Full-size desktops are great
for playing the latest AAA games at high frame rates,
or if you need the extra muscle for video editing,
3D rendering, or computer-assisted design.
But if we're being honest, for most people,
a thin and light basic laptop
is more than enough these days
and comes with the extra benefits of portability
and convenience that you simply don't get with a desktop.
The real bummer is when you end up having to buy both,
a desktop for your gaming or your heavy work
and a laptop for when you're out and about.
I mean, why bother having two full CPUs
installed on two motherboards
when you can only really use one at a time?
If only there was a solution
where just by plugging one cable
into that laptop you already own,
you could extend it with a full-size desktop,
all the peripherals and expansion you could want,
and even a powerful graphics card.
And I mean, while I'm dreaming,
what if wireless charging was simply built
right into a desk?
Oh, wait, it is.
And we did all that stuff.
And we're gonna show you exactly how it works
after this message from our sponsor, Origin.
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So step zero for making your very own
one cable desk dock thing
is having a compatible laptop.
You don't get dual 4K monitors,
10 gig file transfers,
and 85 watts of charging
through a regular old micro USB port and cable.
No, for this to work,
you need a laptop with at least one Thunderbolt 3 port.
And we would strongly recommend finding one
that has a four by PCI express lane interface.
So Thunderbolt 3 looks like a normal USB type C port,
except for this little lightning bolt emblem
that isn't even always there.
So the Thunderbolt 3 port
on our 2018 Razer Blade Stealth, for example,
is totally unmarked.
If you need to double check your device,
you can always search for it
on the Thunderbolt Technology website.
Now, for the most important part,
for step one, plan your layout.
At a minimum, your desktop is going to need
a Thunderbolt 3 hub for everything to run through.
Luckily for us, CalDigit was kind enough
to send us their flagship TS3 Plus,
which can provide 85 watts of power.
That's enough to charge a MacBook Pro.
And it's got enough ports for your peripherals,
wired internet, and a 10 gigabit external drive.
Oh, also up to two 4K monitors.
Now, you could just get a 4K monitor,
get a device like this,
and call it a day with no other parts necessary.
But to make our setup really special,
we wanted to add an external graphics card enclosure
so that our desktop not only makes our laptop easier to use
with a monitor and peripherals and, you know,
lots of ports and all that,
but also substantially more powerful.
So that ended up making things a bit more complicated.
For starters, while Thunderbolt 3 does support daisy chain,
up to six devices off of a single port,
you can't just plug your graphics card into your dock.
Unless your eGPU is the first device in the chain,
you'll get awful latency at best,
and at worst, random crashes or total non-functionality.
Okay, so we just switch the order then, right?
Laptop to eGPU, eGPU to dock, oh.
So at the time of writing, the odds of your eGPU having two ports
on it for daisy chaining are pretty low.
The only options we're aware of are the Blackmagic eGPU,
which only works with Macs, the Akitio Node Duo,
which is designed to hold two cards,
but at only half the bandwidth each,
and the Akitio Node Pro,
which is exactly what we ended up using.
It solves our problems, but it has a gotcha.
Even though our TS3 Plus hub can deliver 85 watts of power,
your laptop only receives power
from the device that it is directly connected to.
So in our case, that's the Node Pro,
whose Thunderbolt 3 ports can only deliver
up to 60 watts of power.
So machines with higher power demands,
like the MacBook Pro, could end up trickle charging.
Fortunately for us, that is not the case
for my Blade Stealth 2017, so our journey continues.
Step two then, choose a suitable desk.
As you can see, our finished desk dock
is completely stealthed,
meaning that even though it's got
integrated wireless charging and a freaking graphics card,
you can't see either of those things
when you're sitting at the desk.
And that is only possible because of the planning
that we did back in step one.
So we limited our options to ones
with enough cabinet space and thickness
to contain all of our devices and our cables,
with obvious cable management runs for bonus points.
This one fit the bill nicely,
and we're mostly thrilled
with how the finished product looks.
But we're gonna stop short of a recommendation here
because the desk's build quality
is a bit of a disappointment.
It's basically Ikea level.
It even uses the same dowels and hardware,
but it was at least twice what you'd expect to pay
at the blue and yellow store.
And it is full of little oversights,
like these holes here that aren't even big enough
to accommodate the screws that are included with the desk.
Now it's time for power tools.
Step three is to hide the eGPU inside the desk somehow.
Our desk arrived before our eGPU did,
but the on paper specs indicated
that it was just a bit smaller than the cabinet.
That is as long as the drawers weren't in the way.
So we made room by shortening the drawers.
This created an empty space at the back of the cabinet
while maintaining the original look.
And what's really cool is that these drawers
can still be used to hold a couple of pens
or like a single banana.
When it actually arrived though,
we did find out that once you accounted for cables
and drawer rails, there really wasn't enough room
for the giant eGPU chassis.
Fortunately, we were able to extract the parts that matter
and then prop them up on a janky frame made out of scrap wood
that did fit inside the hollowed cabinet.
One more thing, we learned from our last desk project
that cooling is super important.
So we used a hole saw to bore a four fan breezeway,
then used fan splitters
to connect our fans to the single fan header
that was already on the Node Pros PCB.
Step three was installing an invisible wireless charger.
Now the original plan here was to simply cut
a charging pad sized hole in the top of the desk
and then have the exposed pad kind of poking through.
But then we remembered,
hey, we have a giant CNC router and an Alex.
So he programmed a basic design, including a cable channel.
And after a couple of test cuts to make sure
that this low quality chipboard didn't just explode
on contact with the blade,
we were able to carve out a recess for the charging pad
to nest into from the bottom,
leaving the surface of the desk intact,
but as thin as possible
to maximize the charging pad's effectiveness.
