Can You Recycle A Laptop Into A Desktop? Let's Find Out!

[AshleyAshes]

 

On the right is an Acer Aspire 5750 which served me through three years of college and three years of employment afterwards.  This proved to be a versatile laptop which saw a series of upgrades. It started with an i5 2410M, dual core, hyper threaded Sandy Bridge, 750GB HDD, DVD/CD Rom drive and 4GB of RAM.  It was upgraded from 4GB to 8GB and finally to 16GB of RAM.  The CPU was socketed, using intel's Socket G2 so it was upgraded from an i5 2410M 2.3ghz Dual Core with HT to an i7 2630QM quad core, hyper threaded 2.0ghz CPU at 45w.  I put in an SSD and then removed the optical drive, using a caddy to store the HDD in the ODD bay.  It had a share of oversized batteries.  I broke the screen once and replaced it.   I even replaced the keyboard swapping a Canadian Bilingual for a US English keyboard.  It once stopped charging batteries so I had to replace the motherboard.  This laptop has lived a long, hard life at times but six years is good service life but I finally got a replacement for it this weekend.  However an i7 2630QM itself is not terrible and it can still offer some utility but the laptop form factor is less than ideal.

 

...And on the left is the Advantech AIMB-272G2-1101E-T ITX Socket G2 motherboard. And I have no idea if it works!   I got it on eBay in September 2016 because it was a good deal and other ITX G2 boards only had one DIMM slot.  So we have some kinda board designed for enterprise of some sort.  It has a lot of COM ports, CFast, no USB3, an LVDS connector and some other oddball things.  Since I was still USING my Aspire so I had no CPU to put into it and test it.  Most importantly however, I can salvage the CPU, SSD, and memory from my laptop and install them in the board.  Not only that but the i7 2630QM will now have access to a 16x PCIE 2.0 slot so I can plug a fat GPU into it if I desire.  HTPC?  Steam Machine?  Really big PFSense router?  Well, the good news is that I have most of the parts here, I did buy the ITX mobo and I'll have to buy an ITX case for it.  First thing though, we have to see if this stupid board will even POST.

 

If you think this build is interesting, you can also check out my in progress eMachines eMonster 500a restoration.

 

 

[KenjiUmino]

hey ... sounds like you got yourself a project ... and an interestinge one.

 

i didn't even know G2 mainboards existed.

[AshleyAshes]

The good news is that on the first go it POSTed and even booted up the Laptop's install of Win10 without issues!  The Win10 install was just like "Hey!  I'm here!  I don't have a battery anymore and now I have a slightly different chipset, okay, I'll deal."

 

...And then it didn't.  It's been shutting itself off and refusing to boot and then suddenly find.  I ruled out the test PSU, it is a six year old CX600, but using a much newer SF450 same issue.  Then suddenly it booted up and it was fine!  So uhh... I don't QUITE trust it yet.  Right now it's on my living room floor and running the 3D Mark Ice Storm demo on an infinite look as a 'stress test' and we'll see if it shuts itself off or not.

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

Oh I guess @Slick said he was interested in seeing this.

So, specs as is for now:

Intel i7 2630QM 2.0ghz, 2.9 Ghz Turbo

AIMB-272G2-00A1E ITX Socket G2 Motherboard

2x8GB 1333mhz DDR3

OCZ Agility 3 360GB (Laugh ALL you want, it's five years old and it still works)

Corsair CX600 600w PSU.  (SIX years old...)

 

So for a case I'm thinking of the E variant of the Raven RVZ01 ITX case

 

http://www.silverstonetek.com/raven/products/index.php?model=RVZ01-E

 

It's a bit big but it'll not only hold most any 13" GPU but also a full fat ATX PSU.  Though the PSU may get some minor modification to remove excess cables.

