Boogie Bug El Rounded Cables review

The product we will be looking at today actually consists out of two mods. It is a rounded cable, this is not really something new and you could easily round a cable yourself with some tape, but that will of course never look so good as some of these premodded rounded cables on the market. And then the second mod in this product is the El cable which they have wrapped around the rounded cable. Rounded cables are mainly used because they look nicer, and somewhat improve the airflow in your case.

The package of this product is like usually nothing special. Just a simple clear package.

ATA133 Rounded Cable
First, we are going to take a look at the ATA133 cable. This cable is used to connect devices like Hard discs and CD/DVD ROMs to your motherboard. It is 90cm long.

The cable has a braided metal mesh, as you can see in the pictures. That could be dangerous if it hits some components in your case, so they have put a round flexible plastic tube around the whole length of the cable, and another plastic piece for each of the connectors on the cable. Wrapped around the cable and under the plastic we can see the El Cable (a blue one on this cable). Also provided in the package is a double-sided adhesive tape to mount to the invertor, and two screws if you like to screw the inverter somewhere in your case.

An El Cable needs power through an invertor. Some reviews about Rounded Cables with El Cables in it found it a negative thing that the invertor uses up an additional Molex connector, but with this cable, this is not the case because it has a passthrough Molex connector.

Another nice thing about this cable is that each connector has a label on where to put them. The blue says "System board", the grey in the middle 'Slave" and the other one "Primary".

Normally I would have included a benchmark to compare this cable his performance against a normal ATA cable, but our current test system does not have an ATA hard disc (only a SATA HD at the moment) so I could not test this. And anyway I don't think this is really that important because it is just a cable. The difference in performance between IDE cables mostly does not differs that much, and small differences can also be accounted to benchmark irregularities. My apologies for this.

Floppy disk cable
The package of the Floppy cable is almost the same as the one for the IDE cable. The only thing different is a sticker on the back with basically says something like "FDD34EL/48B" for the floppy cable and "ATA133EL/48B" for the IDE cable. The Floppy disk cable is 45cm long.

Just like the IDE cable it has a braided metal mesh, and a plastic cover to hold the El Wire and the metallic mesh in place, and also to protect other components in your case against short circuit.

Also, an inverter provides the El Wire with power. Just like with the IDE cable we could find a plastic bag in the package with double-sided adhesive tape to mount the inverter and two screws.

And lets plug in the Molex cable now! The first thing I noticed was that the inverter makes a whining sound, remember that this was done outside our case to take a few pictures of it. The second thing I noticed was that the El Wire had a really nice shade of blue. The color on the pictures is not the same as in real, my camera could not capture the exact color of the El wire. After this I put the IDE cable in my case to see how it would look.

The following pictures are made with the El Rounded cable inside my case. The whining sound of the inverter was almost not noticeable now, but that could be because of all the noise my fans make. So I do not advise you to put these in your system if you are planning to make a quiet system, because the whining sound could become really annoying in that case. Anyway here are a few pictures of it. It looks very nice if you ask me! It is not bright enough too light up your case, but that is not the intention of this product.

Conclusion
This product is somewhat a mod in a mod, and I must say that it looks very pretty! There are a few bad things about it, however. The inverter of the El wire makes a whining noise, and the inverter also adds a little bit more cable mess in your case. Especially if you are planning to buy 2 IDE cables and one Floppy disk cable. That would make 3 inverters which you would have to hide in your case. But I must admit that a Rounded Cable with an El wire indeed looks very cool!

The Good Stuff
- Looks good and has a nice blue color
- The rounded cable is made very well with a plastic cover.
- Rounded cable improves airflow in your case

Bad stuff/Things that could be better
- Inverter makes a whining sound
- The El wire adds some more wire mess in your case.

The El Wire Rounded cable from Boogie Bug receives a 7/10 from DV Hardware

Added: July 26th 2003
Product reviewed: Boogie Bug El Rounded Cables
Reviewer: LSDsmurf
Score: 7/10

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