How I Built My Dream Desk Setup for Less Than You Think!

[Music] don't want to be a one man woman if you're a student and are looking to build your own desk setup then I've got you covered because in today's video I'm going to share my experiences building my own setup on a budget while still making it look aesthetically pleasing to my eye and something that I can call my own let's get into it now when it comes to desk setups having a solid foundation is key being a second-year uni student on a budget I needed something that wouldn't break the bank but would still look good

offer storage for all my clutter and have some cable management that's why I went with the Ikea Alex desk it's not to be confused with the Alex drawers and kitchen bench combo though this is a full desk and I did get it for a steal at $100 on Facebook Marketplace originally retail price was $200 it has two spacious drawers perfect for stashing pens microfiber cloths important papers and other bits and Bobs that would otherwise crowd my desk the drawers are also super smooth to open and close giving it a premium feel even at this price

point another great feature is the built-in Cable Management compartment at the back which keeps most of my cables hidden now while it hides cables well getting to them can be an absolute nightmare especially since my monitor sits on top making access to cables tough when I need to switch something out this comes up and it like pulls up but like you can see my monitor is on that everything is on that but honestly it's a minor issue because I don't have to do that too often and if you set it up right with the right

accessories this desk is a fantastic stylish and functional choice for any student trying to stay on a budget I'll link the links to the desk Down Below in the description it is the Ikea Alex desk let me know what you guys think in the comments below so silly me we're just recording this video now right and I realized I didn't even put in my planning of this video to talk about the monitor itself and that's like a massive part it's like staring me in my face this is the LG fhd which is full HD 27

in monitor I got it for about $110 it's been so good for me because it's actually got 100 HZ refresh rate so I get 100 frames per second when I'm gaming so that's really good it's it's smooth the colors are really good on it as well it's just been a really good overall budget monitor back when I first had my Des set up I was running my MacBook Air from my HDMI cable to my TV and it was just so blurry you know a lot of TVs they're just not built for a second display to

your laptop and this just is just built for that the only downside is it didn't have speakers so I did have to go out and find my speakers for the price point you're going to get what you pay for a full HD monitor 27 in decent size as well you get a decent amount of screen real estate you're getting 100 HZ so you're getting 100 frames per second I would say perfect absolute perfect monitor for students on a budget to add to your setup so get this one cuz this is good can't believe I forgot

about that cuz that's crazy but yeah as for that chair right there I literally got that for free off the side of the road and my mom shout out to my mom actually found this on the side of the road it's like in perfect condition it's not no ergonomic chair just to find something for free and I'm thinking you know budget set up I'm trying to save money as a uni student let me show you let me show you but it's like a nice synthetic leather feel there's no damage to it whatsoever swivel chair perfect

that's all you need as a union student to start things off and it goes with my desk setup you know like the Black and White theme that I have going can't complain it goes really well a few months ago I was running my setup with just my MacBook Air M1 hooked up to my monitor but as a computer science student and a Creator my workload kept expanding and I needed a bit more power and speed especially for handling 4K video edits I built this custom PC now it's powered by a ryzen 7 5700x CPU has

a 4060 RTX graphics card 32 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage truly a massive upgrade from my MacBook moving up from 8 GB to 32 GB of RAM has made a huge difference now I can easily multitask even with intense editing projects switching from Mac OS to Windows 11 did take some adjustment I'll be honest but it's been beneficial since as a computer science student knowing my way around both systems is an advantage I have zero regrets about investing in this PC it's a setup that will grow with me as I go forward

in my creation journey and developer journey I initially wanted a full white build with RGB lighting but to save costs I opted for a black build figering black goals with any setup if I decide to upgrade plus the Aesthetics weren't the top of my priority and for gaming it handled everything beautifully as a new recent Sim racing fan driving with my Logitech wheel and pedals feels Next Level this PC might not be top of the line but it's a beast and I love using [Music] [Music] it now for peripherals I'm keeping things pretty simple I'm

just using a fairly cheap HP wide keyboard that I got from the store for about 25 bucks I chose this keyboard because it it has a lot of functionality on it it's got a numpad it's got different function keys a lot of playback controls on it as well which was important it's great for the price point for a student it has everything I need and just as much as I do want a mechanical keyboard I'm paying hundreds and hundreds of dollars for something that I can yeah when most of the time when I'm at my

desk I have my headphones on to lock into my study I have my my water speakers going I can't hear this the mechanical keyboard board anyway so it kind of doesn't really make sense for me to go out and spend hundreds of dollars on a mechanical keyboard only downside I will say to it is that it is a wide keyboard so I do have to run a wire through like underneath my monitor stands as for the MTH that I was just talking about I use the Logitech MX Master 3s now let me grab this one

