Build your own laptop

Posted at: Tuesday 1st August 2006 by James Morris

James Morris shows you how to custom-build your own performance laptop without spending a fortune

Assault and battery

To round off our testing, we assessed the battery life of our laptops. We performed two tests on each laptop, running a timer to see how long each would last when doing nothing, and again when running 3DMark06 in a continual loop. As such, everyday usage should be somewhere in between the results from the two tests. Not surprisingly, the Pentium M came top of the table, lasting 153 minutes when idle and 92 minutes under duress. The Celeron M was a close second, and would provide more than two hours of normal usage. Predictably, the Turion laptop provided the least time off the mains, as it had the most power-thirsty processor, graphics, hard disk, and twice as much RAM as any other laptop. However, you'd still get around 90 minutes out of it running non-taxing apps. The Turion machine's battery life wasn't as good as that of the other machine, but it was still more than respectable.

Although it was hard work gathering the components for this feature, the end results were clearly worth it. For example, Dell may advertise a 1.6GHz Celeron M 380 laptop (the Inspiron 1300) for £349, but that has just 256MB of RAM and a 90-day service package. Configure it with 512MB of memory and the usual three-year warranty, and it becomes more expensive than our version, despite only offering integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics. Similarly, bump up the processor to a Pentium M 750 and the RAM to 1GB, and it's over £200 more expensive than our Pentium M 760 laptop.

Even our premium gaming laptop worked out at a very reasonable price compared with ready-made equivalents with decent, discrete graphics. You'd be hard-pressed to buy a laptop as powerful as this for under a grand, let alone under £900. One thing you'll find hard to replicate, however, is the full-on premium LAN party laptop. Chassis with the likes of ATi's Mobility Radeon X1800XT or Nvidia's GeForce Go 7900 GTX aren't readily available as bare bones systems, so if you really want the closest thing to a desktop experience in a laptop then you'll need to stick with branded options such as the Elite-listed Rock Xtreme CTX.

At the moment, you can't build a laptop quite as powerful as this yourself. You also won't get the comfort of a full warranty when you build your own system. But the message is otherwise clear: you can now experience the fun and flexibility of constructing your own custom laptop. You could save money, you'll get precisely the components you want and you won't have to compromise on performance either.