Mark Twain wrote:
So are my power supply's going to be hard to
find? Will the Sparkle be around fro awhile?
and what about the custom design where the
loom comes out the bottom?

Thanks,
Robert

If you shop for a shorter length supply, then that will
leave room for the cable to come out the back,
bend around, and plug into the motherboard.

You will likely need to chain a couple nylon wraps
together, to get a "holder" to hold the excess of
main cable run (since the replacement supply will
have a much longer main cable length, than the
custom one you have now).

You can see in this example, how the main cable
had to snake around like the letter "C", to take
up the slack. Things don't always work out that
nicely, and sometimes you have to scrunch up
a hunk of cable, to deal with all of it.

https://www.pcper.com/images/reviews/35/Dr_Cable.jpg

If we look at the FSP one

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...9SIABP94H47035

it has cable lengths in the spec table. The main cable is
600mm or two feet. Now, imagine that run of cable coming
out the back of the PSU, bending around and going to the
motherboard. There might be a whole extra foot of cable
in excess. A foot isn't enough to fold up and put a nylon tie
around, so you might try the letter C trick. One of your cases
has cable guides for holding cables "in flight".

When people do "beauty builds", they use computer cases where
the excess wire is hidden behind the motherboard, and comes
back through to the surface again through grometted holes.
And that's how they hide the excess cable. I don't have any
cases here that allow such a thing, and all my excess cable
is just clumped in a big mess right in the top center
of the case.

Nothing I do here, wins any beauty contests.

It's possible to buy Molex shells, Molex pins,
get a pin removal tool, get a crimping tool, and
"customize" a wire loom to the correct length
for the job. But of course, if you were expecting
to make a warranty claim later for a bad PSU, the
warranty would be voided by cutting the excess cable
out of the loom.

It's not recommended to change the wire color. To
change the wires on a non-modular design, requires
heating up the PCB that holds a ton of wires. It
requires a lot of heat, like a 200W soldering iron
or a blow torch device (to get the BTUs needed).
There is a lot of solder to heat, to change out
the wires. For the modular cabling situations,
it might be possible to buy separate (replacement)
cables, but there aren't necessarily enough "standards"
on the PSU end, to make this approach practical.

Some of the first modular supplies were a disaster,
because the connectors were not keyed or made unique.
You could plug the wrong cable into a modular hole.
Some even allowed cables to go in upside-down, blowing
out the motherboard or other stuff. The designs today
are much more intelligent, so this is less likely
to happen on a "fully modular" supply.

I wouldn't say that all this stuff is "impossible",
but you do have to keep your wits about you,
use your imagination to see how the new item will
fit in the case. Whether any tricks will be needed.
And how ugly the result is going to look like, and
whether you even want to think about that part.

*******

If you shop for an *exact replacement* for the existing
PSU, you get the shape and wire lengths and wire locations.
But what you might not get, is the absolute best electrical
design of the PSU guts. That's why I haven't been pursuing
the problem with that approach. Because what is in there
could be "chinese crap". There's no way to know on a given
unit like that, how many corners were cut. And what are
the odds, the PSU actually came from the same factory
as the original ?

The supplies that HP and Dell use, while the power ratings
may seem low, the specs for the supply are generally
pretty good, and you can load it up right to the power
limit without a problem. So they can be good from that
perspective. But are they 80+ efficient ? Do they have
low ripple ? Supplies like that, generally aren't reviewed
by anyone with a power supply tester, so it's hard to say
for sure.

And I also don't know what a "Dell Parts Store" would
stock for such a thing. They would probably be as neat
and tidy as the original.

Paul