 Are you tired of reaching down to plug in a USB stick? Do you hate that mess of cables under your desk? Are you sick of hard to use phone charging cables? Meet the LTT CleanDesk V2. It's our meanest, cleanest desk setup yet, and it was completely scratch-built for the ultimate in cable management perfection. Thank you LG for sponsoring this video, and now, why don't we all take a closer look at what you guys paid us to build. LG's UltraFine Ergo display features a 32-inch 4K IPS panel, which is great for watching videos, getting work done, or whatever you want, but it also isn't its most interesting feature. The Ergo in the name is because the included adjustable monitor arm forgoes the traditional large base, and instead uses a much more compact desk clamp. The arm gives you the ability to move the display 180mm or 7 inches away from the stand, and swivel it 280 degrees in addition to your typical tilt, rotate, and height adjust. That made it the perfect candidate for a project that one-ups our last cleanest desk setup. In its pushed-back position, the monitor has a distinct asymmetrical look to it, and the goal was to complement that look rather than build just another basic rectangle desk. We ended up choosing the single bump design to keep the integrated USB hub out of the way of the chair, to give artistic users a larger work area, and for aesthetics. For our material, we chose Baltic Birch plywood for its light color, strength, and great layering pattern. Did I mention this is a scratch build by the way? Nicholas is going to put all the plans in the description if you all want to follow along. For dimensions, we settled on the 5 foot width of our sheet to save a cut, and for depth, we felt 28 inches allowed both comfortable computing, thanks to the ultra-fine Ergo, and with a quick transformation, ample space for hobbies like drawing, model building, and the like. Now the main innovation of our table is its invisible cable management. High performance wireless keyboards and mice have been staples of clean setups for years, but the problem is that we don't have the technology yet for wireless high-speed USB, or high resolution display connections, at least not with low latency. So we came up with the idea of routing channels on the underside of the table to tuck our cables into, and then we chose legs that are both aesthetically pleasing and hollow. The idea here is that our desktop and the floor underneath can be totally free of rat's nest cable mess. We laid out the potential cuts, then set up the desk like it was intended to be used. This actually ended up helping us choose the hump as the home for our USB 3 hub. I mean, no one likes bumping a USB stick and breaking it off. We've all been there. As for our wireless charging cheese pot, the left side keeps it out of the way and maximizes usable space on the right. Lefties may actually prefer to mirror the entire design. Marking the final cut lines, cable channels, and where our legs will attach was next. A quick tip, by the way, mark an X on any areas to be cut. This will make it easier to remember which side of the line you want to stay on, and provides a quick reference to what should be cut off. We then used a jigsaw to remove most, but not all of the material. This was to make sure that when we went back and cut with our handheld router, the cutting kind of router, not the networking kind of router, we would be able to get a clean, smooth surface. Using long rulers and some of our filament spools as guides for our flush trim router bit, we were able to clean up all of the edges of our table to its final shape. For those of you wondering what a flush trimmed bit is, it's a router bit that has a bearing at the bottom or the top that matches the diameter of the cutting part. The bearing rides along a template or guide that you want to cut, and the bit then cuts that shape. Next, we drilled out the holes for the legs, and instead of using a normal wood screw, we went with these threaded wood inserts. They allow us to easily install and remove the legs without having to worry about the screw holes wearing out and becoming unusable over time. Make sure you choose a good quality insert, though. We had a couple that didn't want to install all the way in before breaking, and when they break, well, they are a royal pain in the tush to remove. For cutting the cable channels, a combination of freehand routing and using a straight edge as a guide was used to make multiple passes down to the quarter inch depth that we needed. Then, for the wireless charging pad, the hole was cut freehand to just inside the marked circle with multiple, very careful passes to get down to just one and a half millimeters of material left. That's about the thickness of a grain of rice. We then slowly clearance cut until the charge pad fit perfectly. To hold it in place, we used some scrap metal flat bar, cleaned it up, and gave it a slight bend in the middle so that once screwed down, the bend in the flat bar would push against the pad, holding it in place. To make the desk look thick, that's with two C's, of course, but still have it be light enough to move around, we added a one inch skirt to the entire outside of the desk. Now, to make the skirt, you could take the time to make an exact copy of the tabletop that's one inch thick, or you could go the faster route of using the scraps and offcuts from making the table in the first place. We cut down the scraps to an inch and a bit. The exact size doesn't really matter. You just want to make sure there's enough material to give you a strong glue bond. You don't have to worry about overhang at this stage, by the way, because that's going to be taken care of with the flush trim bit. Do make sure, however, that there is no undercut, because it'll look like there's a chunk of wood missing from your desk. The skirt was then glued down, then routed to match the skirt to the tabletop. Looks tiring. Good thing we have these huge 40 ounce water bottles. LTTstore.com Now, we chose a 5.25 inch bay USB hub that has five Type A ports and a Gen 2 USB Type C port. Power for the hub is handled via a SATA connector, and data is handled by this 16 foot optical USB 3.2 Gen 2 cable. Oh, and then also this male-to-male coupler, because the pictures on Amazon for the hub weren't great. To fit the hub and not have to cut a giant hole into the side of the desk, we had to strip the hub down to its PCB and grab a drill bit that's about as tall as the components on the hub. We used a drill to remove the majority of the wood, then a hammer and chisel to open it up the rest of the way with frequent test fits and clearance checks until the hub fit correctly. Then the faceplate that came with the hub was trimmed down and an inlay was cut so that it would be flush mounted. Some more cuts were made so the cables could clear the legs and fit into the channels. Next up was making the pass-through holes in the leg for our cables. One in the top drilled out with a step down bit and then