Slabtop - Portable Desktop Replacement Enclosure

[rossbin]

 

 

Good day!

 

The video above is a promo for Slabtop. Slabtop is a project which aims to take standard desktop class hardware and fit it into a portable battery operated enclosure with all of the regular input devices of a laptop.

This early concept was built based on the feedback from a questionnaire posted on /r/pcmasterrace in January asking what people would want if they could have an effective "desktop laptop".

From the questionnaire, it was wittled down to these primary factors:

1. Had to support full desktop GPUs
2. Price and upgrade friendliness were paramount
3. 15" was the ideal middle ground for an initial design

And as a result, the prototype demonstrated in the video above was conceived. Essentially we just want to hear your feedback, what you think of the idea, the form factor and any improvements you think could be made.

This concept was shaped by the community so we want to know what the community thinks of the initial result!

 

[SlipperyPete]

14 minutes ago, rossbin said:

 

 

Good day!

 

The video above is a promo for Slabtop. Slabtop is a project which aims to take standard desktop class hardware and fit it into a portable battery operated enclosure with all of the regular input devices of a laptop.

This early concept was built based on the feedback from a questionnaire posted on /r/pcmasterrace in January asking what people would want if they could have an effective "desktop laptop".

From the questionnaire, it was wittled down to these primary factors:

1. Had to support full desktop GPUs
2. Price and upgrade friendliness were paramount
3. 15" was the ideal middle ground for an initial design

And as a result, the prototype demonstrated in the video above was conceived. Essentially we just want to hear your feedback, what you think of the idea, the form factor and any improvements you think could be made.

This concept was shaped by the community so we want to know what the community thinks of the initial result!

 

thats awesome. i love this. any more info you can give us?

 

[Fungal]

Okay this is awesome lol but the hdmi coming from the gpu is just the only thing i think should be improved

[rossbin]

Just now, SlipperyPete said:

thats awesome. i love this. any more info you can give us?

 

Current design supports ITX motherboards and GPUs, using a Haswell i5 here with an R9 380. Screen is a 1080p IPS panel, using a pretty janky DP cable solution at the moment; down the line we'd get some custom cables made for this purpose but what we have now works. Rudimentary power system is up and running, will work seamlessly on AC and batteries but there's a lot more work to be done in the electronics department; depending on the response to the reveal, we'll continue moving forward with the design  

[Legolessed]

19 minutes ago, rossbin said:

 

 

Good day!

 

The video above is a promo for Slabtop. Slabtop is a project which aims to take standard desktop class hardware and fit it into a portable battery operated enclosure with all of the regular input devices of a laptop.

This early concept was built based on the feedback from a questionnaire posted on /r/pcmasterrace in January asking what people would want if they could have an effective "desktop laptop".

From the questionnaire, it was wittled down to these primary factors:

1. Had to support full desktop GPUs
2. Price and upgrade friendliness were paramount
3. 15" was the ideal middle ground for an initial design

And as a result, the prototype demonstrated in the video above was conceived. Essentially we just want to hear your feedback, what you think of the idea, the form factor and any improvements you think could be made.

This concept was shaped by the community so we want to know what the community thinks of the initial result!

 

This seems like a great idea but my only concern is that it seems more like a portable desktop than an a laptop desktop combo. The reason I am saying this is battery. If you managed to fit a battery in there that can keep an i5 6600k and a gtx 1060 on for an hour than that's awesome but if it can't then isn't it pretty much the same as any other mini it case?

[MoonlightSylv]

4 minutes ago, rossbin said:

Current design supports ITX motherboards and GPUs, using a Haswell i5 here with an R9 380. Screen is a 1080p IPS panel, using a pretty janky DP cable solution at the moment; down the line we'd get some custom cables made for this purpose but what we have now works. Rudimentary power system is up and running, will work seamlessly on AC and batteries but there's a lot more work to be done in the electronics department; depending on the response to the reveal, we'll continue moving forward with the design  

What do you think the max wattage for components will be?

