One home, one PC

Question

I'm an avid gamer and power user of my PC. My PC is a high spec, 3 monitor machine that I often push to the limit. What I'd like to do is be able to access this power from any room in the house, without having to have to spend the money having multiple versions of this PC in each room. There are a number of other reasons too such as keeping windows synced when I move from one room of the house to another (e.g. start up a music player, then listen to it in the kitchen). At the moment, I use a light Raspberry Pi remote desktop client in my living room, and a Plex Media server. When I want to game though - I can't use the comfort of the living room. When I want to complete any real major task that a phone just can't do properly, I have to go back to my desk to be able to do anything properly.

A similar question has been asked on Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-1667414/replace-multiple-house-central-server.html

What I've worked out so far:

There are three solutions I can come up with so far: the first is remote desktop, the 2nd is KVM switches, and the last is Steam Link.

RDP:

With RDP, I could use Remmina (available on ARM or x86 - which means very cheap hardware can support it), and it supports multiple monitors, but gaming controllers are not supported.

Alternatively, I can use Splashtop (only available on x86 - thinking of a compute stick like the Quantum Access). Splashtop is the only solution I can find that supports gamepads like the Xbox gamepad and touch screen displays for gaming or touchscreen areas, but currently (although the feature is in development), Splashtop does not support mutli-monitor streaming.

These RDP clients don't need Windows to be installed as both of the aforementioned will run on Ubuntu.

KVM:

With KVM, it removes the need for any receiver hardware except the keyboard, display and mouse themselves. Very few KVMs support long range however, due to the limitations of the hardware, so the long range KVMs I'll need are extremely expensive (around $200 each). Using them, I'll also have to rewire my house with the new cables for each individual room unlike the other options which tap into my existing LAN network. However, KVM represents almost 0 lag, because there's no overhead like with the network-based solutions.

Steam Link:

With Steam Link, it has the mid-performance due to its native H.264 encoder/decoder. It's also heavily optimised for the gaming experience, and very cheap, priced currently at $50. But I don't know if I'd be locked into the Steam software with this product (games only - no opening OneNote or something).

Although there are forums that state that using the Steam Link and starting a windows process (like Notepad) through steam (by adding it as a non-steam game) allows the user access to the Windows Desktop. I don't know if the Steam Link will perform properly if I start opening more complex programs that use hardware rendering. Will the "start notepad first, then just open the other program" still work from the Steam Link or will it no longer be able to forward the data like it should as the Steam Link was not built with such tasks in mind.

So...

Which of these would be best? Or am I looking in completely the wrong direction? Is there another solution here that I have not considered?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Turns out that the best solution was in fact the Steam Link. It's one monitor only, but supports the full desktop experience. I'm actually using it to write this. The performance is pretty superb (about 1.5ms lag) and generally very snappy. The Steam Link works out as cheaper than the Splashtop too as the Splashtop requires x86 which is much more expensive if I want to keep the low-profile size of the Steam Link.

Thanks all for the help!