The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC • Hacker News Board

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#41

Post by wlesieutre » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

rashkov wrote: post #28

marinhero wrote: post #22

This is great! I’ve been eyeing the same motherboard to get a similar setup but I do have a GPU. Wouldn’t that break the setup? I could only connect peripherals to the dock and handle the monitors separately. I believe that would end the one cable dream :(

Not sure if the author uses an internal or a discrete gpu, but this build does mention: “ Another weirdness is the 1 foot DP to DP cable required to connect the GPU DP-output to the Mobo DP-input. This is required to get the video stream on the Thunderbolt port.”

Assuming he only replaced the motherboard here, according to the original specs it has a small form factor 1050 ti: https://fabiensanglard.net/the_beautiful_machine/index.html

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#42

Post by cbm-vic-20 » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

The author includes a diagram that shows his PC and his laptop plugged in via Thunderbolt 3 to the CalDigit TS3+ dock, and no direct connection to the monitor. Looking at the dock's product page[1], I don't see how this can have two hosts connected; did I miss something in this article?

[1] https://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus/

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#43

Post by opencl » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

tutfbhuf wrote: post #36

gehwartzen wrote: post #21

Thunderbolt 3 really is amazing. Im using a OWC Thunderbolt Dock to connect my MacBook to: an eGPU thats driving a 5K monitor, a 1TB TB3 SSD, and 24/96 USB audio to my stereo. All over one cable. BTW if your using TB3 as your main connection to your laptop I highly recommend a magnetic TB3 adapter. This has been working great in my setup for over a year and makes docking/undocking a snap. https://www.amazon.com/Magne…

Is it possible to buy an PCIe to TB3 adapter cable and connect any modern graphics card to a laptop or mini atx board that has TB3?

That's basically what all of those eGPU boxes are. You can buy just the enclosure and pop whatever GPU you want in, provided the enclosure has an adequate power supply.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#44

Post by least » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:48 PM UTC

cbm-vic-20 wrote: post #42

The author includes a diagram that shows his PC and his laptop plugged in via Thunderbolt 3 to the CalDigit TS3+ dock, and no direct connection to the monitor. Looking at the dock's product page[1], I don't see how this can have two hosts connected; did I miss something in this article? [1] https://www.caldigit.com/ts3-plus/

No, you didn't miss anything. I'm assuming that he just unplugs the cable from one when he wants to use the other. As far as I know there aren't any sort of KVM thunderbolt 3 hubs in existence.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#45

Post by nicolas_t » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

I have the same motherboard and the same enclosure. The enclosure is really great, well designed and easy to use. For the heatsink, I actually bent some of the pipes and used the lh6 kit to use two sides of the enclosure for heat dissipation instead of one side only.

The thunderbolt port on that mother board works great. I have an egpu that I'm sharing between my laptop and this computer and it works perfectly on windows. I haven't managed yet to configure VFIO so that it works well on a windows VM in linux though.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#46

Post by Gravityloss » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:54 PM UTC

deeth_starr_v wrote: post #31

tmakks wrote: post #5

Which CPU did he use? And why is there a Macbook on all drawings? How is it related to the actual silent PC?

I found this write up confusing also. At the end when he said, "Apple announced a fanless M1 which would have solved my problems", I was like, Wut? You problem was sharing peripherals between a pc and a laptop, right?

Then he might not have needed the desktop at all

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#47

Post by Davertron » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

xondono wrote: post #30

bootlooped wrote: post #6

There's something I don't understand: does switching between laptop and pc with that hub require unplugging one usb c cable from the back of the hub and plugging the other one in? I'm very interested in a similar setup. So far I don't think I've figured out an elegant solution. My current solution is to have both devices plugged into the monitor, and use a usb hub to share the peripherals, manually moving the cable t…

I do something similar, but I got a $20 usb3.1 switch on Amazon and taped that to the back of my monitor. When I want to switch, I just change the input on the monitor and press the button behind it. It’s not the 1-click solution that I wanted, but it’s close enough and cheap. Switching USB ports is cheap, switching video signals isn’t.

You might want to check this out then: https://haim.dev/posts/2020-07-28-dual-monitor-kvm/

That was on HN earlier this year. Basically it's software that you run and set up to detect when certain peripherals connect/disconnect and have it switch the input on the monitor automatically. I've been using it and, while not always perfect, it actually works pretty well, especially considering the price.

If you don't always want the monitor to switch inputs (sometimes I just want to quickly switch my keyboard/mouse to my laptop to do something but don't want to switch monitor inputs) you can also just set up shortcuts or scripts (I created an Alfred workflow, for example) and use something like https://github.com/kfix/ddcctl to switch monitor inputs.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#48

Post by jrrrr » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

Looks like that board is the sole option for Thunderbolt && AMD && ITX. Bummer that there are no options with passively-cooled B550 chipsets.

I do something similar to the post's two-cable configuration:

- Mac to Caldigit TB dock to two displays. - PC to one of the displays - Keyboard and mouse to a USB switch, which connects to the PC and the TB dock

It's kind of a pain to manually flip both the USB switch and the monitor's input.

This app can theoretically help by programmatically toggling the display's input when particular USB devices are dis/connected:

https://github.com/haimgel/display-switch

.. but compatibility is spotty, relying on a rarely-used hardware feature in the display that seems to not be reliably implemented ("DDC/CI").

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#49

Post by dschuler » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

horsawlarway wrote: post #34

dschuler wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the configuration you're interested in, but there are some _relatively_ inexpensive ones from Monoprice [0]. I've tested this one with dual 4k monitors @ 60Hz, and USB 3. It works reliably, which is the most important aspect for me. No laptop charging and fixed TB cable however. [0] https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=31262

Note that this working will depend heavily on what usb-3 peripherals you're plugging in, and the exact resolution of your 4k monitors. a display at 3840x2160@60hz will eat up about 19.8gbps. Two of them together will use 39.6gpbs. Thunderbolt 3 only supports 40gbps. So if you have peripherals that need anything more than basic mouse/keyboard (in my case, a decent webcam and a usb to ethernet adapter) this setup will…

I'm no video expert, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought you can do 3840x2160@60Hz video with 24bit/pixel with under 14.4Gbps, which is the HDMI 2.0 limit [0].

According to this [1], that signal would require 12.54Gbps, so with a link budget of 34.56Gbps - 2*12.65Gbps, you'd have about 9.48Gbps left over for USB and ethernet (which is on the PCI bus for this particular hub). I suppose these numbers include coding overhead for the physical link, but I can't say for sure. If you wanted more than 60Hz or more than 24bit/pixel, you'd definitely run out of bandwidth with two monitors and USB/ethernet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#Version_2.0 [1] https://linustechtips.com/topic/729232-guide-to-display-cabl...

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#50

Post by gspr » Wed, Dec 23, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

dijit wrote: post #11

Something I highly recommend avoiding (though it may look tempting) is the TB16 thunderbolt dock from dell. There is something really screwy with the USB controller in that device, the ETH is on the USB hub and corrupts Ethernet frames, under Linux you can force disable hardware offloaded CRC checksumming as a workaround, but still the USB devices that are directly connected can just stop functioning. It also has the…

Hold on! Is this why ethernet is exhibiting intermittent and impossible to diagnose behavior for me at work, and only for me?! Do you have some more information?