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Comment by tsomctl | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty happy with my setup. My garage shares a wall with my living room, so I put the tower out there. I then ran high quality, 25' long dvi and usb cables to the desk in my living room.

Edit: I currently have two gtx1050 in it running at full power, and can't hear the fans at all.

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Personally, I just don't like computing at a distance. I actually like hearing things like fan noise or hard drive sounds, as long as they're not incessant, because it can serve as a subtle notification that the computer might be doing something in the background that I might not have realized otherwise.

But then a silent build wouldn’t be interesting to you at all. The garage idea is good for someone who does want Silent computing.

Hmm, I guess. I think my MacBook Pro strikes a nice balance: it's silent 95% of the time, and I get some fans up when I run builds or something hangs in the background.

Better to have usage stats always visible like iStat Menus: https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/

Fans don't tell the whole story. Network traffic is super useful to see as well. Also, if your computer never gets hot enough, it can be doing plenty of unwanted background work without setting off the fans.

I have that, but I'm not always watching it. Sound lets me know to glance up at my menu bar to see what's going on.

On a slightly different but related subject, I live on a boat with a diesel engine. Being able to hear the engine run and hear the change of tone is something I couldn't live without.

I often run the engine to heat my water and the very slightest change of tone has my ears pricking up, panicking with "I've not heard that sound before! What's up with it? Is it broken? Am I going to sink??" running through my head.

I did the same but the tower is in my basement. I ran an HDMI and USB cable up thru the wall and into a keystone panel behind my TV. Other than occasionally having to manually flip the tower back on after a power outage it worked pretty flawlessly. Totally silent and no tower to hide in my living room.

"wake on USB" could save you from manually switching the PC back on.

I haven't found such functionality in my MoBo, but a tinkerer could also use one more cord to move the power button where the rest of the controls are.

An Alexa "skill" or whatever integration would be cool: "Alexa, turn on the computer!"

Wake on lan then?

There should be a “power state” setting in BIOS to turn back on after a power outage.

There are also power button remotes that could work, depending on distance: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MQUANS8/

At the risk of me too! I have a Dell T420 with eight spindles in the loft above our bedroom, plus assorted UPS, APU2 based router, switches and a mini ATX based thing for MythTV.

I screwed four lengths of 4" x 2" between two roofing joists to make two trapeziums. I then screwed a 3/4" thick sheet of chipboard to the bottom and then wrapped the top and sides in roofing felt (some protection in case of roof failure).

The loft is lagged 200mm deep with 3/4" chipboard on top which deadens the noise nicely. The Dell was running the fans quite a lot today when I went up to check on something - 25C outside in Somerset, UK today.

What sort of ambient temperature do you normally have in your garage?

With the two GPUs running full tilt, probably good enough to easily add 'tropical plant horticulture' to one's hobbies.

unless he's in a northern country. if it's was in my garage, the machine would probably not need fans

Someone started a fire with their cryptocurrency mining rig in an apartment somewhere near Vladivostok this past February. All it takes a little dedication!

Between 50 and 70 F. It's unheated/uncooled, but I live in a temperate environment.

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