Building Megadesk: 64 Cores, 5 Displays, & Ergonomic AF

this video is brought to you by asrock and the new z590 tai chi are you ready to help your rocket take off with rocket lake the new intel processor pci express 4 and a by 16 slot pci express 4 hyper m.2 you've got all the pci express 4 peripherals and accessories that you need with this motherboard three full length pci express physical by 16 slots right in the box we've also got a physical video card support bracket that's a new thing from asrock it's got front usb 3.2 gen 2x2 20 gigabit front panel type connections got two 30 pin front panel connections it even includes a vrm fan optional right in the box don't worry there's a primary fan that's sort of tucked away behind the rear i o shroud where you've got ample usb connectivity onboard killer wi-fi onboard killer nick as well as on-board intel nick the audio incorporates the ess sabre 9218 dac and the weimar audio capacitors so asrock has really outdone themselves they've got a new tai chi aesthetic of course you know we still got the gears and and the usual stuff to expect from the tai chi but it's also got this sort of hammered finish and a couple of gold accents as well so if you're thinking about intel rocket lake 11th gen core i5 or core i7 processors you should check out this motherboard thanks asrock well hello there it's level one your destination for anything desk related behold mega desk 3.0 so this is the magic the monitor is below the level of the desk you can look behind the keyboard believe it or not this is not unprecedented ergonomically this used to be like a really popular thing i'll show you but how did i get here what makes what makes this make sense it really is super comfortable to be able to type up here and sort of look down there and have all of these pixels i'll show you [Music] how's it going [Applause] this is an uplift desk well the feet are but the top is not the top is butcher block i think this one came from home depot home depot messed up or something and these were like super on sale but this is darn near indestructible husky the people that make like the garage furniture they also sell replacement tops that are pre-finished this came unfinished finished it with some uh you know polyurethane when level one first started and i've been really happy with it we've been using this desk with the legs for a long time it works really well you can accessorize it you know a really common thing that you want to accessorize your desk with is you know a computer and some other stuff i thought this video would be a fun walk down the different itches and experiences that i've had with different desks over the years so this is pretty bog standard you just need to add a monitor arm and some monitors or you know some people just set up their computer on the desk and set up some monitors and you're good to go i'm a real big fan of monitor arms and mounts for holding things so check out this setup right now which i'm probably getting ready to change that's what i've been working on for the last couple of weeks but this is a pretty bog standard desk and i'm using space co monitor arms actually uh i've been using spaceco monitor arms since i bought all the monitor arms from lehman brothers when they went under it's about 300 spaceco monitor arms that was a lifetime ago and since then i was so impressed with the spacecoat products that i've helped move spaceco products into uh other more commercial cells so yeah like yeah the first batch was used but they were so good that it was worth helping some other people resell it and setting it up in more commercial spaces and things like that although it was really funny lehman brothers was using them with like 15 inch like the cheapest lcd monitors you can get talk about schizophrenic probably a prediction of their ultimate success right yeah but monitor arms then i sort of learned that maybe they're not really a luxury you can skip well fortunately amazon has some really inexpensive monitor arms that's what i'm using with the camera and the microphone here you can also set up lights a lot of other more awesome youtubers people like caleb pike you know they show their mobile youtube station they've got this stuff bolted to a cart and it's your whole everything that you need your camera mount your light they'll mount there i don't have a light mounted to mine but they've got a light mounted to it and it works really well for youtubering uh from a desk or doing a tutorial or something like that i mean certainly you guys have seen the videos of me sitting at the desk with the background well that's what it sort of looks like from this side yeah i need to dust a little bit i'm getting ready to redo my desk here i've had this i've had this desk for 20 years since i was a teenager before i was a teenager uh teenager uh it's nice it's a cherry desk but i'm gonna move that somewhere else maybe to the house i don't know we'll see so let's take a look at the thing that i tried in the interim the other setup that we tried was the lienly computer desk which is really awesome in some ways but not great in others so here's our setup with the enormous monitor two monitors on top i kind of like this