5 ms·

I have a coworker whose entire family PCs are rack mounted in the garage. He has HDMI and USB extensions through the house, so the only thing on desks is a moni

I have a coworker whose entire family PCs are rack mounted in the garage. He has HDMI and USB extensions through the house, so the only thing on desks is a monitor and powered USB hub. Perfectly silent. It seems very comfy.

rektide 4y ago
Was super easy & fun when we were on 1080p60! But that became kind of limiting for my preferences. For a while it wasnt really practical, unless you could accept this pretty low bandwidth stream. But now fiber-optic display cables are readily available. My first purchase was a 100ft/30m 32Gbps DisplayPort cable, for $55! To be honest, I couldnt believe it worked; I assumed it was a scam. It's indeed excessively long... too long! I can make it out my room & up to the roof & compute from there with less than half the cable. It's way harder to unroll & reroll than any cable I've ever had before, but also way longer. I have since gone back and bought shorter cables. Thankfully active extension cables are pretty good & tend to just work. Newer models have an inline 1-port usb-hub every 25ft/7.5 (used to be every 5m), and then a wall-wart at the end to power the hubs (to honest that feels like it should be unnecessary; a dc-dc booster mid-span & bus power should be fine, albeit leaving nearly no power available at the end). Also beware, there's a 7 tier limit from root-hub to device, so 5 hubs maximum * 7.5m, if you only plug in a single thing (a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle).
- ciupicri 4y ago
  What about peripherals and latency?
  - rektide 4y ago
    Peripherals are all usb2/usb3 attached. Latency would be super interesting to test for both. I tend to think 4-5 usb hubs are still under 1ms latency. I'd expect the DisplayPort digital->optical->digital path takes less than 1ms too. But I'm guessing, for sure.
  - lxchase 4y ago
    Likely marginally higher, but if you wire the house up with fiber, you can run USB/TB docks over fiber.
- ascagnel_ 4y ago
  If you’re only looking to do low-bandwidth (keyboard, mouse, audio, maybe a webcam or game controller) at the display, you can get inexpensive USB-over-CAT5 adapters. The one I have terminates into a 4-port powered hub, and latency is low enough I can’t detect it in normal use.
jjav 4y ago
> I have a coworker whose entire family PCs are rack mounted in the garage. SunRays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray for those too young) were really nice. When they came out I realized why have a noisy workstation under my desk when I can have a massively larger (far noisier) server in the rack and a totally silent SunRay on my desk! That was my setup for a long time. No longer using the SunRay (sigh) but conceptually not too far from it. I have a macmini on my desk but I do very little compute on it, it's there basically just to drive the monitor. All the machines are on a rack in the garage.

rektide 4y ago

Was super easy & fun when we were on 1080p60! But that became kind of limiting for my preferences. For a while it wasnt really practical, unless you could accept this pretty low bandwidth stream. But now fiber-optic display cables are readily available. My first purchase was a 100ft/30m 32Gbps DisplayPort cable, for $55! To be honest, I couldnt believe it worked; I assumed it was a scam. It's indeed excessively long... too long! I can make it out my room & up to the roof & compute from there with less than half the cable. It's way harder to unroll & reroll than any cable I've ever had before, but also way longer. I have since gone back and bought shorter cables. Thankfully active extension cables are pretty good & tend to just work. Newer models have an inline 1-port usb-hub every 25ft/7.5 (used to be every 5m), and then a wall-wart at the end to power the hubs (to honest that feels like it should be unnecessary; a dc-dc booster mid-span & bus power should be fine, albeit leaving nearly no power available at the end). Also beware, there's a 7 tier limit from root-hub to device, so 5 hubs maximum * 7.5m, if you only plug in a single thing (a wireless keyboard/mouse dongle).

ciupicri 4y ago
What about peripherals and latency?
- rektide 4y ago
  Peripherals are all usb2/usb3 attached. Latency would be super interesting to test for both. I tend to think 4-5 usb hubs are still under 1ms latency. I'd expect the DisplayPort digital->optical->digital path takes less than 1ms too. But I'm guessing, for sure.
- lxchase 4y ago
  Likely marginally higher, but if you wire the house up with fiber, you can run USB/TB docks over fiber.
ascagnel_ 4y ago
If you’re only looking to do low-bandwidth (keyboard, mouse, audio, maybe a webcam or game controller) at the display, you can get inexpensive USB-over-CAT5 adapters. The one I have terminates into a 4-port powered hub, and latency is low enough I can’t detect it in normal use.

jjav 4y ago

> I have a coworker whose entire family PCs are rack mounted in the garage. SunRays (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray for those too young) were really nice. When they came out I realized why have a noisy workstation under my desk when I can have a massively larger (far noisier) server in the rack and a totally silent SunRay on my desk! That was my setup for a long time. No longer using the SunRay (sigh) but conceptually not too far from it. I have a macmini on my desk but I do very little compute on it, it's there basically just to drive the monitor. All the machines are on a rack in the garage.