Building a laptop?

[Blueduck577]

Is buying laptop parts more cost-efficient than say, ordering one from Dell? I would like a laptop that could perhaps play Steam games, as well as adequately run engineering/other creative use applications such as Photoshop, SONAR, Mathematica, Matlab, PSPICE, Solidworks, to name a few.

If anyone here has recently built a laptop that can do the things I listed, would you mind listing all the parts you bought and how difficult?/time-consuming it was to build?

 

[vsrdan]

Can you really do it without buying a barebone??

 

[engiNURD]

Just order one from Sager or something. Check notebookreviews.com.

 

[jmroberts70]

There are plenty of articles on DIY laptops. Just understand that you're not going to get anything "better" than what you can buy at a Dell or something. If you want to pound the crap out of one running Photoshop or heavy-duty engineering apps, don't expect to find special parts that will somehow make it perform like a desktop machine. Laptop hard drives are smaller and slower. Period. Disk-intensive apps will always run slower on laptops for just that reason. Cooling is also much more limited. Mind you, I still run Autodesk's Civil3D program on an old HP P4 laptop with 2GB of RAM but it is just when needed. Any truly intensive operations would just die on this machine over my monster desktop in the office...