Gadgetory

this isn't the first time we've done a father-son PC build on Linus tech tips it's not the first time we've done a multi-part video and it's not the first time I have mounted a computer to a desk but I assure you that today's video is very different from anything you've seen on this channel before this collaborative project has been a long time coming with many helpers and the result and I think you'll all agree was totally worth the effort welcome to ultimate DIY desk PC Rav powers 22,000 milliamp-hour portable charger can charge up to three devices at once while being the size of an average smartphone check it out at the link in the video description let's begin with the objective there are a lot of desk PC builds out there and even prefabs desk PC cases but they all share at least one trait the price some are expensive due to their use of premium materials while others are expensive because they require a well-stocked workshop and a lot of time to build them this is different what we're building is a from scratch design that we're calling the LTTE d1 start for a desk one a complete desk PC case that you can make yourself with a single piece of MDF a couple of saws and a piece of glass let's start at the beginning the first plan was to buy a cheap table from Ikea or off Craigslist then build the rest of the materials around that we rejected that because almost nothing we did would be applicable to someone trying to replicate the project so we started working from the other end what do all sick looking desk PCs have in common a big piece of glass so with some careful measurements you can easily adapt our design to whatever glass top you can find second hand this is a big key for this project because thick tempered glass that's designed to sit without being fully supported the kind that you should use for safety is not cheap so our glass measured twenty nine point seven five inches by fifty seven point three seventy-five and cost us forty bucks for the entire table on Craigslist we just discarded the legs and got to work now to keep costs down the objective was to build the desk out of a single piece of MDF plywood is another valid material choice here it's stronger but we wanted a smooth clean look something that might not matter to you so here are the plans we used you can see here that the largest cut of wood is the bottom piece that will be covered by the top glass just please note that if you want your glass to sit flush with the wooden box around all the edges you'll need to add three quarters of an inch on every side to account for the thickness of the material used to build besides we attach them in this manner to hide what would otherwise be unattractive seams around the outside of the desk for the rest of the cuts you see here we have a cut-off saw and a table saw so we can work as we go but if you don't you can get your local Building Supply Store to cut them for you starting with the smallest pieces so the operator will have more to hold on to officially it costs a dollar per cut but some places will do more for free if you come in at a time when they're not busy another sort of error that we made was in the height of the box we made it exactly the right height for side-mounted 120 millimeter fans then decided after the fact that we wanted a 3/4 inch lip around the edge for LED lighting effects but it ended up working out anyway because we changed our mind about radiator mounting the next important measurement is one of the coolest things about this design the knee cutout you can do pretty much whatever you want here but the general idea is to avoid the awkward arm position that a thick table usually forces the user into we started using a jig saw with a ruler to guide it but and this would have worked for plywood because we aren't using plywood it made our blade Bend and it actually worked ok actually better to just draw a line and eyeball it my dad wanted perfection though and since he already owns a table saw he brought that over to fix it up so our knee cutout kind of got bigger and bigger this was probably the hardest part of building the desk but if you have it pre-cut for you you shouldn't run into that next up is the sides of the box we originally tried to nail these on but discovered that without pre-drilling it wasn't going to work very well due to the crumbly nature of MDF the good news is that with wood glue and clamps this stuff stays together astonishingly well spoiler alert the entire end product is held together without a single screw or nail next up is the legs one nice thing about building your own custom desk is that you can have the height perfect for yourself we went with a 29 inch height from the top of the glass to the floor for our isosceles triangle reinforced legs the assembly here is a little tricky you put the leg components together like so then when the glue is grabbing a bit but not hard it'll be about this color you can wipe off the excess then we position the legs at an angle for a bit of extra strength they're supported at the top by those trapezoid shapes an additional brace here between them down lower though would be a good idea but it's not exactly weak without it next up is the optional LED lip these are just thin strips of wood that we clamped in place around the outside edge to allow us to light up the inside of the case without being able to directly see the LEDs you can actually get pretty perfect seams by wiping the glue at the right moment during the drying process but as you can see ours isn't so in part two we may have to address that somehow but how does all the hardware go in well it actually