Putting an AMD Threadripper HEDT chip inside a laptop might sound strange, but someone was determined to make it a reality. As spotted by Hackaday, Jeff from the Excursion Gear YouTube channel went the extra mile with his DIY laptop, by including a 16-core, 32-thread AMD Ryzen ThreadRipper 1950X.
To make what Excursion Gear dubbed “the most powerful laptop in the world,” Jeff used a pre-built HP media center PC case, which he cut down by a few inches, as the laptop chassis. Specs-wise, Jeff went with an AsRock X399M Taichi Micro-Atx motherboard, 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM running at 3,600 MHz and a Zotac GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. For the display, he called in an 18.3-inch portable 4K monitor.
For cooling, this bootleg Threadripper machines uses a Dynatron A28 1U passive EPYC heatsink, which is low profile anddesigned for server-based rackmount cases. Two Delta BFB1012HH blower fans keep the Threadripper cool.
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The most difficult part of the process, according to the builder, was figuring out how to run the “laptop” purely on battery power. Jeff eventually went with six Dell companion 18,000mah power banks, paired to an HDPlex 400W ATX SFF power supply. The six power banks combined produce up to 390W of power, more than enough for the Threadripper 1950X-based system.
Considering Origin PC makes the Ryzen 9 5950X an option in its laptops, this DIY laptop is probably not the fastest in the world. But a Threadripper-based laptop is quite an engineering feat on its own.