flemurlemur

Hey all With the global pandemic I'm working from home more and more (currently been sent home since mid September, and will be until some time in November), and the company I work for has luckily seen some of the benefits of working from home, so it looks like I will be working from home a few days a week for the next many years to come. While working from home until recently, I was simply sitting in front of my work laptop and using my nice keyboard and wireless mouse with it. However, with the work from home period constantly getting longer I've gotten more annoyed by looking over to my nice setup with my ultrawide monitor, nice headphones, etc, while sitting in front of a tiny laptop screen, but at the same time I don't wanna have to swap around every single cable between systems every day. So I've started to think about how to set up something elegant that can let me keep the nice cable management of my main gaming system, but let me use all of the awesome peripherals I have for that system, with my work laptop. That made me think of the 3 different pieces of tech I know of that would solve part of this but not all of it - Linus' home setup with his optimal thunderbolt 3 cable passing through the wall from his main system to some sort of hub which he can connect his monitor, etc to, a KVM switch where you can plug in two different systems through a hub and then use a button to decide what input you're using, and my docking station at work which now also uses thunderbolt rather than some weird click system to both power the laptop, but also send all the necessary info to my monitors etc. So I'm asking you if you know of a single device that would allow me to give me the functions of those three devices. It would as of now need to accommodate for: At least 4 USB devices (mouse, keyboard, mic, extra) Optical audio DP 1.4 Gigabit ethernet 2 separate PCs, ideally via thunderbolt or other single cable option. Power to the laptop My stationary PC would be static in its peripherals, connected devices, and location - so if there's a simpler / more realistic method that doesn't involve just a single thunderbolt cable to it, that would be okay - it's mainly the laptop that I'd like to be able to simply connect via a single cable, without having to disconnect anything from my main PC. I would also really like to avoid anything that would limit the experience with my gaming PC - that system is the main priority here. I'll be upgrading to Zen 3 whenever it's possible to get my hands on it, so I'll be looking for a board with thunderbolt 3 options similar to the one Linus uses, to have my options open. Also - I think this is a great topic for a LTT video - turning your overkill gaming setup into a dual purpose functional work from home space.

You seem to know a lot about the issues that some of these units have - do you happen to know of any units that would then live up to the claims of being fairly quiet even under higher loads? The Thor unit you mention is that actually decent in terms of noise or does a shitty fan profile then ruin it like it does with the BQ PSUs?

Thanks for the response. No I'm not dead set on 850W, it would primarily be to keep the fan from spinning to be quite honest. Which is also why I'm seriously tempted by the Seasonic prime fanless 700 - it's most likely going to be enough, and if there ever was a good way of ensuring the fan won't spin, that's a helluva good one! Thanks for the recommended list, I see you list most of the same options as I've seen mentioned as great units overall. Is there a particular reason you're not including the AX series? or is it simply that you find the wattage too overkill? The main thing I'm still confused about with these options is the silence factor. The very detailed tests run by anandtech and tom's hardware tend to push the units so hard I'm thinking some of their noise concerns for these various units do not really apply to real world scenarios. The Dark Power Pro is also tempting, and I have been eyeing that for a while (I'm a bit of a bequiet fanboy), and the upcoming model looks amazing, almost too good to hide under a shroud. Issue is it's got a bit of that extra length that would make me concerned about case compatibility.

Thanks man Very helpful. I didn't even know the prisjagt page myself, I usually just browse my favourite retailers' pages. But good to know about those options - and thanks for poiting out the ones that are not silent.

Could you elaborate a bit on why I want multi-rail at these wattages? (and is it because it's "low" wattage or high wattage?) It seems that most of the A-tier units on the list are single-rail, so I'm confused about why people with high end systems would mainly want multi-rail but all the high end units and single-rail?

Yeah I'm considering that as well - it's quite annoying that there are so many good options

Thanks for the response. I'm buying in Denmark which may have an impact of some of the prices, (e.g. BeQuiet may be comparatively cheaper due to being German) but the price range is flexible if the right option is there. The 700W fanless for example is 1800DKK in Denmark and around 250 USD, which would be around my upper limit I'd say. And yeah those are some examples of why I'm fairly confused. It got a "poor" review at Tom's but is still listed as one of the best options in the tier list here. My own understanding of electricity is not deep enough to know which of the unsatisfactory factors mentioned in these reviews are likely to matter to me.

Hi all I'm looking at making some upgrades to my PC over the coming year with the upcoming Zen and Nvidia launches, and Cyberpunk of course. My current system is in a meshify C case with Silent Wings 3 fans and a Dark Rock TF cooler, running an overclocked 4790K and a Strix 1080Ti (probably gonna strap two silent wings on it soon instead of the stock fans). I like the idea of having a solid "base" for my system in terms of the case, PSU, storage, peripherals, so that I don't have to replace everything when doing upgrades. But my platform needs an update soon, and I hope Zen 3 is gonna be my new home, but plan to stick with my current case I value silence quite a lot (open back headphones, PC in living room, living room next to kids' room), but also appreciate the beauty and longevity of slightly overbuilt hardware. My use case is just gaming, but again, I value overkill, and have now been able to take advantage of that over that last 5 years by having gone with an i7 back when everyone said an i5 is all you'll ever need for gaming. One of the parts I'm considering replacing fairly soon is the PSU - not that there's anything horribly wrong with my current PSU (G3 650W), but just that it's a smaller investment than a full platform upgrade or GPU, and I'd rather make it before than after upgrading the rest. The fan does produce noticeable noise on the G3 unit, as it ramps up to a fairly high speed as soon as it turns on. What I'm after is a PSU that will last me multiple iterations of my PC, and therefore needs enough wattage for whatever crazy ideas I might have in the future, ideally without having to turn on the fan. So I'm currently considering going for 850W which will keep me at or around 50% load in many scenarios (assuming my future setup will be a 10-12 core Zen 3 CPU with a 3090 or whatever it's gonna be called). I would also like to keep it in the "will fit most cases" size of 170mm length, and to have a quiet fan with a clever fan profile for when it needs to spin. Finally, as mentioned, I'm looking for something that is a tad overkill in terms of build quality (both in terms of looks and actual component quality) and reliability. Some of the units I have been eyeing are (based on reviews, the tier list, and brand perception): Straight Power 11 Platinum 850 (surprisingly poor review from Tom's Hardware) AX850 (great reviews but slight concern about noise - some state fans barely ever spins, other that it does) Prime Titanium 850 (again decent reviews, but I'm seeing mixed information about the fan - profile seems good, but actual quality seems low?) I've also been drooling a bit when thinking of the 700W fanless from seasonic, I guess it should be more than enough for any crazy system I might wanna build down the line, but my desire for overkill is kinda holding me back on this one. So I come to you to help me in my confusion with all of these many reviews stating similar but slightly different things.