filed until it was big and smooth enough to pass our cables through. Then for the bottom, same procedure, just a lot wider to make grabbing the cables easier. To smooth the table for final assembly, we started with 120 grit sandpaper to knock down all the sharp edges on the table and round the corners a bit. And then next was 220 grit. Then after a wipe down with a damp cloth, the table was sprayed with its first few coats of satin clear varnish. These coats need to dry for about 24 hours, after which you'll notice the wood grain becomes more pronounced or it tends to pop out a little bit more. This is called grain rise and it happens when the wood swells a bit from the varnish. All you need to do to fix it is lightly sand the top with 320 or 400 grit till it's smooth again. And after that, give it another wipe down with a damp cloth to get rid of all the leftover dust, spray another couple coats of varnish, let it dry overnight and come back to admire your wood in the morning. Now that the table is done, all that remains is to see if it functions as advertised. This is actually my first time being close up with it. First order of business, I guess, is to take advantage of the main benefit of the approach we took here. So this is sick. The only area where there's any cables visible on the desk. Okay, there's a small wraparound at the back where the monitor arm comes down. Then it goes into our built in cable channel. Then there's an umbilical cord that comes out here along with the power brick for the monitor. And that's it. Those are hidden off next to your super sexy clean looking PC. And the entire bottom of the desk is unobstructed. So mission accomplished as far as that goes. Obviously using a hub instead of dedicated runs for each of these USB ports means that you are limited to the maximum speed of the single tether connection that goes back to the main computer. But given that this is just for like, you know, front peripherals or whatever, realistically, I don't think you're going to want to plug in too many high speed devices at the same time. So this is a type C steam library drive. I'm just going to pop in there and see if it works, I guess. What a wonderful question. Yes, I can turn the brightness down. Sorry, we need to turn it down for the camera. But for your eyes, you might want it pretty bright. It does 350 nits peak brightness and it is HDR 10 compatible. So if you have an HDR signal coming into it, that will work. Is that better branded? Theoretically, this should be fast enough for me to use as a game library here. So let's go ahead and add another library in Steam. Monitor's got speakers. One moment, please. Just turn those off. They're loud. There we go. So we're running off there just fine. If we had a lot of high speed stuff plugged in, it could be a problem. But if it's just like, you know, a USB key and then something like this for your Steam library, I don't expect it to be an issue. Am I in a real match right now? That's fine. I can win this. This isn't the fastest panel that I've seen. LG advertises a five millisecond greater response time. So it's not exactly like the ultimate gaming monitor, but the colors look great. No, come on. Why is this game so hard? This is cool, though. Check this out. I'm like, oh, yeah, time to go more immersive. Look at that. We actually did a video recently where we took a gigantic TV, also from LG, and then surveyed our staff to see what viewing distance they felt was optimal. And what we discovered was that depending on the type of content, people actually felt pretty differently about viewing distance. Got all of them adjustments. Oh, yeah. So if I'm like, you know what? This is how I want a game right now. Oh, it's not going to make me good at it, but it's definitely sweet. I could blame it on the keyboard and mouse, but we all know that's not what's happening here. We can just figure out more of the ways that I can appreciate how hard I'm getting owned right now. So if you want to have more of like a top-down viewing experience, that's totally cool, too. It's like whatever's ergonomic for you. There's actually a ton of range of movement here. Alternately, if you're doing something else entirely, you can just like have a movie on, like over there. It's kind of out of the way. I like this. This is sweet. What do you think, Brandon? Traditional monitor arms? Lame? Yeah, pretty much. This looks so much better. It takes up no space on my desk. So I can be like, you know what? Screw this game, because I'm terrible at it. Put all this stuff away. And I'm going to get up to something else entirely here. Yeah, thanks for nothing, Rocket League. And obviously monitor arms existed already, but this is just a less wasteful approach. Why bother buying a junky arm that you're not going to use that's going to have to sit on your desk and just go in a closet somewhere when you could just have it come with the right thing? Great. Love it. Sorry, team. Hey, I blew up one of the bad guys, though. Well, maybe we're the bad guys. We're definitely bad. Man, I remember when 30-inch monitors were like crazy, crazy expensive, and no one had them because it was like, oh, that's totally unnecessary. Now it's like, yeah, 30-inch, this is a good size. 30-inch 4K is not only big, it's also sharp enough that no matter what distance you are from it, it doesn't have any kind of noticeable pixelation or screen door effect. Let's fire up like from your project. Oh, yeah. And of course you're at the native resolution if you want to work with like high-res video content. The Ergo also offers 95% coverage of the DCI-P3 color space. So it's perfect for something like photo editing or video editing, as long as you're not expecting to master HDR content. And of course, we could just watch movies. Oh, I'm going to switch it into HDR mode, actually. Oh, wow. Well, the HDR-ness is definitely kicking in here. We just really did not do a great job of mastering this video. The term for that, according to the kids, is big yikes. Big woof-liners. But the monitor is working as we expected. In conclusion, I think we achieved what we set out to do, which is absolutely no visible cables from a user perspective and nothing to interfere with your feet when you're sitting at your desk. But I do think there are things that we could do to even take this to another level, maybe drilling out the bottom of the Ergo stand so that the cables can go right down into our table with the integrated cable management channel or maybe integrating one of Logitech's PowerPlay mousepads, like into the desk or something so that you never have to charge your mouse. But that's a project for another day. For now, if you guys enjoyed this video, check out the link down below to all of the materials that we used to create it. And if you want to watch something else like this, get subscribed because we're going to have the ultimate desk PC version 2 coming as well, where the actual PC is integrated into the desk and it's not much thicker than this.