 

Part of the goal of this build is to prove that a old laptop CPU can still do work and to maybe make an 'pretty okayish' HTPC/Steam Machine/Livingroom PC/Portable LAN PC made of as many repurposed components as reasonable.  It would be interesting to note that with an R9 390X this machine could trump a PS4 Pro and go toe to toe with the Xbox One X.  Once completed I'm looking forward to benching it with some higher end GPUs.

[AshleyAshes]

So the board is now stable.  It happily ran 3D Mark demo's all night without killing itself. We're proceeding with this build.

Also, this mobo is SO weird.  It's CONVINCED it has an LVDS display at all times, I disabled the device instead.  Maybe I can find out where in the BIOS I can permanently disable the LVDS output.  It also has GPIO pins.  It has the most confusing power/reset/LED pinset I've ever seen.  After reading the manual it turns out it's because it supports both ATX and AT power systems.  Yeah, AT.  Right?  You can set jumpers so it knows what kind of power supply it has.

 

I guess that's what you get with a mobo built for 'industrial' applications.

 

Next up, I need to update the BIOS and check CPU compatibility.  It seems it may not be QUITE as compatible with every possible PCIE card as other devices.

[Nowak]

19 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

It's CONVINCED it has an LVDS display at all times, I disabled the device instead.

A desktop board that thinks it has a LVDS display? How odd.

[AshleyAshes]

37 minutes ago, Daring said:

A desktop board that thinks it has a LVDS display? How odd.

The board -has- an LVDS connector.   I'm guessing that LVDS doesn't actually have a way to detect if there's an LCD panel or not.  I knew it had a connector but I didn't expect it to assume it had a screen hooked up.  Though this means if I was REALLY crazy, I could recycle my laptop's screen and build an All-In-One.   I'm not going to do that.  Since the board is 'industrial' and could be used in ATMs and Kiosks, I figure the LVDS connector is an asset for that.  That'd also explain the GPIO and multitude of serial ports, since those kinds of inputs would be useful for such.

[AshleyAshes]

The case has been ordered.  I'm doing with the Silverstone Raven RVZ01B-E since it's a console like ITX case that allows for full size GPUs but the E variant also allows for a full ATX PSU.  I have a spare Corsair CX600 and one of the goals of this build is to recycle as many components as possible.  Today I probably wouldn't buy a CX600, even if going low budget I'd aim for at least something modular, but I see no reason to not use the CX600 I have on hand.  Not to mention that the CX600 will power ANYTHING I can put into this case.  Due to the size of the case, I'm not even sure it'd be physically possible to install components with such a high draw that the CX600 wouldn't cut it.

 

Weird note, I could not find a retailer in Canada selling the E variant, only the standard SFX one, so I had to resort to eBay for the cheapest option.

 

I also have no idea if all the extra cables on the CX600 will fit with all it's wires!  So this thread may see me disassembling a CX600 and soldering some of the peripheral cables, namely the second SATA power and Molex power set.  We'll see what fits.

 

There's also some other challenges to consider.  This board lacks USB3 but expansion is limited.  With only one PCIE slot that has to go to the graphics card.  ...But there's a MiniPCIE slot on the back.   So once the case is here, I'll check measurements, and we may see a combination of a MiniPCIE USB3 controller and a riser cable to ensure the board's IO is current.

[AshleyAshes]

I bricked it!   BIOS flashing program crashed while programming the BIOS for an update.  It wouldn't POST with a GPU in the PCIE slot.  The good news is, this board has an SPI header to allow the BIOS to be programmed externally.  So gonna have to hook something up and flash the board while in it's current state.

Also, in reading, it apparently has a bus mastering issue where it can't shift around resources for new devices.  Any new device in the PCIE slot means you gotta reset the CMOS so it'll dump the stored resource info.  Cute, huh?  Also I should have found that forum thread BEFORE I bricked it. >_>

[AshleyAshes]

BusPirate patched into the SPI bus to hopefully rewrite the BIOS.

