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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I had really meant to say "not enough good mini/laptop options"

Fair enough. My main ergonomic requirement for a workstation is zero noise at rest, and reasonable otherwise. I'm interested in seeing what I can get in form factor though.

My goal as well. I think that I assumed (wrongly) that these small form factor computers would be more quiet than a tower.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the rule of thumb is that standard towers can be quieter because unless the SFF computers are passively cooled, larger towers can have larger fans spinning at a slower RPM to move the same amount of air, as well as have larger radiators.

What I did (but I'll admit this is not an option in many cases) is to move my workstation into a rack in the basement, with 20m DisplayPort cables connecting the monitors and a 20m usb3 extender cable hooking up a usb hub on the desk for keyboard, mouse, usb storage etc.

Let the computer be loud there - noise has become a non-issue when selecting parts. It has a gtx1070 GPU which gets quite noisy under load (gpgpu processing). All 'workstations' I had in the past, like from Dell, got quite load under load, and had (baseline) loud power supplies as well.

I do need access to the power button more often than I thought, so I'll have to wire the front panel power button to a button on my desk.

A similar strategy I am considering. Get a fanless NUC case from Akasa [http://www.akasa.com.tw] and remote desktop to the "real" computer in the basement.

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