Computer Setup

Whoa, it's been a while since we've had one THIS good.

Those chairs are 1600$ a pop.

It's bad for me, I know, but work+hobby = 12 hours of chair per day. I've had many chairs, everything from $15 walmart to the pants-shredding Aerons (which have had their seats and backs replaced TWICE under warranty), and I can tell you that the Embody chairs are the best I've ever run across. The adjustable seat-pan depth and the articulated back are just great.

Have any positive reviews on less expensive chairs? I'm in mine quite a bit as a web developer, ecommerce site owner, and coolcomputersetups addict, but don't really have the overhead for a chair over 1500+, although I'm sure they're damn comfortable

Chairs are very much a subjective and personal item, and everyone likes different things about them. The Embody is adjustable enough that my wife and I can have matching chairs and still both be comfortable. The seat-pan depth adjustment is pretty rare (Aeron's don't have it).

You should install a treadmill desk workstation. Use it a few hours a day and it could add years to your life.

Work out a few hours a day, add years to your life. sounds like a bad deal.

My mom use a treadmill desk while working. She says it's not a lot of effort and she doesn't really think about it. You're not walking very fast. I can't remember exactly what the speed limit is, but it's something <= 4 mph, so they're not intended to be something to break a sweat on, but to just keep you active during the day.

4 mph is more than "not very fast."

Those are exactly the years I don't want. I can't walk, I'm pooping myself, and I'm a burden on my entire family, but yay, I 'm alive. Unless they can cure death or aging in the next 80 years, then I might stick around.

Avoiding a stoke or heart attack in your 50s and 60s is really what it is all about.

"they say sitting is the smoking of our generation"

They say "do you have a blog or something I can follow" is the "your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter." of our generation.

The "your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter," is the "I'll listen to every word you say and later pass it off as religion" of our generation.

This post was the TL;DR of my generation

I use one of these guys at work:

Dude, the bungee chairs from the Container Store are simply amazing. They're $200 out the door and I like them better than the Aeron.

Just bought myself a Steelcase Leap ($900, 12 year warranty). Still on its way. I knew it was the one when I sat in it in the showroom, so goddamn comfy.

I'm in the trucking business and work in an office all day. You know how truckers ride for 12-14 hours a day? Truckers have the most comfortable seats ever.

What kind of chairs are they?

Herman Miller Aeron in the 5th pic as well (I think). Those are $800-1k each

If you think that's expensive, you don't want to know what one of those Sun racks (empty) used to retail for.

Top comment providing me the infos. Came in to find out what chair that was, left knowing I can't afford it. Thanks Coolcomputersetups....

Probably the most well-organized, well-planned, and just nicest gaming setup I've seen. And this is really a gaming setup, not just a computer on a desk with a shitload of monitors.

Up there with the google engineer's LAN party house. A good amount of money and a lot of planning go a long way.

I've seen that guy's setup and it's very impressive for gaming. It was a big source of idea inspiration for me.

I completely agree. I love the use of a old rack to house all the computers. Is the room where the rack sits, is that just below your office, or do you have a pipe running from the office to wherever that storage room is?

It's directly below the office, so yep, a straight short shot for most of the wiring. 20 cat6, 4 USB, and 2 speakers, but some of it is for expansion or trying crazy stuff.

The usb extenders run from where to where? Any attenuation at that length?

I've run USB cables for about 40' before with no attenuation issues. (Metal building, wireless was sketchy at best, web camera.) I doubt OP's run was near that long, so it should be a non-issue.

I don't see how it is anymore of a 'gaming setup' than someone with a computer and 14 monitors. People like different things.

If you don't think that several computers, rack-mounted in the basement, and routed like that totally beats the shit out of the usual "one pc and 4 monitors on a desk" type posts, I don't know man...

I didnt say it wasnt better. i said they were both equally a "gaming setup".

They are equally gaming setups, but they are not equal gaming setups.

All gaming setups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

I posted a quick grab of my setup about a year ago, and had a lot of folks asking for more details. Most of the details are in the album, but ask away if I missed anything. I'm a mostly work-from-home guy, so this is both business and pleasure, so I figure it might as well be nice.

