“After 14 months of late nights, endless challenges and countless curse words, it’s finally alive …”

YouTuber Socket Science begins his new video – viewed over 380,000 times in a few weeks – with these words. 

Over those 14 months Socket Science had set himself the task of somehow finding a way to wedge the bulky guts of a gaming PC into an itty bitty laptop, so as to provide a top-shelf portable experience. It’s the type of project that requires a sense of humour.

Delicate work.

“This is a homemade laptop built entirely with desktop gaming hardware,” he said. “It’s designed to look and function like a real laptop you’d find in a store. It’s fast, one-of-a-kind and built at home by an idiot.”

The gamer said he loves laptops, but was over them using the “same” hardware as PCs but with lesser results. He shows a graphic comparing both products:  “Look at the RTX 4090 GPU, nearly half the frames per second [in the laptop] for what is supposed to be the same card.

 

YouTuber Socket Science has used gaming PC hardware to build a laptop.

 

“Well, I’m fed up and I’m out to fix that. Partially because it’s never been done before, and partially because I hate myself.”

He “refused to use any parts made for laptops” and his kit included an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, RX 6600 GPU, ITX motherboard, some very low profile RAM, a portable gaming monitor, a thin keyboard and touchpad, and a tiny DC to DC power supply.

“Then I started making everything thin enough to fit,” Socket Science said. “I pulled apart the motherboard and, failing to desolder three sets of ports that were too tall, took a very risky approach by snipping them off by hand.”

Homemade case.

He used a PCI-E ribbon cable to be able to lay the video card on its side. 

The goal in building the case was something that “doesn’t look like it was built by a drunk toddler” and “how to keep it from melting down like a nuclear reactor”.

“I designed a lower case in CAD, printed it out, heat welded the parts together, and reinforced everything with JB Weld.” 

After numerous mockups in Photoshop working out how to make the most of every square millimetre, he landed on a layout.

Too tall.

Bespoke fan.

“To attach everything to the CPU and GPU I got some copper shims – thinner than my chances of this working – along with a mess of heatsinks thin enough to actually fit in the case, and a set of heatpipes.”

There was clamping, painting, keyboard trimming, stress testing, cracking and … fans. Socket Science couldn’t find fans small enough to fit in the confined space, so he built them.

Job done, Socket Science said although “I’m kind of tired of looking at it after 14 months of work, I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. It’s far from perfect, but I think it went alright.”