 

[AshleyAshes]

SPI was a bust.  Pulled the chip, soldered wires to it's tiny legs and reprogrammed it.

 

[Zando_]

7 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

SPI was a bust.  Pulled the chip, soldered wires to it's tiny legs and reprogrammed it.

Is it working now?

[AshleyAshes]

37 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Is it working now?

Yup, it POSTed and I got it to boot with at least a Radeon HD 4850 so I can get it to run SOME discrete GPUs.

[Tom is a Door]

20 minutes ago, AshleyAshes said:

Yup, it POSTed and I got it to boot with at least a Radeon HD 4850 so I can get it to run SOME discrete GPUs.

I am most curious about psu, I am not electric engineer but something tells me u gotta do some wizardry to come up with a puny one. You probably have your own ideas but I would look at those tiny zotac pc's. They do excellent job of pushing the psu outside. Also won't you need a beefier battery? Anything in mind?

[AshleyAshes]

3 minutes ago, Tom is a Door said:

I am most curious about psu, I am not electric engineer but something tells me u gotta do some wizardry to come up with a puny one. You probably have your own ideas but I would look at those tiny zotac pc's. They do excellent job of pushing the psu outside. Also won't you need a beefier battery? Anything in mind?

I really can't help you there.  As stated above, I opted for the Raven RVZ01B-E because it supports a full ATX PSU.

[Tom is a Door]

1 minute ago, AshleyAshes said:

I really can't help you there.  As stated above, I opted for the Raven RVZ01B-E because it supports a full ATX PSU.

mb didn't mean to repeat yourself, missed it while reading. 

[AshleyAshes]

Testing continues!  I'm trying some GPUs in it and for sure this system has some issues with some GPUs and it will refuse to POST with them installed.  Even the manual included a list of some GPUs from 2011 that were marked 'Pass' or 'Fail' and it stresses low compatibility.  My XFX Radeon R9 390X Double Dissipation Core Edition is a fail, it won't POST with this thing in.  The card works, the power is fine, the PCIE slot is fine (Even if it's just Gen2) and that is a bit disappointing because I had hoped to bench with it since that GPU's Tflops rate is approximately that of an Xbox One X and that'd have made an interesting comparison.  This is really no surprise, this board was built for industrial applications and to live in a narrow niche, even it's compatibility list for CPUs is only four models and my i7 2530qm isn't even on that list.

 

However my Diamond Radeon HD 4850 1GB works and so does my XFX Radeon HD 7950 Double Dissipation Black Edition 3GB.  I have some kind of Radeon HD 6950 that's not been tested.  Don't mind me being specific in models, but if someone ever Googles up this motherboard for GPU compatibility, any info they find here will be useful.  In turn on another forum I found someone using an HD 7850 and GTX 960, but they gave no specific model information.  So in short, I will not buy a new graphics card for this, because there is a risk that any GPU could be incompatible, this case will purely get hand-me-downs or cards I can test that were borrowed from friends.  I'll likely tape some paper on the inside of the case and keep an active list if compatible and incompatible GPUs that get tested before hand.  That said, even with an HD 7950 in it, it outclasses the standard Xbox One and PS4.

 

And before anyone gets upset, no, I'd never suggest this kind of build if you had to buy all of the parts upfront.  The recycling factor is the only thing that keeps the costs down and justifies the quirks.  If you were buying all parts up front, there's zero reason not to buy a contemporary ITX system instead of this 'Industrial' oriented oddball.  A new contemporary consumer mobo would also have BIOS updates to ensure all GPUs worked.

[AshleyAshes]

Let's do some light benchmarking!

 

i7 2630qm

2x8GB 1333mhz DDR3

OCZ Agility 3 360GB

XFX Radeon HD 7950 Double Dissipation Black Edition 3GB

 

3D Mark Sky Diver

Total Score: 14503

Graphics Score: 23952

Physics Score 5180

Combined Score: 11 523

 

Cinebench R15: 405

Funny thing here is that it scores better in Cinebench as a desktop than it did as a laptop.  Imagine the CPU was more thermally constrained but now it has a big chunk of aluminum on it.