Then we added these classy dots
to show you where the heck the thing is.
Cool, right?
Step four was mounting the Thunderbolt 3 hub.
So the TS3 Plus has IO on the front
that we wanted to be able to access.
And the TS3 Plus has IO on the back
that we wanted to be able to access.
So we had to use Velcro tape on the top
to mount it to the underside of the desk.
This gives us both a discreet, slick looking finish
and the ability to pull the device off easily
instead of contorting our spines
in the event that we need to plug something into the back.
Step five, cable management.
Our desk did come with cable management holes in the middle,
but we added a few more of our own
so that we could route all of the cables
from the inside of the desk and the cabinet,
and the table leg.
Once you're done then,
the only loose cable that you should ever have to interact
with is the Thunderbolt 3 cable
that you plug into your machine.
And this is cool.
It can actually go on either side of this divider down here,
thanks to the hole that we drilled at the back.
That means that it doesn't matter which side of your device
your Thunderbolt 3 port is on.
So that's how we did it,
but let me show you guys how it works.
So first, I have to configure my laptop
to not go to sleep when I close the lid.
Obviously, I could have set up the desk
so that the laptop goes here,
and then it just stays open
and I could use it as a second monitor or whatever else,
but we were going for the cleanest setup.
So once it's powered,
I can go ahead and close the lid
and it's not gonna go to sleep.
You can just kinda tuck it in there.
Now we give it like somewhere between five and 10 seconds,
and our monitor should come to life.
Our peripherals should, come on baby, start working.
There we go.
And check this out.
If I hop over to device manager,
we might even be able to catch it showing up here.
Nope, it's already there.
GeForce GTX 1080 TI.
So because this is a quad core Ultrabook,
that means that we are actually in a position
where we can play AAA level games on our Ultrabook
just with this one cable.
So I'm gonna go ahead and fire up Rise of the Tomb Raider.
One other really cool thing
that I don't actually have set up here
is that with some of the other high-speed USB ports
on the back of this CalDigit device,
you could also do something like have a high-speed
either SSD or hard drive that you've got pre-attached
and then just like, I don't know, taped to the top
or even just hanging out back there,
like plugged into something like this.
And then what would happen is
even if you didn't have a ton of storage on your laptop,
you could plug it in and boom,
your Steam library with hundreds of gigabytes of games
would automatically be remapped.
And then accessible to you.
That's something that actually already works fairly well.
So let's go ahead and continue our game here.
So this is Rise of the Tomb Raider running at mostly high.
I've got motion blur disabled
and a couple of other things that I just kind of prefer.
But this is that mostly high details running at 75,
70 to 75 frames per second.
And the coolest thing about it is actually something
that probably won't be obvious
to you guys watching right now.
And that's this.
So my microphone's right here.
It's basically silent.
So for peace of mind, next time around,
I'd probably put an 80 millimeter fan in the back
and just have it draw some air across the laptop.
But honestly, we left it running
for over an hour yesterday in a game
and our CPU never hit above 65 degrees.
So it was chilly in our warehouse,
but basically at room temperature,
you'd never see above about 75.
And then our GPU stayed downright frosty
with all those cooling fans circulating air in the cabinet.
Honestly, the loudest fan in this thing
is the one in the included power supply
from the Akitio Node Pro.
So to do it again, I do the cooling fan
and then probably swap out that power supply.
Silverstone has some really great options
for semi silent units.
They've got like an 800 watt
that I think the fan only turns on
if you draw over like two or 300 watts of power.
So something like that would make this whole setup,
not just stealthy to the eye, but also stealthy to the ear.
All right.
Well, because we kind of have to,
let's fire up Fortnite and have a look at what it thinks
will be the ideal settings for our system here.
50% off what?
Do I have to pay for that?
You gotta be kidding me.
What is this?
So it has defaulted us to our,
I don't know why there's a frame rate limit.
You know what?
I'm just gonna do this myself.
Motion blur, off.
No, God, why would anyone want that?
All right, not bad.
So we're running in the neighborhood
70 to 80 FPS.
I've seen dips down to 55 or 60.
Let's go ahead and jump out of the battle bus here.
Yep, so around 50 at the lowest as we're falling.
So I could probably improve that
by dropping a couple things down to medium,
but overall, very playable.
And remember, this is at 3840 by 1600 resolution
running off of a laptop CPU.
Super impressed.
I mean, I could take his plane, right?
Yeah.
Wee!
Bye loser.
I'm definitely getting a little bit of chop
that I wouldn't be expecting.
I think there's a little bit more tuning required
to get this running as smoothly as I would expect
for the FPS that we're getting.
We gotta get out of here.
Oh, damn.
So maybe a couple more things to tweak here.
Now that I've seen this fall down once,
some kind of reinforcement so it stays in place better.
Probably a good idea.
Also, using a mouse directly on a desk surface
is not something I'd recommend.
If we had thought for certain
that there was no way we were gonna damage the table,
what we would have really wanted to do
was route out exactly the shape of a mouse pad
and then have it recessed in the table.
That's something we'd probably wanna do on a V2,
but I mean, other than that,
I'm super proud of the result here.
I gave James the task of creating the cleanest setup,
bar none, and as far as I'm concerned, mission accomplished.
I think the only thing left now
is maybe to do like an updated version
for our MacBook user viewers
with maybe a couple of the tweaks that we've talked about,
but we'll see.
Let us know in the comments
if you'd like to see a follow-up.
And now I wanna thank our sponsor
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So thanks for watching, guys.
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And yes, the animation smoothness is way better
as soon as I dropped the render resolution
down a little bit.
I think it was just struggling a bit at basically 4K.