bigmeanie

Budget (including currency): I need to build 4 of them, so dollars count. Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Modest gaming and school work. Other details My sister is going through a D and is moving in with me (trust me, I'm real happy about this) and her and her kids both have some problems, so I can't just go with laptops or anything that can be tossed in anger or sold easily. And power budget wise I'm going to have maybe 100 watts per machine at max. Lower is better as these systems will be running mostly off of solar. I'm making due with some very less than ideal circumstances, but her kids are decent kids and I would like to make sure they have something that can at least do some gaming. It don't need to be pretty, it just needs to work.

I would look at any gaming laptop that has usb-c PD charging on it, I'm using a Lenovo flex with the AMD processor in it and a Win GPD, and then just invest in a solar power station/power bank or two. I charge my yeti power station from my car while driving ( I drive some people around) and it more or less keeps me going uninterrupted without having to idle my car while waiting on them.

It has been a while since I've done the engineering side of things and most of my experience with that was more signal processing rather than digital, just so we are all on the same page of where we are coming from and I cut my teeth in that before computer aided design was a mainstream thing. First step is to block diagram things out and you are going to need to determine what NEEDS to be close to each other. As well as what HAS to be mounted on some specific parts of the board for external IO reasons. This is why you tend to see the Ram right next to the processor, because the more length that is on those traces means the more places for obnoxious kinky stuff to happen. And keep in mind that the higher of a frequency you work with the less the quarter wavelength of what makes a valid antenna for it is and this is not even going into capacitive loading or funky harmonics stuff. And very often in that you are going to need all of the traces to be of a comparable length due to that whole pesky speed of light thingie (although there is some kinkyness that goes into the planning of this as well, you can gate a hundred paths one right after the other and skew the trace lengths so that the signal all gets to the destination at the same time, this is a thing) Next you need to go into what HAS to be far apart, things such as power supplies and rf mixers tend to be segregated, as we really don't need any noise from those components getting into the sensitive stuff. Now thankfully by and large you can just layout your traces to be more or less analogous to the schematic, it may not be the most 'space efficient' means of doing it but it will be somewhat close, in older systems they use to get around the limitation of having a lack of board layers with having a vertical mounted board mounted across the length of the circuit board to....get around the limitations of only having one or two layers to work with. After that your power delivery tends to be given via jumper wires as well in many older systems as well.

I'm stuck using an ancient bit of software that only runs on one thread, so any advice on what is the fastest budget cpu out there? I don't need a high core count with this but I'm looking at several day's of processing time on my laptop and the ability to cut that down to a day will do wonders for my iteration cycle.

You might luck into something decent with ebay/criegs list, but that is very much a YMMV thing and do so with the aid of a parent if it involves any form of in person pickup. But check always to see what it retails for new and in any case you are likely to need more scratch before doing that.

This last episode gave me flashbacks to vacuum and water testing submersible units, Try putting the UUT under vacuum and painting all the seams with a thin glue/paint. often if there is a micro leak that will seal it, and considering the nature of what you are working on, I would be very concerned about a microleak in that unit.