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Quandary: gotta have a PC at the workbench but what kind of setup is best?

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Bud:
Just saying that nowadays monitors have USB hubs built-in, so with two monitors you can have several USB ports available. It is however often a pain to use them because of where the ports are located, either underneath or on the back or on the side of the monitor casing.

Ian.M:
.... and then a mishap with a USB device or programming pod/lead fries your monitor instead of the $20 powered hub.   If you do use USB ports on your monitor, keyboard etc. save them for known good USB sticks, dongles and low power self-contained peripherals, not for general bench use. 

With the ubiquity of black for cases, monitors and peripherals, highliting port and even power button locations with a silver Sharpie can save a lot of fumbling under the bench or round the edges of monitors.

bd139:
I'd grab a second hand Lenovo M800 or M900 SFF PC.  i5 whatever. Chuck 32Gb of RAM and an SSD in it and. Job done. If it's of the last 3-4 generations of Intel CPU you probably won't notice much difference. They are very quiet, very reliable and stuffed full of ports. 2 front USB, 6 rear USB, gig ethernet, 2x displayport, 1x VGA, 1x serial, usual audio. Also usually come with a windows 10 pro license embedded. It'll run 2x 27" 1440p displays quite happily which can be stuffed on a second hand Knoll Sapper stand. That keeps the bench clear of monitor footprint. Put the PC under the bench.

Don't bother with the tiny PCs if you want a lab PC. They are basically laptops which have some performance constraints still as they have mobile SoC processors on them. I use a passive cooled Celeron N3010 based Lenovo M600 as a headless linux utility computer but running a desktop on it would be painful and the gruntier ones are quite irritatingly noisy.

While people love Xeon class workstations running they are extremely expensive to keep alive, drink a hell of a lot of power and make a lot of noise. To run a basic dual xeon, just the electricity bill will buy you the Lenovo box I mentioned above once a year.

David Hess:
My solution is to place two benches at the corner of the room, leaving room in the corner between the benches large enough to hold a tower personal computer case tall enough to mount one of the monitors on top as well as associated gear.

NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: bd139 on July 01, 2021, 10:15:52 pm ---While people love Xeon class workstations running they are extremely expensive to keep alive, drink a hell of a lot of power and make a lot of noise. To run a basic dual xeon, just the electricity bill will buy you the Lenovo box I mentioned above once a year.

--- End quote ---
Those old dual Xeon platforms aren't great for 24/7 operation unless warming up the room is a welcome side effect. But for occasional operation as a test PC, they're often available for really cheap which is what matters in that case.

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