layout you get the glass top now i briefly experimented with actually putting another display in the desk so the computer is literally in the desk this is pretty cool one major modification to the lienly desk is the monitor tree and i did a custom piece of tempered glass such that you can take the tempered glass out without having to dismount the monitors so there's a monitor tree back here and it holds the monitors up and you can basically just grab the glass and go and work on the computer because i didn't like having to clear the desk in order to work on the computer another did ryan the biggest problem with this desk it's really thick it's not super comfortable to sit at because a comfortable height to type on um [Music] kind of rubs your legs not creepy kind of way but it's not great either i mean i like having the front five and a quarter inch drives and the front usb accessible and the rgb controls and i mean there's a lot to like here but i just it just it's not it's not great like the other desks it's also sit stand it is a nice feature although you know admittedly neither one of us really used that feature a lot but it is starting to become a common thread like there's a a little bit of a repetition here because it's like okay monitor arms okay sit stand okay maple butcher block top but when i put the display inside this table it gave me kind of an idea see a long time ago there used to be these ergonomic workstations where you would look through the top of the desk which is glass tempered glass a lot like what this is and looking through the glass there was an old crt monitor that's how it was done and so i was like it was you know your posture was great and stuff like that because your you know your line of vision was basically like this you were looking the keyboard was here and you were basically looking down below the surface of the desk and that's how the monitor was you didn't have the monitor mounted up on the desk you had it sort of below the desk that gave me some ideas now these desks behind me they're steel case i love steel case i love steel case stuff this stuff's 15 years old look i i don't spend a lot of money on random stuff these desks came from lucent where they shut down in texas like wait a minute lehman brothers loosened yeah these were the desks that were used by the lab people at lucen people in the comments could probably verify that but one of the really awesome features of these steel case desks is that they have an adjustable keyboard tray now these desks are not you know sit stand they're not height adjustable but the keyboard tray is height adjustable and these are really big discs they work in four foot sections so they're not exactly uh efficient with their use of space they were designed for an era of cathode ray tubes but i still like them they're still comfortable to work at and there's still a lot of work space for when you need to get a build done or a lot of work done or whatever it happens to be see where i'm going with this i sort of want to break the rules of a desk i've got an idea in my head where i'm going to sort of change the rules of the desk i'm going to have a different surface for where my keyboard and mouse are that are higher up than the monitor and i want to sort of look down at the monitor not something as extreme as like looking through the surface of the desk i don't think that will be super comfortable but i am wanting to sort of set it up so that i can look over the edge of the keyboard and sort of see a display down here but to do that i'm going to have to do some work in the shop okay so the first ingredient we know that we're going to have is uplift desk mechanical legs okay no problem now our work surface our work surface is going to be a little unusual i need to adjust the work surface so that it's not quite as deep as you would expect i mean these work surfaces are 30 32 inches wide i think that's probably going to be too wide for what i've got planned for the keyboard tray so let's go with something narrow i'm going to get a matte black top and a matte black shelf to go with it yeah it's just particle board but this is a little bit proof of concept let's start putting this together i also want to use the new 48 inch lg oled display i did a review on that i like it i kind of fell in love with it but it's more television than display this is not something that i would recommend for everybody it does have a pixel density that's roughly comparable to the 1920 by 1200 24 inch dell displays that i've used over the years and i really kind of like those but 24 inches just doesn't cut it it doesn't have quite as high pixel density as like the 27 inch 1440p i also like those the 32 inch 4k it's even higher pixel density i mean i would take those things if i could get them but i don't think that there's a 32 inch oled with 120 hertz refresh rate that doesn't cost dramatically more than about 1200 which is about what this lg display costs and i want to go for the one big two over now it could go widescreen that dell alienware that's a nice monitor fourteen hundred dollars is a little too rich for my blood especially considering i can get the dell 24 inch monitors for around a hundred