I would like to set up a new work room for me. And I want it to be as quiet as possible. What should I do about my PC? I don't need physical access to the PC.
I would favour putting it into another room and just have the three monitors, keyboard and mouse at my desk, so I don't even hear the disks. Is that possible? What is the farthest distance the other room could be away?
Other options?
It's a bit of a hassle to have your actual machine too far away from you. Assuming you're willing to go with silencing:
Refer to Silent PC Review for more quieting tips.
{1} Some people also find negative case air pressure to be more efficient for heat removal as well, but that's arguable.
Might be worth it to invest in a really nice pair of noise-canceling headphones. That will help with other ambient sound that might still be present, even with your PC silenced or in a different room.
SSD, a quiet power supply and a huge passive cpu cooler works really well for me.
You can get 25ft. DVI cables. You can also get DVI repeater boxes for ~$100.
You could also build a little insulated box with exhaust fans going out your window.
To build a quiet PC you need:
Laptop is usually more quiet than desktop PC.
I recommend you to buy a decently powerful laptop, with SSD and quite fans. Also get a wireless keyboard+mouse combo, hook up with a nice monitor, then hide the laptop is a good ventilation place.
You should make your work room quite quiet without some crazy modification to your PC and long monitor cable.
The USB standard only allows relatively short cables, 5 m), and with decent DVI cables you should be able to go 5 m (1900x1200) to 15 (1280x1024) m according to the DVI specs.
Of course, there are repeaters for both (for USB, just connect up to six hubs in a row) that extend this. KVM Switches might help, but I don't think they normally support 3 monitors.
you can get a hardware solution that makes no noise at all. You could build out an enclosure for your PC that would insulate the sounds coming from it's fans, you could also go liquid cooling, which may or may not be louder depending on your pump. Another alternative is that you could make a passthrough in the wall adjacent to where your desk is going to be set up, and run the cables from the PC through the this passthrough, that would separate your desk from your PC.
There's silent, and then there's silent. If you get yourself a quiet PC case (eg an Antec Sonata - brilliant) and a quiet hard drive, then I find the ringing noise in my ears (from too much fun when I was young) is the loudest thing in the room.
Once you have that, you'll find that you start to go a little crazy in a perfect silence and turn the radio on anyway. :)
Oh, and get yourself a quiet keyboard too.
Physical separation is the best solution. If the 25ft KVM cables aren't long enough, there's always thin-client. Depending on the sort of apps you're running, good old RDP or X11 might be good enough (it works for me; I do much of my home web-browsing/email type things on one of these used as a diskless X11 terminal). But if you're running more graphically demanding things, this video might be of interest as a look at where thin-client "PC-over-IP" technology could be going.
If you want to spend some time creating a completely silent PC that is unquestionably awesome and will amaze everyone, you might consider a mineral oil PC.
I know that's what I'll be doing for my next system. In my opinion, it doesn't get any more awesome (or quieter) than that.
