Pros and Cons

In this section I will discuss the upsides and downsides of the RetroRacks project, with a focus on everyday use.

Pros

Usability

• Devices are powered up in the right order (could be tricky to do this by hand in a reasonable speed)
• All PCs can be controlled from three different consoles without manual plugging and controlling

Energy

• Only devices which are needed are powered up

Cons

Energy

• Each device powered by a switched PDU outlet needs additional energy to drive the PDU relais (could be solved by using a PDU with solid state relais)
• Additional devices not needed in a normal setup need to be powered

Time

• Boot time rises significantly due to device boot times (already parallelized as good as possible)

Complexity

• Debugging can get hard because of the large amount of components involved in the signal chain
• Computers cannot be used without using the control program to start them
• Not all keyboards and mice can be used, because they need to be compatible to the input device emulation of the KVM switches

Signal Quality

• Analog signal quality is decreased because of the long signal chain
• Digital video bandwidth is limited because of the KVM switches used

Wife Acceptance Factor

Due to its nature the project doesn’t reach a high Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF), so it should not be placed in the living room. Fortunately, the HDBaseT KVM Receiver unit is accepted in the TV rack once its cables are well hidden, because of its small size.