We've been chasing the cleanest possible desktop setup
for more than eight years.
We've hidden eGPUs inside premade furniture,
drilled holes through desktops,
and even built our own desk from scratch.
But every one of these solutions compromised.
Low performance, jank, lies.
I mean, it's not really wireless
if you need wires to charge it every few weeks, is it?
So we've never quite nailed the concept until now.
Introducing the clean setup to end all clean setups.
1800 square inches of uninterrupted desktop surface,
and it is gonna stay that way.
This desk can charge your mouse.
It can charge your keyboard.
It can charge your phone
without ever soiling at surface with an unsightly cable.
I cannot wait to show you guys how we pulled this off.
Look, look, look, look, look, there.
No tricks, guys.
Look, no fancy VFX.
Ow, I'm stuck.
Stuck telling you about our sponsor.
We couldn't have done this without our friends at LG,
and they are featuring the 45GR95QE,
a 45-inch 800R curved OLED.
It's 3440 by 1440,
runs at 240 hertz with G-Sync and FreeSync Premium,
and it is the centerpiece of our ultimate setup.
We could have taken the easy path here.
Solar-powered keyboards definitely exist,
and continuously charging a mouse
is as simple as buying one of these
and slapping it on your desk.
But this is Linus Tech Tips, darn it.
It not only has to be zero cables,
it needs to be zero compromises.
I mean, what?
I'm gonna have a top-of-the-line gaming monitor,
and I'm gonna pair it with some B-tier Bluetooth keyboard?
I mean, while I'm at it,
why don't I have a hump under my desk pad
and a stupid wire running over the back?
You make these compromises, and before you know it,
it's not the cleanest setup.
It's just a setup.
Zero compromises means maximum performance,
and to achieve that,
we've gone with the killer combination
of a Logitech G Pro X Wireless and an MX Mechanical Mini.
They use Logitech's Lightspeed
and Bolt wireless technology respectively,
which boasts same or better performance
compared to wired peripherals, but we've got a problem.
As it stands, both of these require occasional charging,
which inevitably turns into a random cable
hanging over your desk that you totally would have put away,
but you're probably gonna need it soon anyway, right?
Wrong!
Regular viewers are going to know
how we tackled the keyboard already.
This MX Mechanical Mini has been modified
with an internal Qi-compatible charging coil,
meaning that keeping it topped up
is as simple as placing it down
in exactly the right spot on the desk, or not.
What's this?
It still charges over here and over here?
Since the last video, we've taken things a step further,
and we've embedded a total of nine charging coils
in the desk itself,
meaning that our keyboard is gonna stay charged
pretty much anywhere that would be ergonomic to use it,
for work or for gaming.
As for the mouse, I'm even more proud of that one.
Logitech's Power Play Mat is an amazing solution
for never charging your mouse again,
but it has some significant quality of life issues.
First up, it's proprietary,
so you can't just install the puck in your mouse,
get some random Qi spot,
and tape it to the bottom of your desk.
You have to use their mat.
The good news is that you can slap your own desk pad
over top of the mat,
but the bad news is that you'll end up
with this awful hump.
So we cracked it open to see, can it be slimmed down?
But unfortunately, the answer was no.
So then, if Power Play is working right now,
how did we do it?
What if I told you guys
that right side up is just a construct?
As it turns out,
the Power Play Mat works perfectly fine upside down,
and like other wireless charging solutions,
it doesn't need to be right up against
the mouse that it's charging.
So just like with the Qi spots for our wireless keyboard,
we were able to CNC out all but two millimeters
of our desktop surface here,
then mount the Power Play upside down inside the desk,
and here it is.
I am so impressed that it works not only through the desk,
but also through our desk pad.
By the way, we have three varieties of desk pad now,
Northern Lights, Stealth, and WAN.
Check them out on lttstore.com.
Let's get some headshots, shall we?
A big part of that gaming clinic I just put on,
yeah, I knew that was coming,
was obviously the monitor.
Did we mention that the 45GR95QE
produces true-to-life color,
a great HDR experience,
and deeper blacks than conventional LCDs,
with a four-side virtually borderless design
and anti-glare coating
to deliver a new level of immersion
for distraction-free gaming.
Now, getting this monitor to work at peak efficiency
with zero visible wires was a significant challenge.
While there have been major advancements in wireless HDMI,
3440 by 1440 at 240 hertz is a lot of bandwidth.
And even if we could transmit it wirelessly somehow,
it wouldn't be latency-free,
and we would still have to deal with power anyway.