[SlipperyPete]

Just now, Legolessed said:

This seems like a great idea but my only concern is that it seems more like a portable desktop than an a laptop desktop combo. The reason I am saying this is battery. If you managed to fit a battery in there that can keep an i5 6600k and a gtx 1060 on for an hour than that's awesome but if it can't then isn't it pretty much the same as any other mini it case?

think about it for lan partys tho. no need to carry a monitor around

[Guest]

How heavy is the case itself?

[rossbin]

The current plan is to have a base battery module which the system has with more that can be added in parallel to bolster capacity. This will probably be in the 60-70wh range, with each extra pack doubling capacity. In the current size it should be fairly feasible to have a 120-140wh battery in there using 18650 cells. Under the average gaming load the hour figure is feasible but with a desktop grade BIOS and what not, fiddling of clocks and whatnot is at your fingertips, so a balance of power/performance can be attained.

1 minute ago, ShadowTechXTS said:

What do you think the max wattage for components will be?

The current circuitry is designed for 330W but we're not happy with its thermal performance at the minute so we're going to upgrade everything for 500W and derate it to 360W. So we're talking in the 95W CPU w/ 180W GPU range, so basically any modern Nvidia card bar the Titan XP class. Obviously what can fit depends on the size of the case, at 17", full length blower cards should fit just fine, 15" is better with ITX designs.

[rossbin]

2 minutes ago, dexxterlab97 said:

How heavy is the case itself?

I've only briefly weighed it but it was around 3-4KG, not something you'd want to carry in a hand, but perfect for dropping in a bag and moving with two hands from desk to desk and whatnot. This may change drastically depending on what components are inside it though. Heatsinks are a lot of the weight, with batteries coming in second.

 

You could configure this thing to be pretty light if you wanted, take out the GPU, run a low TDP CPU and have a single battery module and it'd be a relatively light machine with a thick profile, though that's not necessarily its intended use case, it's entirely up to what someone would want to do with it and that's the beauty of it.

[007agentHP]

2 minutes ago, rossbin said:

The current plan is to have a base battery module which the system has with more that can be added in parallel to bolster capacity. This will probably be in the 60-70wh range, with each extra pack doubling capacity. In the current size it should be fairly feasible to have a 120-140wh battery in there using 18650 cells. Under the average gaming load the hour figure is feasible but with a desktop grade BIOS and what not, fiddling of clocks and whatnot is at your fingertips, so a balance of power/performance can be attained.

The current circuitry is designed for 330W but we're not happy with its thermal performance at the minute so we're going to upgrade everything for 500W and derate it to 360W. So we're talking in the 95W CPU w/ 180W GPU range, so basically any modern Nvidia card bar the Titan XP class. Obviously what can fit depends on the size of the case, at 17", full length blower cards should fit just fine, 15" is better with ITX designs.

honestly, if i was building in this thing, i would definitely go with a T Class CPU from intel

 

From 65W to 35W on Skylake

From 88W to 35W on Haswell

 

and for the GPU side go with the more power efficient cards

 

GTX 950 and Rx 460 Comes to Mind, at under 75W could make this playable for a longer period of time 

 

[rossbin]

Just now, 007agentHP said:

honestly, if i was building in this thing, i would definitely go with a T Class CPU from intel

 

From 65W to 35W on Skylake

From 88W to 35W on Haswell

 

and for the GPU side go with the more power efficient cards

 

GTX 950 and Rx 460 Comes to Mind, at under 75W could make this playable for a longer period of time 

 

The T class Haswell CPUs are fantastic and it would be our recommendation, we just haven't had the funds to invest in all new hardware to throw in the prototype yet, every penny has been spent on the design of the chassis and the electronics.

Even with a beefier GPU, they wouldn't be much of a bottleneck. 

The entire idea of this is to give you the flexibility to say "do I want more battery life, or do I want more performance?". If when you build it you want performance but then change your mind, you have the option down the road to say "actually now I want battery life" and swap just a single component out to get nearer to that goal. It would be cheap and easy to do.

[SlipperyPete]

2 minutes ago, rossbin said:

The T class Haswell CPUs are fantastic and it would be our recommendation, we just haven't had the funds to invest in all new hardware to throw in the prototype yet, every penny has been spent on the design of the chassis and the electronics.

