Fed up with the low performance of laptop processors compared to their desktop counterparts, YouTuber Socket Science set themselves the slightly ridiculous task of trying to make a gaming laptop that uses only desktop PC parts, as reported by Tom’s Hardware.
The finished product is fairly bulky and doesn’t have a battery — but it is a finished product all the same and that’s pretty impressive.
My DIY gaming laptop (w/ desktop parts) is FINALLY done! Full Reveal (youtube.com)
The two biggest challenges with this project were size and heat. He needed to make every part about 10 times smaller and once it was all squished together in a 3D-printed case, it needed a cooling system that could handle the extra heat that comes with desktop parts. Here are the main products used:
- Gigabyte A520I mini-ITX motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X CPU
- XFX RX 6600 graphics card
- 16-inch 120Hz QHD portable gaming monitor
- Scissor-key keyboard
- USB touchpad
- 300-watt PICO DC-to-DC power supply
For memory, he found VLP (Very Low Profile) sticks of RAM that were around 40% shorter than regular RAM that are typically used in mini-ITX cases. When shrinking down the various parts, the bulky plastics and big fans came off first. The motherboard, Wi-Fi card, VRAM heat sink, audio jacks, Ethernet, and some USB ports all came off too. Socket Science notes at this point that he had no idea if the motherboard would still work after having ports just randomly removed — but it did.
For the graphics card, the first trick was using a PCI-E adapter so it could be installed horizontally rather than vertically. The second trick was removing all of the heat sink and plastic until only the circuit board remained.
To keep the easily meltable 3D-printed base safe from all the heat, he covered the inside with a thin layer of J-B Weld — an epoxy adhesive that can withstand constant temperatures as high as 500 degrees Fahrenheit. The finished result is no high-end aluminum casing, but this is a DIY project after all.
For the cooling system, Socket Science hacked together a combination of superthin copper shims, short heat sinks, and crudely bent heat pipes. After failing to find a fan that was both large enough to do the job and compact enough to fit in the case, he had to make his own instead.
Using the motor from the AMD fan and some custom 3D-printed blades, he managed to create something that did the job. After that, he just needed to mount the keyboard and touchpad with some more J-B Weld, rip apart the monitor, and put the LCD panel in a custom case.
He did think about figuring out a battery, but it was a lot more effort than it was worth — after all, no one actually uses their gaming laptop unplugged. Somewhat surprisingly, once everything was put together and plugged in with a custom power connector, it worked — real desktop power and graphics in a laptop-sized box.
In the video, it seems the poor man was a bit too tired after all that work to give us some benchmark numbers, so we don’t know exactly how well it runs. It would be interesting to see how it performs compared to traditional gaming laptops with specialized mobile parts, especially given the size limitations.