for you it's a very very popular Mouse for its productivity features like there's a lot it's not it's more than just like your simple mouse obviously you have right click left click Mouse scroll whatever you can see the quality that you get with the mouse like it's proper quality it's an ergonomic mass and for someone who is a computer science student and who is also a Creator who's spending hours and hours at the desk editing you know I need something that's going to be comfortable for my hand I spend a lot of time there and

just one of those cheap mouses just it makes my hand cramp up it's not as comfortable and I can get a lot more done with this moue I think $130 AUD so yeah it is a bit of the pricey side but there's two things that I need to spend my big money on for this setup and that was a mouse and the PC um everything else is pretty relatively affordable however if you are looking for a budget option I got you covered you can go for either the Logitech g305 or the Razer arochi V2 and

those are great Alternatives available for around the 70 to $80 Mark AUD on Amazon I'll drop some links in the description for you as well now my laptop of choice of course is the MacBook a M1 2020 as a huge Apple fan I love how clean and minimalistic Mac OS is and I'm never going to go and say that Windows is ever better than Mac OS because it just isn't plus with Apple's reputation for Quality I know the laptop is going to last like this laptop has lased me over 4 years now and it's still

going strong I use it for absolutely everything at Uni so this is the thing that I'm going to take with me everywhere I take it to UNI and use it for everything there like browsing tabs on Chrome and Safari writing reports in like word editing Finance sheets in Excel and coding in idees like py charm and webstorm it's honestly everything a student needs and with its current price it's super affordable I'm pretty sure you can find some really good deals on Amazon or your local tech department store it's a really good price point at the

moment I don't see the need personally to upgrade to an M2 M3 or M4 anytime soon now that especially that I have the PC for now I'm just going to be sticking with this laptop even with 8 GB Ram this MacBook is more capable than you might think you see apple says 8 GB of unified Ram is equivalent to 16 GB of normal RAM on a PC so it's actually a lot more capable than you think and this is made possible because of the M series chips and that's what makes MacBooks just a grade above

the competition you know it's just their M series chips are incredibly good at efficiency and putting all the resources of the computer to the right places like it's not going to be wasting Resources with its Ram it uses it very efficiently which is why 8 GB of RAM on MacBooks with the M series chips is so fast and is pretty much equivalent to 16 GB RAM on a PC so like I said I can't see myself upgrading until the end of my degree which would mean over 6 years of reliable use from this MacBook no

complaints here this thing is an absolute Beast yeah so the MacBook just sits in its own little stand uh in the corner of the desk it sits in there along with the iPad as well it's vertical as well which really helps with saving desk space I really love these STS you can get them for like 25 bucks on Amazon so I'm sure you're wondering what these computer speakers are where they're from and why they have water jumping up and down with the music it's funny story because when I first set up this PC and I

got the Monitor and I got you know the desk set up going something that I ran into an issue was this monitor doesn't have any speakers so I had to go ahead and get some speakers now I didn't go and buy these I've had these speakers since I was a very little kid I can't even remember when I got them but I got them for my birthday at one stage and they've just been sitting in my cup way back at my parents house for like ages and yeah they're not the most amazing quality like you're

not getting deep bases or anything the sound quality isn't as good as my UI Mega boom but it's still pretty good it's pretty decent see the tip about building a budget setup is all about using what you have and then just adding to that so I already had the speakers in my cupboard way back at home why not just use them and they're pretty cool as well all right uh yeah those my speakers um for now I'm going to keep those speakers I just I'm so proud with what I've built it's crazy cuz it took

me at least like 8 months just to get everything you know when you're moving in you got to pay all the moving in costs and then you have to pay a bunch of other things and then when I'm finally settled then I can start you know building my setup so I'm very happy with what I built very proud of it now seen as this is a student desk setup most of you guys are probably students and I'd like to introduce you to aori now aori is one of those tools that I use that makes my

research more efficient and makes it a lot more FAS and just saves me a bunch of time when you first open a fori you'll be taken to the reference manager and this is where you upload and organize all your research papers and journal articles now what's great about this is it has a powerful citation engine and basically a 4i will scrape and autofill all the metadata from your Journal articles you can use this later to create citations and references when you're writing your paper the reference manager page is basic basically where you're going to organize

all of your papers and all of your Journal articles so you can organize it by subject or organize it by different topics or whatever different project that you're working on my favorite part of a fora and it's called the research assistant so in the research assistant which is I think a for's most powerful feature you have three different ways to find credible sources for your topic or for your essay that you're writing first of all you have the document retrieval mode which basically just searches through the documents that you have already uploaded in your library

you can put INE prps like compare two different documents and find the conclusion what is the overall conclusion and it's going to basically answer any question that you put into the chat and it's going to retrieve the information from the documents that are already uploaded so that's a super clutch feature if I just want to do that however if I'm trying to write about a topic and I don't know where to find certain research papers or I might need some extra research papers before I can help you research papers and journal articles relevant to your

