Final Form Achieved for my WFH/Gaming Battlestation

[kingfurykiller]

I have achieved the final form of my work-from-home/gaming/streaming battlestation. Let me know what you all think! 

 

1. What do you do with this? I work from home at a major networking company, often on conference calls while multitasking heavily. For fun, I play games and work to expand my own technical knowledge. Among a wide variety of titles, but I play strategy, action, RPG, and FPS games. Assassins Creed, Battlezone, Half Life, DOOM, Skyrim, FTL, Mass Effect, Tomb Raider, XCOM, Dead Cells, and Halo are some favorites.
2. How did you get here? Well over a decade of personal and professional passion and hard work in technology, and help from both friends and family. I started with a hand-me-down Compaq Deskpro that my Uncle brought home from a hospital’s refresh, and a random ATI GPU that my Dad got me in high school. The organizational layout I get from my Mom. Friends in college and from work got me into PC building, and either taught or inspired much of this station.

3.  Desktop Tower: Running case and motherboard from the original 2016 build, but upgrades made to all other components. No need to swap out the case; just keeping it clean. I don’t feel like swapping the motherboard and re-installing the OS, hence the older CPU platform and SATA SSD. Still, the i7-7700k performs very well in all the tasks I use the tower for (primarily gaming). Larger cooler will allow overclocking to further extend the useful lifespan. 16GB of RAM serves this purpose fine. RTX 2070 GPU was purchased in Feb 2020, just missing the GPU shortage. It runs most games at 144FPS/1080p resolution/Max details, so it’s staying as long as it lives. Storage is configured as boot SSD, 2 game SSDs (that were added later), and 2 HDDs for large storage in RAID1. Further upgrades to the fans (2 front and 1 bottom intake, 2 top and 1 rear as exhaust) and cable management allow for improved airflow and extended lifespan. The PSU was just upgrades to 750 watt gold for more efficiency and to allow later overclocking.

4. Monitors: 3 different displays (obtained at different times on different budgets). The left and right are cheap/free (23in/27in, both 1080p/60hz) while the center display is a nice one (144hz/27in/1080p with adaptive sync. It was more cost-effective and space-efficient to get 3 medium displays than 1 or 2 large ones. As for use case, all of the displays’ input 1 is connected to the gaming tower, while all of the input 2 is connected to the work laptop’s docking station. This allows for streaming/gaming/system monitoring/chat/guides on the desktop, and notes/chat/email/productivity/browser on the work laptop. This is also the maximum amount of pixels that my work laptop can push

5.  Peripherals: I primarily use the Logitech G815 mechanical keyboard for both work and personal. It (along with the Logitech C920 webcam) are connected to a USB switch, hidden under the rightmost monitor. This allows these devices to be switched between the work and personal PCs. I use separate mice for each machine (MX Master for work, G502 for gaming) for different ergonomics and feature set. Both can be swapped interchangeably between machines.

6.  Audio: Since no headset that I’ve found has true multi-device support, each device has different audio needs, and windows audio switching is rough, I have multiple audio devices. The work laptop connects to the Cisco 562 Multibase headset on the left, which integrates seamlessly with WebEx for work, via a docking station connected to the laptop dock. The Logitech Pro X is my primary gaming headset, which I purchased for build, mic, and sound quality, along with solid battery life. It pairs wirelessly via a dongle to the gaming PC. I rarely use speakers, but I have a set of Logitech Z407s that were carefully mounted behind the monitor. They are connected via USB to the gaming PC

7. Lighting: due to poor lighting conditions in my room and my job keeping me on video calls extensively, there are 2 key lights on either side of the main display. The brightness adjusters are mounted directly in front of the speakers, making it easy to adjust while on call, and avoiding a pricier webcam. Due to space constraints, the tripods were ziptied in place.

8. Work laptop: As with many IT workers, I am now permanently remote. My employer provides a Lenovo X1 Carbon with a Thunderbolt dock. I have mounted it on a metal riser (with venting holes), and used this to add a laptop fan pad, keeping performance as high as possible. Furthermore, this metal rise allows for easy cable management and connections to all the additional peripherals (using every single port on the dock) for full connectivity. This does include ethernet for solid networking. The dock only provides 2 display outputs by default, so a USB – VGA converter was added for the 3^rd monitor. Laptop screen is disabled when docked.

9. Desk: This is a standing desk from VIVO to preserve personal health after long hours; it rises according to the presets on the button panel on the right side of the desk. Additional shelving and mounts were added to the top of the desk for more storage.  A VIVO monitor arm holds 2 of the 3 monitors (the other does not have a VESA mount and sits on the shelf instead. Underneath the desk, a VIVO cable holder was added, and the power strip was mounted, allowing for the best possible cable management of the high number of devices. Charging cables were added at specific locations and held in place with cable clips for convenience. The entirety of the desk setup is backed up by a 1500V Cyberpower UPS, which can run all of the gear for at least 15 mins and up to 80 mins, in the event of a power loss. Various extension cables were ran to make power easy to reach while keeping cables out of the way.

10. Mobility: The Surface Pro 7 is my personal laptop, used for personal computing elsewhere in the house or when traveling (I don’t use my work machine for personal tasks). When at the desk, it serves as an additional machine to accomplish personal business during work hours, or monitor chat while streaming/gaming. The surface was selected for extremely high portability since I have a powerful desktop. This model can charge with USB-C, which means I only need to travel with 1 charge. This pairs with the Google Pixel 3aXL as my phone (on a mount on the right), and the Plantronics Backbeat Pro 2 SE headphones for my primary mobile gear. More on this in another post

11. Additional Furnishing: Since some of the furniture was acquired over time, matching cost and height was a challenge. Various cheap Amazon options were selected to give maximum storage space in this office corner, while keeping equipment accessible/off the floor, and providing some display capabilities for personal effects. Full list is in the spec list, although some of this is no longer available. On the other hand, the chair was an investment and selected for additional ergonomics. Walls are used to display Lego (Xpods specifically), personal keepsakes, my diploma, a plaque from work, and some of my favorite books.

12. Networking: Due to my employment and the needs of my house, I had my ISP place a coax tap for broadband directly into the closet behind my office. I then added my own modem (ARRIS), and then router and switch from Ubiquity. 2 of the cables go directly to the work laptop and gaming desktop for maximum performance. 2 more runs go to Ubiquity Access Points elsewhere in the house for full coverage. 1 more goes to a 5-port flex mini switch for the entertainment center.  The entire network setup is also backed up by a separate APC UPS, providing about 1hr of uptime.

[krakek]

Congradulations!

Still waiting for a GPU for my own battle station

[kingfurykiller]

2 minutes ago, krakek said:

Congradulations!

Still waiting for a GPU for my own battle station

It'll be worth the wait. I'm so glad I snagged this GPU early only

[Kid.Lazer]

Looks amazing!

 

If you want to clean up your audio device cluster, I highly recommend the freeware SoundSwitch. Set a hotkey to switch audio devices (both input and output) and changing devices is nearly automatic. I use this all the time on all my PCs.

[kingfurykiller]

Just now, Kid.Lazer said:

Looks amazing!

 

If you want to clean up your audio device cluster, I highly recommend the freeware SoundSwitch. Set a hotkey to switch audio devices (both input and output) and changing devices is nearly automatic. I use this all the time on all my PCs.

That's awesome! I'm not sure if my work PC would allow it; and the headset for my work PC has specific requirements for that headset (which is great for work, and terrible for music/gaming). So i'll work with the multiple devices for now, but I'll keep SoundSwitch in mind for future configuration.