than using pins and holes, the connectors used on some cables (for example, modular telephone cables and 10BaseT Ethernet cables) use other methods to establish the connection. The connector that terminates a cable may mate with a connector on the end of another cable, or it may mate with a connector that is permanently affixed to a device, such as a hard disk or a circuit board. Such a permanently affixed connector is called a socket, and may be male or female.

Some cables use individual wires joined to a connector. Only three cables of this sort are common in PCs—those used to supply power to the motherboard and drives, those that connect front-panel LEDs and switches to the motherboard, and those that connect audio-out on a CD-ROM drive to a ...