My play was always to build big cases with water-cooling + low speed fan radiator sandwich for near silence.
Next gen play is to accomplish near silence in a much form factor because super towers take a lot of space and moving them sucks.
Next gen play is to accomplish near silence in a much form factor because super towers take a lot of space and moving them sucks.
- lots of cables everywhere
- when you bring it with you on travels it feels like it’s gonna fall apart internally
- external monitor is difficult to safely bring as well. (This one is a problem with the laptop as well because I still use an external monitor there.)
You should be able to access your data, projects, anything from anywhere. Then the desktop vs. laptop is a matter of comfort/circumstance.
My toolkit for this now involved tailscale for network, nfs/smb shares for data access, and vscode/neovim for programming.
It's incredibly powerful
If I had a take a critical desktop-sized PC traveling, I'd consider building it in a rackmount 4U chassis, adding additional bracing (e.g., to keep big GPUs from wrenching on the PCIe and board, and for general chassis flex), and bolt it into a shock-reducing rackmount flight case when not at home.
But I'm trying to stick to just lugging around a vintage ThinkPad, and keeping anything larger in self-hosted servers or at cloud providers.
I was thinking of travel environments more hostile than that, when I might really like a road/flight case with shock absorbing. Without custom-fitting a case, rackmount is a good choice, and (with short depth) has the flexibility of looking like a presentable desktop/under-desk if you want to unrack it when not on the road.