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

In this light, your laptop carcass itself will dictate your choice of graphics and TFT specification, so make this one of the key factors of your decision when choosing your chassis. If gaming isn't a consideration, then integrated graphics should give you better battery life than discrete options, particularly Intel's GMA. Otherwise, though, pay careful attention to getting a bare bones laptop with the best graphics available, as you'll be stuck with it for the lifetime of the system.

Driving lessons

With so many peripherals integrated in a laptop, the hard disk is one of the few areas in which you have plenty of choice. Virtually all laptops use 2.5in drives, and capacities range from 30GB to 160GB. Three spindle speeds are available, with the 4,200rpm drives being theoretically the cheapest, but also the slowest. The 5,400rpm drives are the most prevalent, and offer the greatest selection of capacities, and you can also get drives with 2MB or 8MB of cache, just as you can with 3.5in desktop disks. There are far fewer options for the high-performance 7,200rpm drives, although Hitachi's 7K100 is available with a capacity of up to 100GB, as is Seagate's Momentus 7200.1. Both models include 8MB of cache.

However, both Seagate and Hitachi have recently started using a new type of storage technology called 'perpendicular', which arranges the magnetic grains (or bits) used to store the data perpendicularly rather than the longitudinal system of regular hard disks. This allows for greater data density, which means even bigger drives. Hitachi's new 5K160, which offers capacities up to 160GB, uses perpendicular recording, as does Seagate's 160GB Momentus 5400.

Samsung has also announced a 32GB laptop drive based entirely on its NAND flash memory, which it calls a solid-state disk (SSD). This attaches via the regular 66MHz UDMA EIDE bus, and comes in a standard 2.5in form factor. Aside from being totally silent, it also consumes just 5 per cent of the power of a standard hard disk. Performance is comparable, though, with a 53MB/sec read and 28MB/sec write, which will be uniform across the disk. However, as the SSD is priced at around $1,000US, only the ludicrously minted need apply.

Your next consideration is the optical drive and, unless your chosen chassis is already fitted with one, you'll have to choose your own drive. This will need to be an internal slimline version, and these are at least double the cost of 5.25in desktop versions. The cheapest option would be a CD-ROM (£29.38 from www.mini-itx.com), but you can pick up a slimline DVD burner for less than £50, so it isn't worth skimping on this.

The Custom PC laptops

We based two of our laptops on the MS-1022 chassis. Since this is a relatively cheap bare bones system, we first tried to put together the best-value laptop we could. The cheapest Celeron M chips are allegedly in short supply, but the 1.5GHz Celeron M 340 (£58.74 from www.savastore.com) is still available. As you can see from our example specification on p111, this would still allow you to put together a laptop for less than £500. Unfortunately, we could only obtain a 1.6GHz Celeron M 380 in time for this feature, which sports 1MB of Level 2 cache compared to the 340's 512KB, as well as being 100MHz faster. However, the performance difference wouldn't be that significant in everyday use.