 

Tomb Raider, All Settings Default, 1920x1080, Vsync disabled:

Min FPS: 130

Max FPS 190

Average FPS 161.7

(I guess there's some room to crank that up a bit. >_>)

 

Grand Theft Auto V:

"Your Computer Does Not Meet The Minimum Recommend CPU Frequency Specification.  The Game May Have Trouble If You Proceed."

Thankfully it let me ignore this and when it's minimum CPU examples are the 2.4ghz Q6600 and 2.5ghz Phenom 9850, I imagine the i7 2630qm beats them in IPC even if it's 'only' 2.0ghz.  Not to mention it has a fairly aggressive Turbo.

 

Frames Per Second (Higher is better) Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 24.620314, 68.817245, 57.358273
Pass 1, 39.082607, 79.956421, 64.513756
Pass 2, 45.587841, 140.426453, 63.992432
Pass 3, 51.215485, 102.627869, 74.047852
Pass 4, 22.968554, 110.432838, 67.674194

Time in milliseconds(ms). (Lower is better). Min, Max, Avg
Pass 0, 14.531241, 40.616867, 17.434277
Pass 1, 12.506813, 25.586830, 15.500570
Pass 2, 7.121165, 21.935673, 15.626848
Pass 3, 9.743942, 19.525345, 13.504781
Pass 4, 9.055278, 43.537788, 14.776681

DX Feature Level: 11.0
Intel(R)
Display: 1920x1080 (FullScreen) @ 59Hz
VSync OFF

Tessellation: 2

LodScale: 1.000000

PedLodBias: 0.200000

VehicleLodBias: 0.000000

ShadowQuality: 2

ReflectionQuality: 2

Reflection
MSAA: 0

SSAO: 2

AnisotropicFiltering: 16

MSAA: 0

MSAAFragments: 0

MSAAQuality: 0

SamplingMode: 0

TextureQuality: 2

ParticleQuality: 1

WaterQuality: 1

GrassQuality: 0

ShaderQuality: 1

Shadow_SoftShadows: 1

UltraShadows_Enabled: false

Shadow_ParticleShadows: true

Shadow_Distance: 1.000000

Shadow_LongShadows: false

Shadow_SplitZStart: 0.930000

Shadow_SplitZEnd: 0.890000

Shadow_aircraftExpWeight: 0.990000

Shadow_DisableScreenSizeCheck: false

Reflection_MipBlur: true

FXAA_Enabled: true

TXAA_Enabled: false

Lighting_FogVolumes: true

Shader_SSA: true

DX_Version: 2

CityDensity: 1.000000

PedVarietyMultiplier: 1.000000

VehicleVarietyMultiplier: 1.000000

PostFX: 2

DoF: true

HdStreamingInFlight: false

MaxLodScale: 0.000000

MotionBlurStrength: 0.000000

[AshleyAshes]

I may have a fix for the PCIE cards.  On a whim I decided to email Advantech to see if there are any BIOS updates for this 6 year old board.  V1.11 from 2011 was the newest one on their site.  They responded on the first buisness day and they have a v1.16 dated for May 2016.  this board has been getting regular BIOS updates, just not released on their site, for some time.  Wow.  I figured this was a long shot but it may pay off.

 

They also supplied me with a log of improvements for each version they've made and it seems v1.14 noted "Enhance PCI Express device compatibility".  So maybe we can do the R9 390X afterall.

[AshleyAshes]

It worked!  Firstly, the DOS flasher Advantech provided worked without flaw, and the BIOS update allows my Radeon R9 390X to boot in it.  So now we have a pretty mean little box in this configuration and it means I can expand my options for this little motherboard.  The case is still in shipping but I'd argue that this project is coming together a nicely despite some challenges.

