Thunderbolt Switches (Not KVMs)?

[RobV1306]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm currently in the process of moving my rig into a new office for the missus and I. However, the office is going to be just that - an office. I've therefore agreed that it's not for playing games and that I'll use our loft conversion for that.

 

To do that, I figure it's best to have the PC downstairs with normal monitors and peripherals etc, while I have the games room set up upstairs. To link the office and the loft conversion, I figure it's best to use thunderbolt 3. However, this brings me to the topic - I want to have 2 separate sim setups made up in the loft conversion which I can switch between. Let me explain a little further.

 

I like to play sim games, both racing and flying and I've built proper rigs for these in the past. Obviously, a racing sim rig is different to a flight sim rig and so will be physically set up in a different part of the room. What I'm looking for here is the ability to switch between the two.

 

If I just had one sim, it'd be easy - run thunderbolt cable upstairs, plug in a second keyboard and mouse, displays etc and then simply use windows in-built monitor switching to turn monitors upstairs/downstairs on and off. So far so easy. But what I'd actually like to do is have a thunderbolt switch (I don't think a KVM is right here since I think that goes the other way - one set of peripherals for 2 PCs, not 1 PC for 2 sets of peripherals) for me to be able to select between the racing sim being essentially "plugged in" and the flight sim being "plugged in". Problem is, whenever I search for thunderbolt switches, KVMs come up.

 

Can anyone give me some advice on products I could use to be able to switch between the racing rig and the flight rig?

 

Any more detail needed, let me know.

 

Cheers!

 

Rob

[BobVonBob]

As far as I can tell nothing like that exists. You could attach each setup to a thunderbolt dock and just switch the thunderbolt cable manually, not ideal but if you put the docks near each other it won't be too much more effort than an A/B switch.

 

I should mention that thunderbolt 3 only works up to about 5 meters, so unless the computer is directly below the sim setup you'll need to switch to thunderbolt 2 with an add in card and use expensive optical thunderbolt 2 cables. Thunderbolt docks also don't support more than 2 displays, so you'll need to figure out a way around that issue. I think displays can be daisy chained, but they need to support it and that's not a very common feature from what I can tell.

[RobV1306]

Thanks Bob. Not the answer I wanted really but a very helpful one nonetheless. Looks like I might have to explore optical stuff. I was hoping not to have to.

 

Any different suggestions as to how I might achieve my desired setup?