Unconventional room layouts for gaming rigs

His can be a thread for showing off or problem solving unconventional PC setups in places like your sitting room, bedroom, garage, kitchen… all the places you generally don’t want them…

I’m planning at some point to get a powerful flight sim capable PC next year to run MSFS in Vr… I assume it’ll run hot and require a fairly big case.

What I don’t want to do is put it up in our office, which is crowded already with two machines, no place for any roomscale VR stuff, and the banging around would be across the wall from my daughter who often has trouble falling asleep as it is. Besides, I spend all day in here, I’m done with it after work hours.

So what I need is to get it set up in the sitting room. Problem being, my wife won’t want to see it. So here is my tentative plan… the router is the far left of the room, under the window by the orange couch. Given that I will need the PC wired for it to Airlink well in VR, I run a network cable under the window, behind the white bookshelves and through the back. I put the PC in the far right cabinet, with the hot air exhaust pushed and sealed up against the right cabinet wall, and I cut a vent through which will expel all heat into the 15 cm void between the cabinet and the wall. When playing, I’ll have to keep the cabinet doors open for cool air. Note the shelf in the middle is removable or I can drill it higher to stack peripherals etc, as I have in the left side one holding the DVD player and power bars.



Either I hook up the PC to the 4K tv for general pancake gaming, in which case I get a Bluetooth mouse, keyboard and game pad and sit on the couch, or else I’ll cut a floating shelf that will slot in between the two open cabinet doors for resting a driving wheel or hotas (the shelf idea worked well before I had an office and we were sent home during pandemic, though it does take an annoying minute to set up every time). Seating will suck, I’m not gonna have a nice gaming chair down here, but beggars can’t be choosers.

So, what are the pitfalls here? Will the airflow and heat dissipation be sufficient for an nvidia 3080 or 4080 machine? Will the tv make a decent occasional monitor replacement, given I’m most likely to run most things in the Quest headset anyway via Remote Desktop? Any other bright ideas for the room?

#2 depends on the distance to the couch, monitor size and resolution, and what you like to play. I do something similar at around 12 feet from screen to chair with a 77” OLED TV set to 1440p or 4k depending plus wireless keyboard / mouse / controller. It’s very good for controller driven console style ports, adequate for PC first stuff with flexible UI scaling, and VERY POOR for keyboard-first strategy games with tiny and dense UIs.

#1 will be tricky. My current rig is a full size tower with AMD 5900 and RTX 3080 and VR. It moves A LOT of hot air under load and I don’t think I’d want it buried where couldn’t get good air flow. But then won’t really know if don’t try some options. Have you considered different style and sizes of cases that could maybe be somewhere visible?

There’s nowhere else in the room, sadly. The couch fits just so between the doorway and the wall, so I couldn’t put it next to the router, and the final wall doesn’t have anything to hide it with. In theory I could build a custom pc-case-slash-coffee table to hide the tower inside next to the green chair, but not only would there be hdmi and LAN wires snaking out of it, which my wife will hate, I’m struggling to think of what carpentry tricks I could possibly apply with my limited skills that won’t make it an unsightly wooden box. I thought maybe even hiding it behind the TV but I think it’d be much worse airflow.


The heat issue is my biggest concern. With both cabinet doors open, and the heat expelled on the other side, I feel it would do as well as anyone that keeps it under their desk, possibly. I could cut another hole in the back of the cabinet to the void where the skirting is, in fact I’ve already done a small one to access the plugs for the tv and where I’d power the PC… but I don’t know if that would really add much other than letting all the spiders in more comfortably.

Good point about strategy gaming, but I’ll be honest, I don’t play them much anymore. This will be for console ports, VR games, and simulation. And if I do, it’ll be virtual desktop to get around the small font/UI problem

Your space is lovely, but tight though,. Particularly the difficult-to-work-around built-in book shelves.