dollars each so i think i'm going to go for two 1920 by 1200 displays on top and my lg 4k display on the bottom i've taken the adjustable keyboard it's basically got a pneumatic spring for as a counterweight for lifting and lowering the display i used a router to route out my particle board and pre-drilled everything and i've put it together so i've got my adjustable height keyboard tray for the computer i'm using a 64 core thread ripper now i'm probably going to upgrade this to a threadripper pro but i've got this in the fractal meshfi xl it's a really awesome case with tons of room i've got a custom loop in there 360 millimeter bits power radiator that i picked up from micro center i think this thing's got 64 gigabytes of memory right now i've only got the one gpu in there but i'm doing a little bit of magic on the side here this is going to be a really high-end vf-io machine i also added a 1440p display in portrait on one side i think if i strap the computer underneath the desk and add a backup battery to the horizontal rail that's a part of the stabilizing system with the uplift desk i think that'll probably end up somewhere in that neighborhood and if i do that i'll probably add a fifth uh 1440p monitor to the left side also in a portrait configuration but for right now i'm completely happy with this i've done my cutout for the keyboard just a hair off center to better support the fractal meshfy 2 on the left side of the desk i'm pretty happy with how that turned out of course the level 1 mouse pad on our work surface here it's basically the same size as our work surface that works out but i can adjust the height of the desk and also the placement and position of the keyboard because i find that i like the keyboard in a slightly different place when i'm sitting than when i do when i'm standing so this is working out really well as a sit stand desk and i can look over the edge of the keyboard sort of below what would be the surface of the desk by about four or five inches i realize it doesn't show up that great in video but the monitor is actually sitting much lower about six inches lower than the surface of my keyboard and this is really comfortable because i don't have to keep my neck completely straight i can actually look down a little bit and that's a little bit more ergonomic is it worth the level of effort i don't know i need to use this for a few more weeks but as it is i've been using it for a few days now and i'm really happy with how this turned out oh let's manage those cables a little bit so here we are with the final ish setup so if you're looking to reproduce this basically you just get some uplift desk legs you might be able to get the uh steel case keyboard mechanism on ebay or something like that and then it's a hundred dollar formica top and a twenty dollar formica shelf well formica coated particle board it is pretty thick it's about 30 35 millimeters thick something like that seems like it's going to be strong enough to hold everything of course the structure of the uplift desk legs is pretty good because you got this support bar down here that doesn't move it's just part of the structure so it prevents the legs from flexing on the desk that's a design feature i really like on this version of these you know lift legs the carrying capacity of these legs is also pretty high because this is the commercial version of the kit overall i'm pretty happy with how this workstation turned out i've got my model f keyboard i've got just a generic dell mouse here because the batteries died on the mouse i was using of course uh right before this video but this is a fun project to undertake and this is kind of a lot of pixels i'm really tempted to put an ultrawide on top instead of those especially the new ultra wides that are the same resolution 3840 not 3440 3840 by 1600 on the top like the dell alienware monitor now that's curved probably go with a non-curved variant of that and if you remember the big curved monitor on top is also what i use on the current setup that uses the asus 43-inch 4k monitor oh this is also a good setup for the level one kvm because i could have multiple computers strapped under here and everything works really well to cover my particle board sins there i've got on order but you know pandemic it's hard to get things it's basically iron-on you can get fake wood edging that's black that has an iron-on adhesive and you just melt it and that's what the edging on the desk already is so basically they make it you just need to pick your thickness in millimeters and these little thin sheets of plastic arrive and you just iron it on so in a week or two you're not even going to see the particle board edge it's going to look pretty good but i couldn't wait that long for this video this has been kind of a long time in the making i'm wondering this is level one this has been uh another one of my pandemic projects we'll see if i'm still as in love with this desk in a couple of months i'm signing out and i'll see you in the level 1 forums [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 94,915

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: G868B68UwRo

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021