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Ask Slashdot: Making a 'Wife Friendly' Gaming PC?
shadeshope writes Having just gotten married, I find that for some inexplicable reason my wife doesn't like my huge, noisy, 'ugly' gaming PC being in the living room. I have tried hiding it in a TV cabinet: still too noisy. I have placed it in another room and run HDMI and USB cables, but the propagation delay caused horrible tearing and lag when playing games. Have any other slashdotters encountered this problem? I don't want to buy a console (Steam sales let me game so cheaply), or mess with water cooling. Ideally I would just hide it in the attic, is there some wireless technology that would be fast enough for gaming use? I have become quite attached to 'behemoth.' I have been upgrading him for years and he is the centre of my digital life. I run plex home theatre, media centre, steam, iTunes and air server. Will I have to do my gaming in the spare room? Once I have sorted this small problem going to try and make a case for the efficacy of a projector to replace the television..... it takes up less space, motorized screen could be hidden when not in use, etc.
Your wife just wants to make the house more kiddie friendly. Get a laptop.
Why UNIX?
Alternatively, marry someone who respects your hobbies.
What are you doing "gaming" in the living room? Dude, you are now MARRIED. Turn the spare bedroom into your "man cave". The living room is your wife's domain.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Find another wife.
You have a wife learn to read the signals its not the noisy machine but the fact your spending too much time gaming. Or like a former friend of mine you will have the best gaming machine but No wife or kids and quite likely no real friends
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
Just do your gaming in the spare room. Put a small quiet/silent PC in the living room for media centre stuff if you cannot live without a living room PC.
Also, I'd have to advise against replacing the TV with a projector. They're hellishly expensive if you get one with decent resolution, require a pitch black room to look any good, effectively prevent rearranging the living room, etc.
I love how this thread is increasingly turning into a gender thing, when in fact this issue could come up with any roommate. Or even in reverse...
My computer's noise was driving my husband up the wall recently. So after a fair amount of pestering from him I finally armed myself with some canned air and carried the system out to the patio, opened up the case, and found... that it was fairly clean inside. All I really needed to do was clean the air intakes on the *exterior* of the case. It was that simple and took seconds. The noise level dropped considerably. It went from being all we could hear in the living room to running near-silent.
So clean the outside. If that doesn't work, open 'er up and dust. And then yeah, if that doesn't work, I think this comment above is great. Consider a case with better airflow and/or different fans. I also can't say enough good things about having your OS on a SSD -- far quieter and much quicker. I did that on my latest build and it's fantastic; well worth the trouble of reconfiguring your files.
Exactly - what he is seeing is caused by crappy cables forcing retransmits, not propagation delay. The signal speed in a cable is typically higher than 10% of the speed of light, so any extra delay is measured in nanoseconds.
Anyway, a more silent PC is possible. My old workstation, at work was a quite powerfull i7 (although with a moderate GPU), which often ran at full load for months on end. It was completely silent (being under the table also helped), to the point where an i3 iMac is now annoying me with how loud it is. It was an HP marketed towards the pro marked, and cost something like 1200 $ (without taxes, using my employers good deals) when I ordered it in 2012.
You should be spending time with your spouse, not ignoring her while just happening to be in the same room. If you're gaming on your PC you might as well be at the bar instead, you're just as committed to the relationship at that point.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
... not the PC itself, but the fact that you still seem to want to live the same life as a married man that you lived as a single man. You said your vows, now show that they mean something. Spend time with your wife. Talk with her about the new lives you are starting together.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If you assume someone who wears a kilt (or other masculine skirted garment) hasn't grown a pair, perhaps you need to grow a pair.
propagation delay? Really? What country is that other room where you moved the PC to? Or perhaps you had some other problem that you don't really understand and just decided to call it propagation delay.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Noisy PC, erm yeah right. This is all about "pay more attention to me, Me, ME" and that gaming computer is just the first target.
So with the claim of a noisy computer the response is either get the significant other gaming or you just might have made a huge mistake. A quieter computer is bound to turn into an ugly computer that doesn't match the other furnishings or the screen is to bright and distracts from viewing the idiot box or you are a child for playing computer games and should just grow up or, well, you get the idea.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
If you expect a marriage to be 50/50, you'll probably be disappointed. Because the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, two people who are equally giving will probably feel that they're doing 80%. I do a lot for my wife, and she does for me. Mostly, we do for us. We want time together, so we make time for that, etc.