Well, that’s more like it: CES 2022 concept design is relatively new and delightfully funny. I present to you Razer’s Project Sophia, a modular gaming desk concept that promises to be “the battle of games of the future” that somehow still looks like a giant laptop.
The basic idea is a gaming desk with a glass top, underneath which you can open thirteen separate units to truly customize your setup. These units range from system monitor gubbins, secondary and tertiary monitors, to perhaps even regular monitors, pen discs, or a cup warmer.
If I want to keep a cup of tea warm, I just balance it on the GeForce RTX 3090 built into my desk. This does the job, but doesn’t like spillage. So maybe a glass top heater is the best choice. Thanks, Razer.
Project Sophia promises desktop performance in an office, although the actual computing unit looks a lot like it used portable components – it all looks like someone just pulled a PCB out of a Blade laptop and put it under a coffee table.
Now, there’s a draft homebrew I can get behind.
However, the claim for desktop performance does stand still, as modern mobile GPUs and CPUs are so close to their bulkier cousins that they’re capable of delivering quite a bit of gaming grunt. As we’ve seen from the latest hardware that AMD, Nvidia, and Intel have already announced this year for gaming laptops in the next few months.
The slim design, enabled by the use of such components, makes Project Sophia’s desk look very impressive. And of course, Chroma RGB is enabled with a wide light range that circles the desktop itself.
But the main appeal of Razer’s concept design is its modularity, and the ability to magnetically attach a set of these different units to the underside of your glass desk, giving you access to system information, hot keys, and other goodies tailored to your specific needs. Razer provides sample layouts for The Gamer, The Creator, The Streamer, and WFH, each with different settings for their perceived individual tastes.
I’ll be honest, I don’t really see the need for most of these units, I mean I don’t really need to know how fast your CPU and GPU are running 24/7. If I do this, the screen on top of the NZXT Kraken cooler will show that instead of the GIF of Holly from Red Dwarf currently running in my rig.
Sure, a streamer probably wants to monitor production, and needs touch hot keys to switch things around without resorting to something sloppy like a Loupedeck or Elgato Stream Deck—physical buttons, stupid—but a lot of these are needless distractions from the main event for games that appears on the screen.
I mean, I don’t want to burn the palm reaching for the mouse just to put my hand on the cup warmer. But I’m wondering if you might be able to overclock it, turn it into some single-ring burner and cook eggs on your desktop.
There’s also the fact that I bet a few of you have crystal clear desktops. With all the different modules and screens on display baked into a Project Sophia concept cover, where’s it all this is going to live?
I’m actually fortunate enough to own a gaming desk with a PC built into it, one with a glass top as well. Although Lian Li DK04 has full size computer components. And I can happily let things pile up on top of it, although I understand that the image above might give some people nightmares.
But I still can’t help but really want a Project Sophia desk for me despite all of this.
Forget the 65-inch OLED screen that’s attached to its end (which only adds to the laptop’s hefty-on-the-legs aesthetic), the fact that it looks like the console from a mysterious ship from Section 31 in Star Trek means my relentlessly obsessed side needs this in my life.
Unlike the tired Alienware concept products that Dell’s gaming suite showed off this week, Razer’s mostly unreleased desktop may be realistically pointless, but it actually comes with the most important thing a concept design needs: Desire.
So yes, you want.