Some updated benchmark scores with the 390X swapped in too:

 

3D Mark Skydiver

Overall: 19 251

Graphics: 37 154

Physics: 6 097

Combined: 13 973

 

It's hard to bench GTA5, since it changes it's 'default' settings for each GPU, so I'd have to go through and replicate each option from my previous post, this is a bit of a pain for just the evening after work.  But the long and short of it is, this thing is rocking now.

[AshleyAshes]

Work resumes.  Reflowing the power connector on the mobo and PSU surgery to remove unneeded cables from the nonmodular CX600v2.  When will a SFF build need more than two SATA power connectors or any Molex at all?

 

 

[GrayTech]

Interesting mainboard! How much did it cost?

 

 

And please keep in mind that opening up PSUs can be dangerous if you want to do something similar.

[AshleyAshes]

4 hours ago, GrayTech said:

Interesting mainboard! How much did it cost?

I paid $87.40 USD, including shipping to Canada, and then it sat on a shelf for nearly a year till I properly retired my laptop.  You can find it and similar boards on eBay with their prices fluctuating.  Some are high and make a NEW ITX build with normal components more attractive than this build.  If someone wanted to do something similar I'd say the price of the board would be critical.  You'd also have to have an appropriate laptop full of useful guts being retired too.

[AshleyAshes]

Near final assembly.  The long blue SATA cable is temporary, two six inch cables are on order, I just don't have short SATA cables on hand.  Smilarly, you see the USB3 header cable coiled in there, it needs an adapter to arrive to fit on a USB2 header.  Finally, I do want a more suitable heat sink since this one will thermally throttle in some cases, so I'm going to get something a bit bigger, with a copper core, and then modify that with a 60mm Noctua fan instead of the fan it ships with.

Finally, the GPU is a placeholder.  While you can't see it, it has a Radeon HD 4850 in it basically it was the only unused PCIE graphics card I had on hand and I needed to make sure the PCIE riser assembly functioned.  Right now, this thing is no better than an Xbox 360.

Now, this is where we get to the fun part.  What I've nearly built here is a freaking game console, it just needs some more suitable graphics.  It boots into Windows 10 and goes directly into Steam Big Picture Mode.  It has a 360GB SSD and 750GB HDD, enough for a wide arrangement of Steam games.  Just add some game controllers and we're in business.

 

I'm undecided on the graphics.  On paper a Radeon HD 7870 would be needed to edge it above the standard PS4 or something more like a 290X/390X/480/580 to have it compare to Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro.  However a Radeon HD 7950 or 7970 are more likely to end up inside here.  And the thing is, it can house and power any GPU like that.  It can house and power a Titan if it wanted to.  I will certainly be testing it with the Vega I intend to buy in the fall.  But with the right GPU, even the R9 390X, this machine should have no major issue doing 4K gaming at more conservative 'normal' settings.  I've already demonstrated such with my 3770k system when it's paired with my 390X.  Right now the biggest short coming here is that it rather lacks HEVC decoding and unlike my 3770K powered HTPC, this 2630QM lacks the power to brute force 4K HEVC with software decoding alone.

 

 

[AshleyAshes]

So I'm thinking of adding Wifi to this build.  While the mobo lacks wifi and there's no free expansion slots to add PCIE card, there is the mPCIE slot on the back of the board and the laptop I recycled had an Intel AC7620 adapter which is currently in a drawer anyway.

 

http://www.ebay.ca/itm/1-Pair-Universal-Laptop-Wifi-Mini-PCI-E-Wireless-Internal-Antenna-Black-White-/352094946177?hash=item51fa7e8381:g:J6UAAOSw0j9ZSzhw

 

So something like this shouldn't be too hard to install, connect, and then feed through the case so that the antenna themselves are outside the metal case but underneath the plastic facade.  And what kinda gloried Steam Box doesn't have wifi?