took us a while to figure that out thank you well you just killed like that that's awful isn't that what you want everything about what you just did there is awful isn't that what you want to I'm not sure yet let's just kind of back up for a second here I think the things you have cables I think the things should be centered and we might just have to use extensions for the connectors that we need horsepower slightly I don't know well what's going to go over here though that's that sort of a concern right now is this just going to be like a like a diorama of like gaming figurines like what are we going to put here what about hard drives ah SATA cables that far I'm not sure if that's a very good idea hole right there so what's going on with the legs well you guys did have a preference so we decided to angle them for beauty yeah so the desk itself will be beautiful but the computer might not be in there you guys really should have thought this through first you know what Vaughn finding you Canada I'm supportive right now hey I helped your dad build this Deb that's true important that's true that's supportive you did most of the work yes yes we know he did do that okay all right so hold on let's just this can we put back here right there and then the cables can have like that nice look thing that comes here what's a while okay so we're thinking but again we are now officially out of components to put over there still have perfect we still have reservoirs but your reservoirs are really small no we can't put hard drives over there Jake you can't run a SATA cable that's like 15 miles long but one we prefer where are we gonna put the hard drives then hold on let's not get too far away from ourself from what's going on here so power supply can go out and up where it ends up and up to where that needs to go so that's fine then sorry our YouTube mini-14 right oh yeah yeah but cable model do completely custom link so I'll just send them exactly what we need then for this is stuff that I'm actually kind of worried about like how do you have your two here you have an extender we do yes don't you put this here let us click go like this because you're still into really no you're still good no you're still gonna hit it what about instead of using hard drives you can just use SSDs are you sure hold on Jake we might be okay here my dad might have solved the problem are we planning to do hard pipe fun we can Israel's kind of all do you want to uh I don't think we really it might look kind of ghetto if we don't okay so we could do these here we could go pump pump yeah and then we could go res res we still end up with some oh you know what no so we go like res res and then we go how many hard drives are there like for are they SSDs I don't think we have a choice on that one so basically we go up and we bring this pump up no we can't no can't bring the grumbles oh no no no that's fine because we want to know we want to hit the top of it okay so we go up to the top of this pump then are we going to we have a writing um but there are stills there still the challenge of i/o so power button I think is pretty I think is pretty straightforward yeah we just need to find like a couple cool LEDs and power buttons that we can put in the wood at the front right or we could just do we could just do a hole and then just have a piece of have a piece of wood that cover that just comes out to cover the cables that are plugged in yeah okay let me just make it that simple so basically we just a little lower case of a little zip right here yeah it would be a little tough but honestly I mean once it's mounted it's not bored okay so if that's the case then we'll do the exact same thing here and then we'll do the exact same thing here so actually would we okay so how about this then would be just cover okay so we have a plan now and it only took until after the desk was already basically finished being constructed and planning anyway so IO is going to go here that's good because I'm right-handed and it's good because the user is going to sit right about here ish kind of back a little bit you won't really see that so we're going to just bring our power button front USB blah blah blah cetera a couple LEDs right up there then CPU and GPU are both going to have tubing going between them and then over across here we're going to talk we're going to try and do hard line tubing wish me freaking luck with this one anyway the point is you're going to get over to these radiators they're going to go to their pumps and both of these pumps are going to be able to draw air directly from a reservoir meaning that we're not going to have issues with leading the loop something that I have definitely had to deal with in the past these fans are going to have white chrome acts corners so we're going to have like a black and white color scheme kind of thing going on in here and in terms of power we're going to use custom cable mod cables to go up over to here over to here over to here similar to my last desk PC and then we're going to have we're going to use this lip under here see that it goes all the way around the outside to run power to these drives and we're also going to have cable mods SATA cables over to these drives from this direction and then we're going to run power over to the pumps and fans over here hiding them under the lip as best we can the other thing we're going to run around the entire outside is RGB LED strips though don't worry we're not just going to go one solid strip around the whole thing and make it like a like a light show inside we're going to use extensions to create gaps so we're just accent