computers

My 10 years old t410i finally reached the end of its days. It served me well, all these years (tears on my eyes), worth every penny i spent on it. This laptop’s 8GB wont be enough to cater the requirements for my daily task.

My search for a new laptop took many months as I could not find laptop worth paying for. i am attracted to new lenovo x280 but it costs a whopping RM4k++ at the time this article was written which was above my budget.

Then I searched for a used lenovo x260 and found a well maintained one which costs RM1156 (i5 6200U , 8GB) but it uses quite slow CPU and i thought i could replace it after i buy this laptop, then i realized laptop nowadays has its CPU and RAM soldered onto the motherboard! Oh man, my good ol’ T410 survived for 10 years because I am able to upgrade is CPU, RAM and HDD to meet ever growing software requirements installed in it. After that I am stuck, at first I was searching for a laptop which can swap its CPU and it turns out almost all laptop does do that anymore! Except one, which is Clevo!

i stumbled on this video where this guy swapped Intel G5420 with a FREAKIN i5 9400 desktop CPU!!! How is that possible? It turns out that this laptop sold by a chinese company called Maibenben which are one of the resellers who build their laptop based on Clevo’s barebone laptop chassis. Some of these laptop chassis uses LGA1151 socket which enables it to use 8th and 9th gen intel CPU!!! In that video the laptop is based on Clevo’s NB60TA where this model is already obsolete by now. But do not worry, Clevo produced newer models which also has LGA1151 socket where you can find a comprehensive list of upgradable cpu laptop here.

There are plenty of resellers who are using Clevo’s laptop chassis such as Eluktronics, XMG and Sager where you can easily buy it from their websites. Below shows one of the model where you can buy a barebone laptop (without cpu, ram, hdd) which uses H310 based chipset with LGA1151 and you can build a i5 9400 based system as low as RM3000 !!!

Or if you have an even tighter budget, you may check out chinese brands such as Shinelon(炫龙) and Hasee(神舟) were these laptop brands can be purchased from Taobao. Here is one link which sells Hasee laptops where you can own a Laptop with i5 8400 desktop CPU for as low as CNY3000 (RM1800) !!! And it has GTX1050 suitable for gamers out there.

However bear in mind that this laptop will be a bit bulky and a little heavier as compared to other mainstream laptops which is one of the trade off by having a desktop cpu in a laptop. If you can live with this trade off, you will own a laptop which is sustainable for many years.