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Build your own laptop??

A

agg123456789

Senior member
Hey all, I was just wondering about the possibilities of this.

I know that you can get many of the components (like the hard drives and SO DIMMs) but what about mobo's, LCDs, cases, batteries etc.

agg123456789
 
You'll probably not be able to find them anywhere. I don't think that any companies make them for retail sale. I know you can but stripped down laptop parts on egay though !
 
does anyone know if there is a standard for laptop mobos and psu/batteries??? something like ATX is for the desktop segment??


agg123456789
 
i dont think there is any specific standard for laptop cases/motherboards, how its usually done with say dell/gateway and many others is that they contract a companies in korea/taiwan usually that desing the case and mobo, then they ship them barebones and they get assembled with ibm LCD`s or whatever and the rest of the parts at dell/gateway plants
 
Laptops are mostly made of proprietary parts. About the only things that are "standard" are the hard drives and RAM. Everything else is custom designed for each specific machine.

It may be "possible" to build a laptop from parts, but that would be like building your car from parts. Let's see, that Mercedes costs $45,000 if you buy it assembled. If you buy the parts and put them together yourself it costs $325,000. You do the math and let me know if you think building your own is a good deal.
 
Build your own laptop, sure, but it wont be very portable when youre done.

However, I'd love to be able to hack a GF2MX into my laptop. I've got a mini PCI slot, one would imagine that all would be needed is some sort of adapter or bridge.

Of course there'd always be the problem of outputting to the LCD screen. As far as I know, laptops dont use anything in the way of standards for this, and if they do, I doubt its DVI.

I'd be more than happy to have a box attached to my laptop in some strange way to get 3d
games.

And what about cardbus? The bus is basically a PCI bus, and they do have graphics cards for them. Nothing 3d. Why doesnt someone bring out the voodoo cardbus dammit?
 
I am sure if enough companies would come together they could develop some standards. The only problem is that people want laptops to be small and work off of a battery. So they are always refining and tweaking them to be lighter, smaller, and use less power. Any standards that you developed would have to fly out the window every 6-12 months. With the desktop, you can pretty much use as much power as your outlet will handle and size/weight is not as much of a concern, though the mini-atx standard seems to be gaining in popularity lately.
 
Well personally, I never use the battery on my laptop. I need it because its easier to move around every week than a desktop, but I'm always connected, and I suspect a lot of other people are as well. Many people that own a laptop own ONLY a laptop, and when theyre not on a trip, its their normal computer, and would love to have a 3d card in it.
 
Well there are probably a couple of segments of users, those that basically want a desktop replacement and those that use their laptops for its primary advantage: portability. I read somewhere that the slimmer laptops were gaining a lot of popularity. But remember, if you are EVER going to use that laptop when not next to a power outlet, your battery is going to be drained fast if it has a lot of power sucking components in it. Personally, we own two laptops ONLY and no desktops systems, by design. While yes sometimes my wife and I use them at home, more often it is because we are travelling (she is on 6 week rotations and I visit her on weekends). I think this would be analogous to a business user who spends a lot of time on the road (as my brother does). In fact, my brother STRONGLY prefers having a light, slim laptop to "get stuff done" as do my wife and I.

Nice though that laptops are getting more powerful so you can play games and watch DVD's on the road 😉 without sacrificing battery times.
 
i took my laptop apart last week in order to swap out some parts from a spare parts laptop from my dads work. Anyways, mini pci is for ethernet and modems only. But i did find that on my laptop the video card comes off of a little boards. so you can just snap in another video card. HP makes this particular series with an 8mb or 4mb savage 4 ix vid card. the cpu was just a standard mpga2 one that you can buy on pricewatch boxed even, but they are insanely expensive above 750mhz or so. the only think proprietary was the mobo, and well hp's entire pentium 3/ celeron line uses the same one, so in theory you could actually upgrade a celeron notebook to a 900mhz p3 , and even the lcd can be swapped easily enough
 
I really wish you could build one from scratch. It's probably the only thing keeping me from breaking down and buying one.
 
would be interesting you plugging your shiny new geforce 3 into your laptop and barely finish refreshing the q3 or ut servers when the geforce 3 has already drained your fully charged batteries 😛
 
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