lighting the right pieces that was my idea Jake was not responsible for that at all and ahh I mean yeah oh right right right last thing so Shroud my dad says it's pretty simple to kind of go over here and then down and then over so all we're going to do is put some holes in the side so you can access your i/o that makes this setup a little bit more flexible for the future like oh I don't necessarily want to use DisplayPort anymore like if we used extensions to get over there or something no no no we're just going to have holes you can reach in you can do whatever it is you need to do now the keen-eyed among you are probably asking yourselves gee Linus well you got a bunch of exhaust fans where are you drawing air in to which my reply is don't worry about it we have taken away the top we're not going to put a piece of glass on it anymore new idea monitor balance is here okay keyboard goes kind of right here and then across here for stability while gaming mouse get this you are going to use the top of the water block of the video card making you the world's biggest badass that's stupid isn't it yes okay so know the piece of glass is still going over top but what we're going to do is we're either going to use like these Silverstone filters or maybe we'll do like a custom sort of larger mesh and we're going to do one intake right here so because we're using high static pressure fans over on the other side we're actually going to have a pretty decent amount of airflow sucked through that filtered intake across the motherboard down towards the power supply and over here and then out down here over on the left and that is how we do it when we plan everything after the fact oh yeah I didn't even explain the disaster almost that was the radiators so not having given my dad any guidance in fact I said specifically I didn't care he did these cool angled feet under the desk that almost made it impossible for us to mount these radiators over here that's why they're kind of offset like this but it it ended up looking like yeah we meant to do that so maybe we'll just leave this clip out and then you'll never know that we didn't mean to do that because that's how video works kids so the last thing here is we're doing a quick test fit of the glass you can see the the quarter-inch extra that we have around now at this stage in the game you have a couple of options you could rebuild your table or you can actually just get glass that is custom-made to fit exactly but we're probably not going to worry about that for the purposes of this video what I did want to say though is now that we've got this on here we've realized you know you can even with paint and even with sanding like you're going to see some of this so when optional stuff at this stage would be to put some kind of a veneer over top of here so you don't really see all these joins might make it look a little sharper and then to keep the glass from slipping and moving around you might also want to consider putting like maybe like a roll-on clear silicone around the edge so that once you put it down it kind of sticks in place let the silicone dry first so it's just a grippy like a grippy texture around the outside so you'd actually be able to lift it straight off you just won't be able to slide it well this this chair is a little tall that's not how high the chair will be we'll check it out the knees gap is right there boom that's freaking awesome okay so we're going to cover some of these imperfections like right there so this is optional you don't really need to do this because you could have just painted that and once you put the sort of friction surface like silicone or some rubber surface you wouldn't see these little marks anyway but we decided to go with little bit of in here so that's optional so anyway the test fit with the glass looks awesome other than the calculation error with the outside edge so the next step then is to see if we can get around our half-ass planning and get all the components actually mounted inside stay tuned for part two I did say it was going to be a multi-part er but maybe you don't want to build a desk computer maybe you want to build a beautiful functional website well don't worry we've got that taken care of too squarespace.com is the place to go if you want to do that thing that I just said the one with the website not the one with the computer they offer 24/7 support via live chat and email their templates look great across any device and it is super easy to use it starts at only $12 a month and you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for the year we've got tons of great features including their logo designer a commerce module that comes with every website and cover pages a feature that lets you set up a beautiful one-page online presence in a matter of minutes more than that everyone can now publish content in Apple news format directly from their Squarespace blog module making it available to millions of potential readers which isn't to say that if your content is garbage people will necessarily read it but at least there's that potential so you can start a trial with no credit card required and start building your website today by going to Squarespace calm then when you decide to sign up for Squarespace make sure you're using offer code LTT so you can save 10% off your first purchase thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured I mean MDF at Amazon in the video description maybe we'll put the hardware that we're going to put in the system in there anyway also linked in the description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channel super-fun