At first i was like, "o cool, a chic little desk or two"

This is simply incredible. Your entire home is based around your gaming setup. May I ask what you do for a living?

The technical side of enterprise software sales. My wife's also from the tech biz, so it fits us.

Given the Sun tower I'm going to go on a limb and say your Oracle right?

The album says he scavenged it for $100

I think he's alluding that he scavgened it from work.

Actually I don't work for Oracle. I bought the rack from Silicon Valley Compucycle. Their deal was $100 but you have to come get it yourself.

I did the same thing to two of my friends when I bought a vending machine for $75. Who knew those things were about 100 lbs per foot of height?

Our fraternity house made this mistake not once, not twice, but three times.

That was definitely an interesting way to reveal the weight of the vending machine.

So you are the peak of 21 century lifstyle then?

I aspire to live a life similar to yours once I'm out of school. Fuck tv/cable.

Truly amazing setup. What do you use for audio? Monitor speakers or am i missing something else nicely tucked away.

Monitor speakers for most stuff, but the audio is routed into the receiver at the top of the rack and I can push it to the NHT's you see sitting on the floor of the office for cutscenes and videos when I need some bass.

How can someone that has such good taste in everything else, be so wrong about audio?

If I want immersion, I use headphones or put it on the NHT's. We listen to music on the bigger speakers and the office is just an extension of the living room stereo with NHT supertwos, so the monitors are just for YouTube and other squawky crap like email alerts. When we play 4 player games, we keep the volume way down and balanced anyway.

I wish I could money :(

FWIW OP is somewhere in or around his 40s and he built it up over 20 years.

You're pretty much right agewise, but I have definitely moved around. This is my 6th house/condo in 15 years. Each has had a quad setup, but you learn from each one and build the next iteration better (and reuse a lot of parts to save money).

I convert HDMI to 2xCat6 and back with the Atlona baluns. Digital audio comes with the video.

I take it you do that because of signal degradation with HDMI cables over longer distances that aren't nearly as bad with CAT6?

Yup, cat6 can do 300ft/100m no problem, HDMI? not so much.

This might sound a bit stupid... but how do you turn the computers on without walking to the rack? And any latency due to the long (I'm assuming) cables?

No latency that I can detect. We play a lot of League of Legends and some FPS and never had a problem.

I usually keep all of the lag over at my house...
MFW I KNOW this guy...!

One easy way to do that would be through WOL(Wake on LAN), which would let them be turned on over the network by a phone, tablet, or even the router itself. Could also probably be accomplished by soldering really long wires to the power button's wires and hooking up another button to that.

Wake on LAN, everything suspends or hibernates. I have to go push a button about once every 2-3 weeks, but it's almost always my fault.

Oh, nice. I've hoped to set up my future house for home automation, what do you use for it? I had a setup with X10 and misterhouse on a spare Linux server for a while. That was nice because it was cheap, but I'm curious what you used and how much you have automated with it.

What app(s) do you use for this? I'm building my own Raspberry Pi automation webgui but I'm interested in alternatives.

Insteon with the Universal Devices ISY-99 as a controller. Elk M1 for security and dry contact automation.

I am really envious of your knowledge. Is their any communities or books I can read/explore to learn more about this kind of stuff?

You could (at least theoretically) route the motherboard power button control jumpers to a button any distance away. He could have just spliced them into a cat-6 cable and installed switches on the other end upstairs. Then he could just control all the power switches from upstairs.

Or solenoids and switches to push the power buttons.

Presumably they are on UPS and he never turns them off. Still, good question.

In there, he definitely states "I'm too lazy to..."

The first box I installed was my always-on-runs-everything-god-I-hate-to-have-to-reboot-this-one vSphere host. It was about an hour later that I realized I still had the 2x4 stuck in there and I was going to need to unrack it and pull the rails out in order to turn that screw 10 times.

Suddenly, Sun rack. I was starting to get suspicious of what was powering these beasts.

I would love to see more of these on this coolcomputersetups. Less of a gaming setup and more of a lifestyle.

I think there's room for all the various types of gaming setups.

OP, leave your wife and marry me, I need this!

