The first thing you notice is what isn't there.
No strips of blue light bleeding under the desk. No logo illuminated on the headset stand. No tempered glass side panel catching the room like a mirror. Erik Sundström's apartment, on the fourth floor of a low building in Södermalm, is lit by one pendant lamp — warm, tungsten-yellow, hung low over a birch desk the color of unfinished bread. The monitors are off. The PC sits inside a Fractal Design North case clad in white oak mesh, looking more like a piece of Danish furniture than a gaming rig. There are two small plants in white ceramic pots. One of them needs water.
He is twenty-six, Swedish-Finnish, and has a peak Valorant ranking of Radiant with a 74% win rate over the last two acts. He does not look like the room, exactly — he looks like someone who could survive any room, which is a different thing. The setup, he says, took longer to finish than the game career that justified it.
The gear
Custom liquid-cooled RTX 4090 tower — The Fractal Design North case is the piece that stops every visitor mid-sentence. Inside it: an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB of DDR5 at 6000 MHz, and a custom open-loop cooling system that keeps the GPU at 58°C under full load. Sundström built it over three weekends in November last year, sourcing the fittings from a small distributor in Gothenburg. Total component cost came to roughly kr 38,000. It runs at near-silence — 28 dB at idle, 41 dB at peak — which matters when your microphone is two feet away. ~kr 38,000
LG 27UN850-W 4K monitor — One screen, not two. This is the detail that surprises people the most. Sundström uses a single 27-inch 4K IPS panel, USB-C connected, no secondary display cluttering the periphery. "Two monitors is a habit, not a need," he says. He uses virtual desktops on Windows 11 instead, sliding between OBS, Discord, and the game itself with keyboard shortcuts. The panel's factory calibration holds a Delta E of 1.8, which he verified himself with a colorimeter the week it arrived. ~kr 7,200
Buy on Amazon → 3. HHKB Professional Hybrid Type-S — The keyboard is the room's most aggressively opinionated object. No number row on the right. No arrow keys in the obvious places. Topre switches at 45g actuation, dampened with silencing rings, resting on a thin sheet of sorbothane Sundström cut himself from a hardware-store sheet. It is the quietest keyboard in the apartment, quieter than the refrigerator. He has been typing on HHKB layouts for four years and cannot convincingly explain the transition to anyone who hasn't made it. ~kr 3,800 Buy on Amazon → 4. Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 — Here, finally, is a concession to the conventional. The mouse is white — Sundström ordered the white version specifically, so it disappears against the desk surface — and rides on a Artisan Shidenkai soft mousepad in ash grey. He plays at 800 DPI, 0.5 in-game sensitivity, eDPI of 400. His crosshair placement discipline does the rest. He went through seven mice in eighteen months before landing here. The Superlight 2 has been on the desk for nine months without complaint. ~kr 1,100
- Shure MV7 Podcast Microphone — Clamped to the back-left corner of the desk on a low-profile Rode PSA1 arm, the MV7 sits just outside the monitor's field of view and barely registers on stream unless someone goes looking for it. Sundström runs it into a Focusrite Scarlett Solo, monitoring through a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pros. His stream audio consistently tests at -14 LUFS. He is not a podcast. He plays Valorant. But his mic chain costs more than most people's entire setup, and the stream chat notices. ~kr 2,900
The philosophy is almost too simple to be interesting, which is probably why it holds. Sundström wanted a room he could sit in for eight hours without the room trying to be something at him. No aesthetic asserting itself. No light demanding to be looked at. "The game is already loud," he says. "Everything around it should be quiet."
He gets pushback from his chat, occasionally, when a camera angle catches the room behind him — someone always asks where the RGB is, always half-joking, always expecting a punchline. He doesn't give one. He just tilts the camera back to the monitor and keeps playing.
Before he leaves for the night, he switches off the pendant lamp. The room goes dark all at once, no LED bleed softening the edges, no strip light left warming the floor. It's just a room then. The birch desk disappears. The little plant — the one that needs water — becomes a silhouette, then nothing. It's the cleanest part of the whole setup, and it happens every night by accident.
