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The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

fabiensanglard.net

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Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#161

Post by gehwartzen »

benfrain wrote: post #72
gehwartzen wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! As long as each PC is setup with all the necessary drivers and such its all plug and play. No issues with just ripping the cable out of my MacBook without "undocking" anything. It just reverts to the internal display without issues. I kind of wish there were manual/dumb TB3 switches for this sort of thing but I have not seen any.

One more question — those magnetic connections, can it connect both ways? What I mean it, cable running away in either direction or is it orientation specific?

Just tested for you. Yep! It works plugged in either direction.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#162

Post by jeffbee »

pmalynin wrote: post #156
Bud wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One very major difference is, Thunderbolt's spec requires that this cable carry 100W of power in addition to the 40Gbps of bandwidth.

Power over Ethernet is not too far from 100W. Maybe around 70, if I can recall correctly. So the power isn’t the biggest factor I think

PoE only works on 4-pair UTP though. It's not going to work over twinax!

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#163

Post by gautamcgoel »

For anyone in interested in building a silent PC, I have some simple advice: use a Noctua CPU heatsink and Noctua case fans. They are whisper-quiet, and I spent < $100 for all the fans in my system. They are the most premium-feeling computer product I have ever used; the CPU heatsink was very heavy and solid, and came with all the tools needed for installation including a screwdriver and thermal paste. Highly recommend, 10/10.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#164

Post by mperham »

FireBeyond wrote: post #144
js2 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not ejecting the external SSD before disconnecting? I have a TB2 dock which I connect to using Apple's TB3 to TB2 adapter. I keep my Time Machine backup drive connected to the dock (along with 4K monitor, keyboard, mouse, and speakers). If I don't eject the drive before disconnecting from the dock, macOS complains about disconnecting the drive without ejecting it first.

I ended up buying Jettison ( https://stclairsoft.com/Jettison/ ) to handle auto ejecting on sleep and remounting on wake (in particular, I have a PCIe SSD in my Mac Pro which macOS considers an external drive, rightly so, but still).

How is this not built into macOS already? It's literally "on sleep, flush and unmount".

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#165

Post by jbjbjbjb »

treve wrote: post #2

I just also started looking into Thunderbolt 3 docks after only getting 4k30hz. $400+ CAD is so much though! Im curious if anyone here has recommendations

I bought this for a tenth of what the blog suggests. Im sure it’s not as good but I get my 4K 60hz

https://www.cablematters.com/showproduct_m.aspx?ProductID=89...

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#166

Post by 908B64B197 »

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…

I wish Microsoft would open-source their magnetic Surface Connector.

It Just Works with a dock, period. They made an USB-C adapter if you want to try out the buggy Thunderbolt/USB-C ecosystem.

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#168

Post by neogodless »

jrrrr wrote: post #48

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 m…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25522437

Anandtech article announcing Intel's Maple Ridge - a chipset to enable Thunderbolt 4 on future motherboards regardless of the CPU (i.e. Tiger Lake not required.)

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#169

Post by mastax »

fabiensanglard wrote: post #151
mastax wrote: post #101

The tall thin heatsink at the edge of the motherboard is cooling part of the VRM. The VRM or Voltage Regulator Module is responsible for converting the 12V input down to 1.3V or so for the CPU. Under that heatsink there are 2 of the 8 phases for CPU Vcore and 2 phases for Vsoc. It would be pretty safe to remove that heatsink, even in a passive case because: - Vsoc draws very little power, especially with no iGPU. - T…

Thank you so much for the explanation. How do you know all that? I am interested in learning about motherboard design and wonder if there are books you would recommend about it.

I'm an electrical engineer by trade. The specifics in the post were lifted from the linked video since he already did the hard work of looking up the components and calculating the efficiency curve.

I wish I had a book to recommend about motherboards specifically, I would like to read it!

Re: The beautiful Silent ThunderBolt-3 PC

#170

Post by jules »

gautamcgoel wrote: post #163

For anyone in interested in building a silent PC, I have some simple advice: use a Noctua CPU heatsink and Noctua case fans. They are whisper-quiet, and I spent < $100 for all the fans in my system. They are the most premium-feeling computer product I have ever used; the CPU heatsink was very heavy and solid, and came with all the tools needed for installation including a screwdriver and thermal paste. Highly recomme…

The Noctua NH-D14 is the best heatsink, but Arctic P14 PWM fans are superior to Noctua, and much cheaper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv1S9RhABa8

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