Thunderbolt 3 pc-over-fiber

[ctrl.alt.delicious]

Apologies if this is the wrong sub-forum, I'm new here.

 

I've got a problem I'm trying to figure out how to solve, and my research has not been conclusive on if this is possible or not, but its a common problem. The video above seems to be the closest to what I'm looking for.

 

I would like to have mine and my wife's computers in one room, and our monitors/peripherals in another. There seem to be a few ways of doing this but my problem has a few caveats.

 

The setup would look like this for each of us, I'm assuming whatever solution I end up with I would have to double up, one for my PC and one for her's.

 

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In one room:

- 1x 1440Px144hz displayport (or hdmi) display (essentially any refresh rate above 60, the higher the better [most of the solutions max out at 1080p60hz or 4k60hz] [if downgrading to 1080 for higher refresh rate is required, that's fine])

- USB Keyboard

- USB Mouse

- Headphones (USB or audio jack, whatever works, potentially could draw audio from display?)

 

In the other room:

Our machines

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This isn't a massive house, the total cable length would probably be well under 200ft.

 

It seems like optical thunderbolt 3 would be the best way of transmitting data. All of the peripherals would be on a dock in one room, and the thunderbolt would carry the data to the machines in the other.

 

Now my questions:

1. Is it possible to do high refresh rate at low latency over optical TB3? Or is there another technology that does this?

2. I'm assuming I would need a motherboard in the PCs that supports TB3, unless there is a technology to split the TB3 signal back out into the DisplayPort and USB?

 

I'm not set on thunderbolt 3, if I need to run multiple cables, that's fine. Our main use is gaming, so low latency is a must. If the displays are going to be locked at 60hz due to technological limitations, I would rather deal with the heat and noise instead of doing all this work.

 

Is any of this possible?

 

Thanks

[manikyath]

the thunderbolt dock way of doing this really is prohibitively expensive, especially if going single monitor.

 

i'd say get one of those optical displayport cables, and an optical USB cable, then run the rest of the peripherals off a decent powered USB hub.

in theory going that route is pretty much completely 'transparent' to the system, so past some theoretical latency in the conversions in the cable there's no difference in latency.

[Kilrah]

Long optical display cables are reasonably cheap these days, and good ones will usually support pretty much everything. What's expensive is USB over RJ45 or fiber especially if you want USB3. In any case I'd recommend separate links for both instead of an all in one since that will likely have additional limitations on the display side of things. Separate boxes also won't need "obscure" things like Thunderbolt.

 

[ctrl.alt.delicious]

On 7/5/2025 at 10:22 PM, manikyath said:

the thunderbolt dock way of doing this really is prohibitively expensive, especially if going single monitor.

 

i'd say get one of those optical displayport cables, and an optical USB cable, then run the rest of the peripherals off a decent powered USB hub.

in theory going that route is pretty much completely 'transparent' to the system, so past some theoretical latency in the conversions in the cable there's no difference in latency.

Thank you! Yeah I don't mind running more than one cable. Is it possible to go past 60hz on optical dp cables? Does it depend on the spec of cable itself? Thanks