research topic from a database of over 200 million previewed research papers and you can further refine your research with search filters which include refining it to like the field of study datea of publication and Open Access papers this makes it incredibly easy to find the papers that are most relevant to your study and this has saved me so many hours wasted from scrolling through Google Scholar you can of course view the official text itself going to the original Source but if you do want to just search the whole entire internet you do have that third

option of the Google search feature mode which allows you to find the most recent and up-to-date sources of information from the rest of the internet as you can see a fori gives you the ability to search from a wide range of databases if you have been in any form of school though you know when it comes to wrapping up your assignments and essays that putting together bibliography can just be super tedious and super annoying if you're writing your essay in the document writer it allows you to pull citations from your library already and it can

also suggest citations for you as you're writing and as you're writing your essay at the end it's going to automatically put a bibliography for you super super handy and this is going to save me so much time I'm going to have so much more free time to do other things so if you want to stop wasting hours on research and actually get started writing your assignments and your essays get yourselves a fora now you know I got you guys a special deal I have a 10% discount for you if you click the link Down Below

in the description using my code Isaiah you can get 10% off your first month with a fora thank you so much for sponsoring today's video of for I really do appreciate it [Music] any good desk set up you're going to want to sort of protect your desk surface for any spills from food from drinks I had to get a couple of desk mats which is also super good for your mouse as well I actually got these two mats in a combo on Amazon for like $25 can't complain because it goes with all my other peripherals

so yeah I'm happy with it and it protects the longevity and life of my desk as well as for the desk shelves though I actually got these two at a shop called office works yeah these weren't my first choice and I eventually do want to upgrade them so that it is just one complete shelf I actually wanted a wooden one particularly off Grove made but oh my gosh those things are so ridiculously expensive I couldn't justify buying it on a student budget bro but I did have to get desk shelves because it just cleans up

everything and I get a bit of extra space on my desk where I can sort of hide cords under these headphones I've talked about these on the channel before these are just the song Sony whh CH 720 n how is Sony going to have the weirdest name they're the noise cancelling headphones they're about $250 to $300 I will say the noise cancelling is not the best but at this price point the noise cancellation is good enough and keeps me locked in when I need a lock into to my studies they also have a button to

switch between ambient mode which allows you to listen to what's outside so I use this all the time when I need to talk to people quickly and I don't got to just take my headphones off moving on we're moving over to the charging station and this is where I charge my iPhone my Apple watch and my airpods as well actually got this for as a birthday gift I'm pretty sure it's off Amazon and it's got a cool little light on it as well so yeah that's the charging station but but if you guys are wondering

what this little white thing is on my desk I'm about to explain to you it's actually a really cool thing this is a 3D printed by bamboo lab printer by my man Carl this is like top quality so I saw this thing on YouTube Once time and it was this guy who printed like a thing for his iPhone where he could magnetically charge it so I don't have a magnetic mag safe charger at the moment so that's why I'm not using it at the moment but when I do eventually get that I'm going to be

using this and it will replace my charging station at the moment for my phone anyways this little thing here when you press that in it pushes the phone out and that's how I grab it so I just grab it like this bang so easy drop it back in one of the coolest designs I've ever seen and I saw it on YouTube and I was like yo I said to my friend bro we got to print this out because this looks so cool he printed it for me and it it came out absolutely amazing he's got

a bamboo printer so that was just a bit of an explanation of what that white thing was on my desk and I love doing this you know has satisfying that is putting it in and taking my phone so satisfying all right moving on then to personally make the desk mine and decorated a bit I just got a Mustang GT which I got for my birthday personally I mean I love Mustangs for sure I love them not as much though as I do now cuz I've grown up and I've matured I love a BMW M4 in

particular the g82 come on now that is a beautiful car and then also to decorate I put a plant just in the in the corner there it sort of softens the corner up it's a good thing to put plants in the corner I got the lamp shade there as well it's like a nice warm light which creates that warm cozy feel at night time yes guys that will be the end of the video thank you so much for checking out my desk setup it has been a joy to take you guys through I really do

appreciate you guys sticking around to this part of the video it's been such a it's been so much fun to build this setup you know go shopping and find each different part and sort of really make it mine I'm so excited for the countless desk setups that I'm going to build for myself and other people in the future it's going to be so much fun if this is something that you're interested in please don't be afraid to like hit the like button down below drop a comment on what was your favorite part of the desk

setup and maybe try some things out from here that may work for you this is the student desk set set up for 2025 I'll catch you guys in the next one peace out man [Music] only I'mma play some Sim racing now cuz it's Saturday I'm going to get into it let's go okay all this local just some local I'm doing shows overseas they don't know you hey check the