Posted by cyclopeanutopia 3 days ago
These devices are built to the edge of performance margins. Throw in some high voltage transients and things flip out. I think displays are particularly susceptible due to long cables, large surface area and unavoidable shape of common displays: they're effectively patch antennas.
The furniture static case is amusing: I imagine some foam cushions can cause millions of tiny static discharges in parallel when they expand. This will flow through the metal stand to "ground" and probably make a VHF range RFI spike (based on the size of a typical chair frame.) Common 24-27" display panel geometry just happens to be in the same neighborhood...
Adding ferrites to cables, as I see suggested several times, might help. You could also get unlucky and make it worse: choke a line to just the right length an it becomes a better inductor/antenna. Electricity is fun.
to add:
> In my particular case, my chair wheels are made out of plastic (non-conductive), so my solution was to “ground” my chair by adding a metallic chain from the chair to my room floor. I got the idea from reddit.
The chain grounded chair is used all the time in ESD rooms. The floors in these rooms use semi-conductive flooring which is tied to a ground rod. The chair is grounded to the floor which is in turn ground bonded to earth.
On a side note, distilled water is highly recommended with ultrasonic humidifiers. Heat-based devices evaporate solely the water and leave mineral deposits behind. Ultrasonics create tiny droplets _along with the dissolved minerals_. Hard tap water or mineralized drinking water will coat your work area in chalk-like dust.
The air outside is extremely dry (<5% relative humidity once heated to indoor temperatures), and the air is quickly replaced by the ventilation. I have anecdotely heard that in the US they have much lower requirements of rate of air replacement than here in Sweden though, so maybe that could work there, but then you would also have stale air, which doesn't sound great.
Also, y'know, your lungs. Deep inside your lungs.
Running tap water in an ultrasonic humidifer's going to spike the particulate pollution (PM1/2.5/10) throughout your entire house by hundreds of ug/m^3. And it seems that children are particularly prone to inhaling this stuff and having it deposited in their lungs (~2x more particles and ~3.5x more mass).
They really shouldn't be used with anything except distilled water. The things should come with a continuity tester that disables them if the water's conductive or something.
It’s pretty clear that most modern standards (HDMI, DisplayPort, thunderbolt, etc) are so close to their physical limits that there’s no more room for errors.
And yeah, we're pretty close to the limits. We always have been, though: At all points on the timeline of digital electronics, we've been pushing speeds to be as fast as we can manage today. But tomorrow (and the next day, and the day after that), we'll solve more of the problems and yet-again make it even faster.
Which brings us back to...ferrite beads, and problems.
I got introduced to Monoprice back when HDMI was still new and somewhat finicky, when stores like Best Buy were fond of selling $180 HDMI cables (and even Wal-Mart wanted something like $60). In that crazy world, Monoprice was the place to buy inexpensive cables that worked.
And it was clear that HDMI was the future, so I placed an order for a half-dozen or so different-colored HDMI cables with ferrites pre-installed near each end.
They showed up, and... they barely worked. They were glitchy, touchy, and intermittent. I was frustrated, and I felt like I'd made a poor decision that cost me money instead of saved me money. In fact, I was rather pissed off by all of this.
With nothing to lose, I used a knife to cut away the plastic overmolding on the ferrites on one of the cables that was being particularly problematic. And then I smashed those ferrites with a hammer.
With the ferrites thus-removed, the cable immediately began working perfectly. It was glitch-free. I couldn't get it to misbehave even if I tried. I repeated this with all of the other cables from that order and they all started working perfectly, too.
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So, ferrites. Their presence adds a little bit of series-mode inductance. And that's something that can be useful. It slows down the edge of things like transient voltage spikes. And since the spikes are transient, slowing their rise-time in this way reduces their bandwidth and peak amplitude. Adding a snap-on ferrite bead can be enough to turn a problematic data bus into a well-behaved data bus.
But! They're just dumb hunks of minerals. They're indiscriminate. They can't distinguish betwixt the bad signals and the good signals -- everything is affected. So while ferrites can be useful in a fight against unwanted noise, they can also be destructive of the signals that we're trying to use.
They're good to have available, but they're also not necessarily something that someone should go forth and attach to every cable they find. If there's no problem that needs solved, then there's no solving to be done.
(These I days I make it a point to actively avoid buying cables that have ferrites pre-installed, both professionally and at home. But I've got a stash of snap-on ferrites in the top drawer of the toolbox just in case; it's good to have options.)
Now I'm wondering if I should ground my chair to the shelf my PC is sitting on.
As pretty obvious evidence this is static related, it only happens in the winter.
My guess is that, like OP, we're both getting interference in the our DP connections, and that that interference is in our cases causing the GPUs to crash.
Haven't had a chance to try ferrite cores yet but that was going to be my first test.
Curious what system specs you have in case we have overlap in anything that could isolate the issue. Mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xpdb8Z
Laptop plus external monitor is an interesting case. The monitor should be grounded via its power plug, but the laptop's ground may be floating. Not sure about the grounding path for Apple laptops. Attempts to find info on laptop grounding online are returning AI slop. If everything is running off 2-prong plug external power supplies, there may not be any grounding.
Get the room humidity above 40% and most static effects will disappear. The water in the air grounds them out. That's often the easiest solution.
There are electrostatic field meters. Halfway decent ones start around US$150. I used to have a surplus store field detector on my desk when assembling electronics. It would squawk if the field level got high. Wearing a wrist strap would shut it up. With a meter, you stop guessing. This isn't mysterious, just something that needs instrumentation to chase down.
The chair chain is good, but make sure that the shiny enameled chain and the floors are actually conductive.
I found out this year that my reception is horrendous if those lights are on. The coax cable which goes from the attic to the TV downstairs runs right above the lights and the LED driver / PWM noise must couple with the coaxial cable. I'm not running anything fancy like RG6 since I just re-used whatever cable was already run up there from the 70s.