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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?
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
Eh? This sounds more like crappy cables, than anything else. Propagation delay on an extra 10-feet of cables is hardly measurable much less noticeable.
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
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.
Came to say this. If you want a great build, include these:
An Asus Strix GTX 970
A Seasonic Platinum 1050w
A 120mm/140mm CPU cooler, at least a Hyper 212 Evo
A 4xxx Intel chip
A SSD
A case with lots of ventilation so you won't need extra fans. For maximum Wife Acceptance Factor, consider mini-ITX.
Noise? What noise? If your motherboard is willing to shut off your CPU fan at idle, you'll be at 0db (except for electrical noise). Even during heavy gaming the thing will barely make a whisper.
Need more help? SPCR has you covered.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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.
Get a less noisy system. How hard is that to figure out?
Married 15 years. After I had spent the money on quieter fans, it turned out she just didn't like the look of the computer in the living room, with its wires and peripherals and stuff.
Go the man cave route with an extra room (or even a closet). You get to spend the money on bigger speakers instead of quieter fans. She gets to decorate the living room to her liking, and you get major points for being so accommodating. It will come in handy later when you have kids, so you can lock out all your little ones from the Dangerous Stuff, and it's even more handy later when you can let your bigger kids play in them while you and the Mrs. enjoy some sanity time in the nice living room.
The moral of the story is: don't be poor.