rackmount Rackmount Gaming Rig and Desk

fiberftw850 · January 21

Hello all, First time poster, long time lurker.

I've finally got my remote gaming PC setup and desk to a point where I would like to share the setup with the community.

I hope others wanting a similar setup can gleam some useful ideas from this post!

Background:

My gaming PC puts out a good amount of heat, and my desk is in my bedroom. In the summer the room is brutal after a few hours of gameplay. Even with aggressive AC, the room can hit 90F.
I've seen Linus' setup and I already had a server rack, so I figured I'd do a similar thing with the long distance display cables.
I did try out other methods; RDP, moonlight, and steam remote play, but found the latency and compression were just too noticeable.

Not to mention that wake on lan is unreliable in my experience. As for thunderbolt, I didn't want to get stuck into an ecosystem of specific motherboards and cpus.

The Long Cables:
I found some good 75ft optical USB and Displayport cables on Amazon for ~$160 a piece. Its definitely pricy for a single cable, but it is plenty worth it IMO.

I was worried about latency issues with long cables, but after testing it out, I found no noticeable difference between a 3ft USB and display cable and the 75ft cables.

The Gaming PC Power Switch:
The PC power switch circuit is 5v but only 0.01 amps, so voltage drop over 75ft could be less than a volt. So I could just run a pair of wires the whole distance. But I thought, if I'm running a whole other cable through the walls, I might as well make it a useful cable.

Despite the extra cost, I decided to use a CAT 7 Ethernet cable and just hijack a twisted pair inside the cable. Just a little bit of future proofing if I move in the future, for the next person.
I got one of those momentary push buttons with built in LED, the ones you might find on custom PC cases. And I could use a second twisted pair in the Ethernet cable and splice into the power LED header on the motherboard. Granted, the voltage drop at that distance with 24-26 awg wires is about half, but the LED still illuminates enough.
And as a side benefit, I still had two twisted pairs left, just enough for a 100base-tx connection, as well as PoE mode A. (Don't ask me why when I already have an Ethernet cable to my room, in short I'm splicing off two pairs for a PoE powered GPS NTP server in the attic)
As for each end of this power switch madness, I wanted something that wasn't entirely cobbled together. So, I found some Ethernet splitters, the ones that split out a gigabit Ethernet cables 4 twisted pairs into 2 100base-tx connections.
For the PC side of things I got one of those M.2 to RJ45 network adapters. The one I found has the all the logic on the m.2 side, so the pcie bracket just had raw electrical connections.

I used this as a nice way to make the bulkhead connection into the PC case. I got some splitters for the motherboards power sw and led headers, and connected up the rj45 network adapter.
The other side was definitely more cobbled. I cut the end off an Ethernet cable and soldered the pairs (orange and green) onto the push button. Covered it in dielectric grease and wrapped in electrical tape and fabric wrap.

Audio:
I went pretty basic here, my monitor has 3.5mm port, so I'm just using audio over displayport. Then I have a terribly cheap 3.5mm mixer.

I have ground loop isolators on all inputs and outputs and there is still a small hum in the background - to be fixed later.

USB hub:
This remote PC isn't my daily driver, for that I have a SFF Linux box. My KVM switch has two USB 3.0 ports (not for keyboard and mouse) that I have for a microphone and any USB drives I might need.
Side note: The reason I have the connectpro KVM specifically is because I hate the delay of regular USB switches, so I needed one with USB DDM.

Cable routing:
I'm fairly lucky, theres an air return vent that shares a wall with my bedroom.

I'm on the second floor and my server rack is in the basement, right next to the HVAC system, so it was basically a direct cable drop through the first floor.

Pictures:

Middle monitor is the only one I run on the gaming PC, the sides stay permanently on my daily driver SFF.

Views of my cable rats nest. Gotta hide 'em somewhere:

Spoiler

Definitely not completely finished with this setup, still have some things to take care of, like having a non-duct taped together quality audio mixer, and maybe mounting the UPS and KVM under the desk.

I would love to hear what y'all think!

Parts Lists:

Desk: Flexispot E7 Pro
Center Monitor: Dell s2716dg - 27" 1440p 144hz
Side Monitors: Lenovo li2364d - 23" 1080p 60hz
UPS: APC BE850M2
KVM: ConnectPro UDP-12AP
Keyboard: Logitech K740
Mouse: Logitech M500s
Headphones: beyerdynamic DT 700 PRO X
Network Switch: Ubiquiti UniFi Switch Lite 8 PoE
Access Point: D-Link PoE DAP-2610 (openwrt)

Cables:

1x 75ft Kxable USB 3.0 Extension Cable, Active Fiber Optical Male to Female
1x 75ft FURUI Fiber Optic DisplayPort 2.1
1x 75ft Adoreen Cat 7 SFTP shielded RJ45 Ethernet cable PVC/LLDPE 26 AWG Copper

Power switch:

1x uxcell Momentary Metal Push Button Switch 12mm Mounting 1NO 3-6V White LED (I'd recommend a larger diameter though)
1x IO Crest M.2 Gigabit Ethernet Module, 1000BASE-T M.2 A+E NIC Module
2x SinLoon (A-Pair) RJ45 Ethernet Splitter Adapter

Gaming PC:

CPU: Intel i7-8700k @ 5 GHz
Cooler: Corsair H100i v2 AIO
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB DDR4 3000MHz CL15
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus XI Code
GPU: Nvidia RTX 3080 Noctua
Storage: Samsung 970 evo plus 2TB NVMe
Case: SilverStone RM52 5U Rackmount Server Chassis SST-RM52
PSU: Corsair AX860 80+ Platinum

Daily Driver SFF:

CPU: Intel i3-10105 @ 3.7GHz
Cooler: Cryorig C7G
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 16GB DDR4 3200MHz CL16
Motherboard: MSI MEG Z490I UNIFY Mini-ITX
GPU: Intel iGPU
Storage:
- 2x Samsung SATA SSD 870 EVO 1TB (ZFS RAID)
- 1x Samsung NVMe SSD 980 PRO 500GB (Home drive)
- 1x Supermicro SATA SSD SuperDOM 16GB (Boot drive)
Case: Sliger SM550
PSU: Corsair SF450 80+ Platinum