Absolutely beautiful. May I ask how much did you spent on the whole thing?

I have no clue. I've slowly built this setup over about 20 years. It would be big chunk to buy it all outright, but a couple pieces at a time and it doesn't hurt that bad. Sturdy walnut desks cost more than almost anything else! I probably have more money tied up in cabling and adapters than in actual hardware.

I imagine this wasn't all built at once...

We used to live in a loft in downtown SF, until we happily found out our daughter was on the way. We bought a 1940's house with the intent to remodel, so the planning really started there.

What is the distance between the wireless keyboards / mice and the receivers?

There are USB hubs on the backs of the monitors and the receivers are there, so only 1-2 feet max. I've tried it with them downstairs and they work but there are some intermittent drop-outs, and the metal rack doesn't help.

This is my dream setup. You bastard. I love it. One bookmark is not enough here.

I had suggested a rig like this in a thread about cops raiding someone's house and confiscating all the computer gear they found. I.e., put a fake tower on the desk and hide all the guts up in the attic out of sight.

Crap. You win the internet.

My question is whats the purpose of all the rack mounted equipment? I can't tell what it is, even

Those are the PC's. They're centrally located and the audio/video/USB is routed to the offices. As mentioned in the notes, that much computer crap means a lot of heat and noise, so not sitting anywhere near it is a big benefit. Everything pulls out on rails, so new gear can be dropped in and swapped around with minimal effort.

How do you keep them all cooled? Could we get a parts breakdown?

Perhaps i should have read the notes - do you have them directly connected to KVMs or using VM/RDP ?

It looks direct. I'm assuming the room is below the floor where the desks are so it's really not that far. There's only 4 machines for the 2 of them, so I'm going to guess they each have their own machines and the other 2 are dev/server boxes.

Amazing setup! A few questions though. And do you have any type of battery backup for the servers or desktops? Is the electric bill bad?

My UPS died and they're such a pain to acquire, transport, and dispose of, so I've been putting off getting another huge lump of battery, but there were at least 10 times where I wish I had one.

I just picked a couple of 1500 2u ups's (120v) off amazon for a couple hundred each. Most major cities have collection days for stuff like old equipment once every couple months. We have a place by me that will take full enterprise ups systems in for free every couple months if you catch one of the days they are running a free drop off.

"No gaming setup is complete without something from Ikea..." Amen brother. I love Ikea LED strips. I find their light the warmest.

A Sun server cluster? Good god man, what do you use it for?

Those aren't Sun servers, those are four PCs (one for each monitor).

I am doing this right now as an experiment with my wife's PC and our HTPC. If it works out I was going to do the same with my workstation. - What is the longest run? - Have you noticed any lag from the HDMI to CAT6? I have a 75' run to the living room right now and I swear there is a slight lag.

No lag at all with these current HDMI baluns that I can tell, tested with both gaming and movies over various lengths. They're Atlona AT-HD30SR.

I'm clearly in the wrong line of business. What he's got setup here is my yearly housing payment.

It's a vicious cycle. Build systems to get good at working on systems to make money to build systems with!

I want to ask -- do you run Windows 8 bare metal, or is it in a virtualized environment for your main systems?

The wall mount components are actually vinyl K-style rain gutters from Home Depot. This stuff costs about a dollar a foot. You'll need a couple plastic mounting brackets that are a dollar or two a piece, and you can screw them into the studs of your wall. I've also got the downspout attachments that you see for passing cables out the bottom.

Deathstar is an appropriate term.

"oh it's just an old Sun Microsystems rack"

Does it bother anyone else that those monitors are not level?

It would be a crime if you didn't add back lighting, OP.

This is so awesome. I wish I could have something like this, even though I don't need it.

What are the chairs in the first two images?

Very nice. I personally found the Embody chair to be the most uncomfortable thing ever. I have an Aeron supplied by my company at the office and I like that much better.

Yep, chairs are all about personal comfort and preference. I dislike the plastic bar at the front of the Aeron, and the B size seat was too deep for my wife to sit comfortably in.

That is beautiful. This is what I aspire to have one day when I graduate and hopefully get a job with my degree.

