Laptop Shopping Frustrations; How Do I Convert tower to Laptop?


  1. Posts : 78
    Windows 10 Professional
       #1

    Laptop Shopping Frustrations; How Do I Convert tower to Laptop?


    Below is just some context to the situation, my real question's at the bottom:

    Now recently for my line of on hand training, I've been needing a laptop to work out with some Developmental environments regarding video editing and some higher side rendering, (Nothing too intense like some 4k kind.) For this reason I've been using the search for this powerful portable machine under the minimal specs required for something like Doom 4, as a good starting off point, pretty simple. Come along searching around places like Amazon, EBay, and Wal-Mart Shopping Sites for an easy search, nothing wrong there. Or so I had thought.

    Something I almost immediately noticed, and I'll probably focus most of my time on Amazon specifically for this, is the absolute bombardment of incredibly crappy "laptops" that are available for public consumption. You see, being as I barely work part time, nearly two days a week, (or whenever my manager wants to bother put me in,) I can say for certain that I can afford putting down a reasonable sum of money down for these, ($400 I would have put to the absolute worst case of laying down,) but for what is available is absolute garbage. As I've mentioned earlier, I can't afford much, so I will often look to seek the cheapest I can get, and boy are these fun. These listings, often from cheapest to more expensive reveal a lot of these Android and Chrome based, "Note Book PCs," and very often will some of them purposely attempt to advertise themselves as "Fast and Powerful!" with some fancy graphic on them from a video game that I know would have less than 1 frame a second had It actually was tasked to run the promised game. Then there are just so many different kinds of AMD ones that I know overheat overwhelmingly than nearly any other device of different components. Being of someone in my trade, you start to pick apart the ins and ends of what works, and much less of what's fashionable, So I can tell you that the refurbished section is quite not that different. If anything, It was worse for me.

    Perhaps I'm a shill for what's cheap, I'm not sure, but what I can say that for as great in comparison to what else was out there, it seemed Lenovo was my saving grace, or to what I came to expect professionally out of Amazon out of all places. An issue I'm still bugging the Amazon customer support to reimburse me still to this day. A third party at that time was offering a decently powerful Lenovo laptop for a 150 dollar price tag out of the regular $220. A "this is a too much to be true," moment out of all this I'm sure, but considering my bad luck with EBay, and considering to what I believed to be a more customer orientated service, surely There wasn't much to risk here no? Well luckily enough the water wasn't too cold, It just froze my foot off after a small dip of my toes in it. So It wasn't so bad, I just wasted some time and energy that I may never get back, that's all. So onward my trip continued in the depths of the online market.

    I had been looking for a simple request, a CPU that clocked at 2.7 GHz naturally before overclock, a GPU that is, if not past a GeForce GTX 970m with 4GB, and it to actually portable that's all. I need not worry about, whether or not a Hard Drive was included, so long as there was a slot for inserting one in, nor did I bother much about the ram initially included. All I simply wanted was those two components in a small carrying case per say. But, no matter how much I tried, I found nothing good.

    So just out of defeated curious thought, and because I had this motherboard lying around from a cousin, I thought to myself, "How much would I need to have a decent tower built?" And I kid you not, lord and behold after a little time with PCPartPicker, totaled no more than $320 something dollars, where a laptop of similar strength had cost literally thousands of dollars, ($1000+ to be more specific,). Now this is frustrating to me because for one, I needed the whole, "Portability" aspect of it for study and work, and needless to say, it was not.

    The real kicker here:
    Now after my whole backstory to what I am going to ask now out of the way I must ask dearly, especially from those hobbyist to building PCs for entertainment, How may I turn this PC into a proper portable laptop? What type of carrying case, or rather, just really anything I can do to turn this into some form of small form factor? I will admit to be the type of poor scraping by College kid, but I've learned from my trade I'm studying for, a bit of ingenuity in myself to become more closer to a hardware sort of engineer, (with of course, no Money.) Any help would greatly be appreciated, and I thank you for taking the time to read what I have to say, thank you.
      My Computer


  2. Posts : 56,825
    Multi-boot Windows 10/11 - RTM, RP, Beta, and Insider
       #2

    Maybe this should be in PC Custom Builds and Overclocking - Windows 10 Forums for better visibility?
    @essenbe
      My Computers


  3. Posts : 1,680
    X
       #3

    How do you turn a desktop computer into a laptop?
    You don't. Ever.

    Nothing inside a desktop computer will fit into a laptop-sized unit.
    The PSU is 5x thicker than a laptop.
    The CPU heat sink, likewise.
    Even the mobo is too thick ... even if you remove the card-slot connectors. And it's likely too long and wide.
    Seriously ... what makes you ask this? Or have I completely misinterpreted your question?
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 88
    Windows 10 Pro x64 (Insider Beta)
       #4

    Ultimately, with laptops there's a pretty big trade-off between performance and portability and a lot of that is because of the battery life limitation. If you have a Micro Center store around you, they're selling the Acer Nitro 5 with a true quad-core i5-7300HQ (2.5 GHz Base - 3.5 GHz Turbo) and a GTX 1050 with 4 GB VRAM for $679.99 right now but it's in-store only: Here

    That's probably about the cheapest you'll find a new gaming laptop because they are still more of a smaller niche market. If that's more than you're willing to spend on a new laptop then you're probably better off building a tower because, as you've already said, at the same price point a tower will always beat a laptop performance-wise.

    If you're looking to build a small form factor desktop, Mini-ITX is one of the smallest, however, there are a few catches. Some of the smaller mITX cases require special small form-factor PSU's, not all of those cases will fit a full-sized GPU card, and some of them don't have space for an optical drive if you need one. Cooling can also be an issue with some of the really small cases since they don't have a lot of space inside for fans and radiators.
      My Computers


  5. Posts : 13,995
    Win10 Pro and Home, Win11 Pro and Home, Win7, Linux Mint
       #5

    "Back in the day" I had a Portable computer given to me, looked a lot like one of the word processors with a fully enclosing case, weighed about 30 pounds. I didn't keep it long as it wouldn't run Win95. I do have the Smith-Corona Model 5P word processor, just don't have much need for it.
      My Computers


  6. Posts : 5,899
    Win 11 Pro (x64) 22H2
       #6

    I tried replaying to the OP's post, but the more I read the more confusing the post and OP's gripes became. At the end of the day I don't even know what the OP wants or expects for $400 dollars...

    SotoPrior said:
    I can say for certain that I can afford putting down a reasonable sum of money down for these, ($400 I would have put to the absolute worst case of laying down,) but for what is available is absolute garbage.
      My Computers


  7. Posts : 15,037
    Windows 10 IoT
       #7

    $400 dollars is not going to get you a "desktop replacement" laptop. It won't even get you any kind of performance desktop PC. You get what you pay for. Buy a gaming laptop or desktop replacement laptop and you'll get comparable performance to a good high end desktop PC. It will be big a clunky, but still a lot easier to carry around than any desktop PC you might buy. The only way to get a small desktop PC is small form factor. They suffer in performance though so I would caution against going that route. Your only other alternative is an all in one which is somewhere between a desktop PC and a laptop. Their performance may not be what you want though.
      My Computer


 

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