So we took some inspiration from our peripherals,
and we put the cables inside.
The power and DisplayPort cables go inside the post
of this basic clamp-on mount that we, let's say, modified,
with some extra holes to keep the cables out of sight.
If you look at the bottom of the mount,
then you will see, or I guess you won't see,
that the cables disappear down into the desktop,
never to reemerge.
We did have to get a little sneaky.
We used a mini DisplayPort cable,
then a full-sized adapter,
so we didn't have to try to feed a full-sized connector
through the relatively small hole in the base of the mount.
Then the other end goes to this cable channel here
that goes all the way to the back,
where the power splits out to this holder for the brick,
and the DisplayPort cable joins up
with the rest of the cables in our umbilical cord.
Okay, there are some cables.
We need some cables.
Compromise.
No, no, this is very clean.
While we're on the subject of cables,
our umbilical cord contains not just DisplayPort and power,
but also USB for our fairly generous side-mounted IO.
We've got USB Type-A, USB Type-C,
and a headphone-microphone combo jack.
We thought about putting this on the front,
but from an aesthetic standpoint,
we felt that it would be better to have it out of the way.
Also, the front is full of wireless charging stuff.
Well, sort of.
That's a lie.
We had some space left over,
and we decided to use it to build a small drawer
for holding pens or CDs or whatever other clutter
you wouldn't dream of scattering around on a desktop
so clean and so pure.
I was on the fence about even having the phone charging spot
because, like, really?
Do you need to have this here?
But the way that I, and realistically just about everyone,
live tethered to our cell phones,
it just makes sense to have a spot for it.
Now, there are high-powered Qi chargers
that are designed to go through a desk surface,
but if you're wondering how we did this,
since we were hollowing out the inside of our desk anyway,
we just used a random off-the-shelf Qi charger,
and once again, we shaved our top surface down
to about two millimeters,
ensuring adequate charging performance.
You might think, and in fact,
I had some serious questions about this project
when I heard about it,
that hollowing out and shaving down
the entire inside of the desk
means giving up sturdiness in the desktop itself.
But I'm happy to report that,
unless you were to dance a little jig
over the mousing surface,
it's not even noticeable in day-to-day use.
Like, check this out, David.
See, I can get a little bit of flex here
if I really push on it,
but like, moving a mouse, go ahead, find the flex.
If anything, it's been an improvement
in the user experience,
since hollowing it out helped to reduce
the weight of the desk so much.
Yeah, it's not even that bad anymore.
We started out with a five-by-five sheet
of one-inch Baltic birch plywood
that we then cut in half and then stacked
to give ourselves a two-inch plywood sandwich.
It's not the skinniest desktop in the world,
but it's also no thicker than the butcher block desktop
that I use at home.
So I think from the outside,
no one would realize that there is so much tech
hidden away in here.
I guess you probably wanna know how maintenance would work
if you ever needed to swap anything out, right?
The trickiest or maybe, let's say,
most finicky part of assembly and disassembly
are the right leg and the post of the monitor stand.
In both cases, it's because cables have to pass through
with fairly narrow clearances and relatively tight angles.
As long as you're aware of the situation
when you've got those two bits of metal
only loosely attached to the desk as a whole,
you can avoid accidentally moving things too far
and causing damage to the desktop surfaces.
The other major pain point is only a problem
after installation if you need to change
what IO you're including on the side of the desk.
The tiny nuts and bolts that secure the IO ports
have very small clearances.
So you either need tiny hands
or some good needle nose pliers
in order to get them installed.
Other than that, installing chargers,
running cables through the various channels,
it's shockingly straightforward
and even fitting in the monitor's power brick
is pretty trivial.
The drawer is simply made out of some thinner plywood
that we cut on our laser cutter
and then we use this little drawer popping mechanism here
to make it easier to open.
Though with it being installed at this janky angle,
it is a little bit less smooth than we'd like.
I think I made it look pretty good earlier,
but I don't know, it's all right.
Really, we don't expect anyone
to try duplicating this build at home
as you need a pretty large CNC router,
but hey, maybe we could inspire some of the companies
that are mass producing cheap gamer desks
to put a little more effort into their designs
because honestly speaking, other than machine time,
materials cost on this is next to nothing.
And I think it is by far the best clean setup we,
or you know what, I'm going for it,
fighting words or anyone else have ever done.
I love this thing.
Just like I love telling you about our sponsor.
Just kidding, it was brought to you by LG.
We already told you everything you need to know.
It's an OLED 240 Hertz gaming monitor.
This is, this is come easy.