I want to use my desktop PC in my bedroom and living room at the same time.

[bkaphengst95]

hey everyone. I'm new to the forum. I have a Linux Mint based older PC(q6600, I'm planning to upgrade eventually) and I'd like to be able to use it in my living room and my bedroom at the same time without having to move the tower at all. I live it a small apartment so I can run cables to either of the locations without any issues.(I hope) I'm just wondering what everyone thinks is the easiest and cheapest way to be able to do this. Im comfortable messing with computer hardware but I'm not the most well versed in software and figuring out how to configure what I'm trying to accomplish.

[theblastman21]

Get however long cable you need and plug it in.

[Wh0_Am_1]

Welcome to the LTT forums! Now this is a difficult-ish question, probably the cheapest way would be to get a long HDMI cable and run it behind the baseboards, meanwhile the most elegant and easy fashion (as long as you have a fairly recent Nvidia GPU) would be to grab an Nvidia Shield TV (box) and just stream your video over the local network.

[bkaphengst95]

I've thought about just running HDMI to the tv in my living room but Im wondering about a keyboard and mouse. I havent tried any bluetooth keyboards to see if they would work but I would think they would as my apartment is only like 25'x18'. How long can I run a HDMI cable before running into issues?

[Wh0_Am_1]

3 minutes ago, bkaphengst95 said:

I've thought about just running HDMI to the tv in my living room but Im wondering about a keyboard and mouse. I havent tried any bluetooth keyboards to see if they would work but I would think they would as my apartment is only like 25'x18'. How long can I run a HDMI cable before running into issues?

Depends on the standard, but generally 50 feet is the max before you have to worry about purchasing expensive (and laggy) repeater. Also bluetooth should work as long as you don't have any appliances, (like microwaves, fridges, and etc.) in the way of the computer, though depending on the layout of the apartment, you may experience lag or dropped keys. 

[Overbuilder]

You can find 20m hdmi 2.0 cables for 35 usd, and you should be able to do about 25m with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Only issue wwith such a long cable , it affects the colour @4k60hz, you can only do 4:4:2 colour. However, with a C2Q PC i wouldn`t reccomend anything higher than 1440p so you should be able to get full colour through the cable easily, just not at 4k.

[bkaphengst95]

Thank you for the input. I mainly just needed someone to bounce ideas off of, as I tend to make things a lot more complicated than they need to be a lot of the time. I think I'll get a better GPU with more HDMI or Display Ports and just use my living room TV as another display, using an hdmi switch to switch between my cable box and PC on my living room TV. Does that sound like it would work?

[Overbuilder]

you can even get crazy long 164ft cable that do the fll colour at 4k, but it would set you back over 200 $ lol.

 

[Overbuilder]

yeah, although if using a splitter, make sure it is a half good one or you will have issues.

[Wh0_Am_1]

1 minute ago, Overbuilder said:

you can even get crazy long 164ft cable that do the fll colour at 4k, but it would set you back over 200 $ lol.

 

At that point it would just be easier and cheaper to go with the Shield TV solution for ~$170 USD.

[bkaphengst95]

I just did some rough estimates of how long the cable would actually need to be and it would probably only need to be like 30-40 feet. If worst comes to worst it wouldn't be that annoying to swap out hdmi cables on the back of my living room tv, its extremely easy to get to. Thanks for the help everyone, I had a feeling I was trying to make this way more complicated than it needed to be.

[Overbuilder]

you're most welcome.

[ChrisLo]

Your house is just too big 

[RyzenUp]

Very long cable and HDMI switch