All I can say is well done.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you do for work? and how often do you work from home?

Sorry everyone but I'm new here. Please someone tell me what that big black box is and what does it do? Thanks

The big black box is a server rack, which you'd normally mount servers in. In this setup, the OP has his computers mounted in it and the connections all run to it. So, all of his computers are kept in there keeping noise and heat out of the actual office.

Good work, bookmark for you

Centralized storage piled up on disks in the vSphere box, with RDM's to Samba VM's. Nothing is stored on the PC's long term so that they can be rapidly wiped and used for various things.

How did you manage to get that Sun rack? Was it from a previous job, or did you manage to find that on Craigslist or something?

So 4x computers running i7-2600's + what graphics card? Just curious what you have under the hood. Also not that many people use it but optical drives?

Geforce 550GTX Ti's. The CPU's are overkill for Windows, but I do a lot of virtualization and the i7 is a nice processor for both types of workloads.

It was 9:11 when you took one of those pictures. CONSPIRACY!?

I can't bookmark this hard enough. I'm jealous. Like on a level I never knew I could reach.

Great!! Now I feel like shit getting ready to post my gaming setup that' I'm fixing up!

Given your setup, you may want to invest in a video matrix switch. It could easily change the way you use your existing systems.

A 4x4 is just too expensive for the value it would add. Each PC can handle 2 HDMI outputs, plus I can turn on Virtu and get one more HDMI and a Displayport, and I haven't even needed to do that.

So, what, are you going to take over the world with that ?

What if you need to plug a USB peripheral?

There are 7 port USB hubs stuck to the backs of the monitors. Each one has the keyboard/mouse receivers and retractable 30-pin iOS charging cables.

I was waiting to hear "We use them to play Minecraft." It would have been the crowning jewel of the whole post.

There are only two words that exist to describe this gaming setup...

I kind of want to see the rest of your house

This is what I want when I graduate and then save money for a few years...

The cable management pics gave me such a boner. I'm way too OCD about loose cables.

What do you do for a living again?

You magnificent glorious basard...you've pretty much built what i've been envisioning for my own home...damn you and your creative vision >:(

I want to have your computer's babies.

We've all seen what kind of trouble a half-Cylon can cause!

Could you give the full specs of the computers please :)

Nothing really exotic, mostly middle-of-the road gear that's easy to replace. ASUS P8 mainboards and i7-2600's (for virtualization support with VT-D and all the extended passthrough spec), 8GB of RAM, 240GB SSD's, Geforce 550's.

How's the performance with the HDMI to Cat6 cabling?

I can't look at other gaming setups the same, they fall quite short after seeing this!

Dudeheim this is awesome. I've worked with some tech sales guys from Engineyard on infrastructure pricing. Seems like a cool job.

That's really some fantastic work you've done there.

Wow, that is fucking spectacular.

You Win, I think we can close this sub now.

Question, what job do you do, to justify the use of 1200$ chairs?

This is seriously bad ass. The pigment of my skin is literally turning green right now because all of the envy I have.

This is incredible.

I am curious, why do you have 2 PCs x 2 (I assume 2 for your wife and 2 for you?). Why not have 1 really OPed PC and use Synergy with the dual monitors?

I saw this on the sims once.

Is that an Aeron chair?

No denying, this looks bad ass. I'm curious about the monitors, are they hard mounted straight to the wall or are they on arms you can adjust. They seem a bit far away from the seating position and not angled towards the view point.

While your desk chairs are incredible, I must comment on your gray captain's chair, as seen in picture 5; I have had the orange variation of that exact chair since I was 10 (I'm 18 now), and this is the first time I've seen another like it in the wild.

A lil much their, what kinda chairs?

Can I be your friend?

I have one of the most raging hardons I have ever experienced.

What do you do for a living?

This is a great set-up. As I also work from home this for me is a dream, I currently work on the dining room table and clear it all away at the end of the day so my family can eat at the table. Great work buddy. What is it you do if you dont mind me asking?

So yeah, this is pretty epic.

Can I inquire (if known) the total cost of this set up? It seems amazing! I am very impressed and thanks for sharing.

Atlona extenders are not all that costly See here.

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