That's very impressive, I'd love to know how you done it, what were the tricky bits etc? The links weren't working for me so I fixed them for you. Hope that's OK?
Looking forward to the new videos with the better camera.
That's very impressive, I'd love to know how you done it, what were the tricky bits etc? The links weren't working for me so I fixed them for you. Hope that's OK?
Looking forward to the new videos with the better camera.
well i would have to say that cooling was the trickiest part of the build. With only abut 13 3/4" by 9 1/4" of usable real-estate on th inside bottom of the base, you can imagine everything is very tight. The close spacing of the components made airflow a big problem.
I couldn't use the stock fan to cool the heat sink because it was just too big, so i had to find a fan that would fit on top of the heat sink and still let it fit in the less then 2" of height I had available. I ended up buying 7 of the slim type fans and some of the impeller type before I found one that would fit and move enough air and was quiet enough with a 4 pin connector. But even at that when i test fitted it with the top on the tight spacing of the components still caused a cooling problem.
the CPU and heat sink were cool enough according to a temp probe and IR thermometer but the case was far too hot. It felt like holding a toaster oven in my lap. and that was with no vent cover over the fan. When I added the cover it would now longer cool the CPU properly.
So adding the stock fan to vent the case was a no brainier, and putting vents and a small fan by the heat sink helped a lot. that plus the oversized speaker grills to double as vents salved the cooling issue.
The next biggest problem was keeping everything stock in such a small space, It would have been so much easier to just solder ribbon cable to the motherboard for the Audio and Video connections, and the RF board connections. oh and the wifi. But I really wanted to keep the motherboard unaltered. So that meant i had to de-solder the stock connectors form the wifi and RF board so I could use the ribbon cable to extend them.
That way they cold just plug into the MOBO the same way they did in the stock configuration and still be moved. by the by the solder Microsoft uses is very difficult to deal with.
as far as the AV, it is not hard to make a vga cable out of a stock AV cable. what was hard was making one that would fit in the 1" of space i had between the back of the case and the back of the motherboard. I have to redo that one too before i got it to work and to split the signal for the duel monitors.
Mounting the monitor turned out to be a problem as well, i tried 4 different sets of laptop hinges before i found a set that would do the job and allow assembly and disassembly by attaching the monitor to the aluminium and fibreglass top plate.
and as always the aesthetic part was a pain. I put the Carbon Fibber Vinyl on the base 3 times before I figured out how to apply it. But I know how to do it now and when i put it on the back of the monitor I got it on the first try.
I never would have thought that hand making buttons with the symbols on them would be so hard but I spend a week of trial and error before I got them right.
You have an INSANE amount of work put into this thing! What are you hoping to get for it? Not that I'm interested, I'm just curious. I do a lot of custom hack work for hire myself, most controllers though. I know Ben charges somewhere around $8K but how many hours did you say you had into it? Was it something like 1000? I'm really curious to see how much it goes for. Another curious question, do you plan to make more laptops as like an ongoing business type thing?
I have about 400 hours of wrench time in this build. I really can't say how much time I spent trying out ideas and testing but it was a lot. A great deal of time was spent just staring at the parts on my work bench turning ideas around in my head trying to solve one issue or another.
Knowing what I know now, what works and what doesn't. I know I can do it much faster.
I repair PCs an laptop PCs on the side, I am an electrician by trade. I would like to keep doing these things both xbox 360 and PS3 on the side, if I make enough for it to be worth my while. I dropped almost 2000$ building this thing, but that number is counting everything I bought even if I ended up not using it in the build as part of trial and error. Even though I have that kind of time in this, I can't see it going for more then 3000$ but maybe I am wrong. bottom line is I need to make money on this build to keep doing them. And I would really like to keep going. I have some ideas and I think I think I can build one at or under 2" thick. I would love to try!!!! This is a lot of fun but, having enough Money to keep going is the issue. But isn't it always.
I think it would easily be worth more than $3k but the issue is your market really. I think the biggest challenge would be getting someone who had the cash and wanted it bad enough. The more you put it up on sites like this though the better luck I think you'll have though!