Maybe a small form factor mesh case that’d barely fit an Nvidia 30x0 series card would fit more neatly in those lower cabinets (assuming the doors stayed open for ventilation)?

On the happy side - the distance issue sounds like not-a-problem given what you wanna play!

To echo dgallina, it does look like a lovely – and comfy! – space.

If you’re going to have the cabinet open, is there any reason why you couldn’t just… leave the side of the PC open? That would ensure plenty of airflow and could alleviate at least some of your ventilation/heat concerns. Normally that would look terrible, but if it’s in a closed cabinet when you’re not using it, neither the looks nor the dust should be huge problems. Maybe just something to consider.

As an aside, is SpiffyShorts dead on Youtube, or can we look forward to seeing more awesome short animations at some point in the future? I must admit that “Star Wars – Episode IV: A Fully Automatic Hope” is still one of my favorite videos on the Internet.

What’s in the next room? If it’s a sauna, you are all set!

My office is a spare bedroom next to the garage - I put a hole in between the two and just run monitor and usb cables between. This is allowing my PC to sit outside and vent the hot air and run the fans as loud as they want. I don’t hear or feel a thing, can’t imagine going back to having the PC in the same room, at least not a gaming one.

The other option is extra long cables or display port over fiber or ethernet. I tried over ethernet but 10 years ago the tech was just too wonky plus its pretty expensive and you still have the issues with running cable.

Hide the pc behind a wall… I like that. Unfortunately for me the other side of the wall is either the kitchen (no) or the neighbor’s house (no). And while I could run LAN cable outside the house to the office, that puts the pc one floor, one brick wall, and about 20 feet away for the wireless connection to headset and controllers and any kind of streaming to a screen which sounds really iffy, and I’d hate to do all the cable laying and drilling to find out it’s not going to work great.

Here’s a little sketch for the cabinet idea and floating peripheral shelf…

Hey thanks…! I don’t know, really. I’m kinda waiting for the kids to get older and my work hours to lessen before entertaining more creative frippery, given that even silly little projects has my wife threatening divorce… gaming is safer right now…

This works quite well now. USB & HDMI/Display port (and network, natch) all over Ethernet. If you can run a few network cables between a PC somewhere in the house, and the gaming room, you’re in business.

Thanks for the link. That was great!
I also enjoyed how OTT Robocop: ED209 Hits The Streets is. Way off the rails!

Looking forward to whatever you do next.

I never followed up with my PC setup! In the end, I liberated the far left cabinet so that I wouldn’t have to move the lounge chair behind me if I wanted to do flight simming at my joysticks, and also to run a network cable quickly with least clutter to my modem for air/steamlink VR. My custom shelf slots in to the cabinet doors securely and gives me a tray for flight sticks, keyboard, or drawing tablet, and the drawing tablet doubles as a screen if I need it, but most of the time the screen stays tucked away, since I’m usually either using my VR headset for virtual monitor, or else I’m 4-8 feet away playing VR roomscale or on the couch with motion controls or gamepad… or else playing non-VR games on the TV from the couch opposite.

I was worried about the heat in the cabinet, but I’ve installed a cabinet fan behind the rear exhaust, and that effectively keeps the flow going with zero issues thus far on my 4090.

All in all, I’m super pleased, a great setup for 4 player gaming with the family, and once everyone’s in bed, a great setup for either peripheral gaming or space for roomscale VR. The only hiccup was the Christmas tree for 4 weeks in december…

Very discreet :) I’ve never heard of a cabinet fan - where does the exhaust go?

I got this cabinet fan: it can run on a plug adaptor or even just in your usb port when your PC boots up. Not sure if it’s obvious, its mostly black in the photo, but it’s to the left of the rear of the PC, embedded in the cabinet; there’s 20 cm gap on the other side that the warm air is pushed out to.

Ah just through that left side there. Got it. I had a similar setup but the cabinet was set into the wall so the doors had to stay open once it warmed up.