Even with a beefier GPU, they wouldn't be much of a bottleneck. 

The entire idea of this is to give you the flexibility to say "do I want more battery life, or do I want more performance?". If when you build it you want performance but then change your mind, you have the option down the road to say "actually now I want battery life" and swap just a single component out to get nearer to that goal. It would be cheap and easy to do.

when and if when how much will  this be available for?

 

[rossbin]

Just now, SlipperyPete said:

when and if when how much will  this be available for?

 

When's a difficult question, this is quite an early design though it's been in the works for a while. If we get a large enough and positive enough response to the video and the idea in general then it'll be gun ho to making it a reality, a much faster rate of development than it has been.

 

The price to build a system with the enclosure would ideally be in between a desktop and laptop. It'd include the case itself, internal power electronics, batteries, keyboard, touchpad, screen, speakers, all other various interconnects, with the user supplying the CPU, GPU, Mobo, RAM and storage. External PSU is a tricky one at the moment, we're trying to decide whether to go with traditional laptop bricks, or something else a little more interesting.

[SlipperyPete]

Just now, rossbin said:

When's a difficult question, this is quite an early design though it's been in the works for a while. If we get a large enough and positive enough response to the video and the idea in general then it'll be gun ho to making it a reality, a much faster rate of development than it has been.

 

The price to build a system with the enclosure would ideally be in between a desktop and laptop. It'd include the case itself, internal power electronics, batteries, keyboard, touchpad, screen, speakers, all other various interconnects, with the user supplying the CPU, GPU, Mobo, RAM and storage. External PSU is a tricky one at the moment, we're trying to decide whether to go with traditional laptop bricks, or something else a little more interesting.

do you have any idea of what the enclosure alone would cost?

 

[rossbin]

Just now, SlipperyPete said:

do you have any idea of what the enclosure alone would cost?

 

We don't really want to give any solid numbers at the moment, it's too early to say. The aim is for it to be considerably lower than buying a laptop, with the advantage of being able to upgrade it later, with the only detriment being the thickness. Think of it as a desktop with a sensible price premium. I mean if you look at the idea it would include the screen, keyboard, touchpad and speakers, as well as power supply it could be considered very close to the price of a normal desktop with monitor, keyboard and mouse, but they aren't directly comparable.

[SlipperyPete]

Just now, rossbin said:

We don't really want to give any solid numbers at the moment, it's too early to say. The aim is for it to be considerably lower than buying a laptop, with the advantage of being able to upgrade it later, with the only detriment being the thickness. Think of it as a desktop with a sensible price premium. I mean if you look at the idea it would include the screen, keyboard, touchpad and speakers, as well as power supply it could be considered very close to the price of a normal desktop with monitor, keyboard and mouse, but they aren't directly comparable.

i understand and am prepared to pay. i am very intrested which is the reason i was asking. is there going to be a kickstarter or webpage?

 

[rossbin]

4 minutes ago, SlipperyPete said:

i understand and am prepared to pay. i am very intrested which is the reason i was asking. is there going to be a kickstarter or webpage?

 

http://binari.tech is our website, though it's very rudimentary at the moment and very much what you know already, but we'll make regular news posts there to update you on things.

In terms of crowdfunding, if we go that route we'd want to do it right, because everyone and their grandmother has been burned by crowdfunding in recent years which is a real shame. There might be an interim thing we do to fund further development but no big campaign with big money involved until we're sure that we can deliver on our goals.

 

As a side note, please feel free to share the project with anyone you think might be interested and post it anywhere it may get some attention because the more feedback we get the better!

[DocSwag]

Wow interesting... Have you by any chance considered using a mini-stx board or something? This is extremely thick, though I understand you aren't aiming at a thin laptop. P.S. Do you have any idea how heavy it is when fully loaded with parts (how heavy it is when you have everything such as CPU, mobo, GPU, etc. in there)?

 

I was just looking at thin mini-itx and it seems like a great solution to potentially make the slabtop a bit thinner except thin mini-itx doesn't give you a pcie x16 slot so...

 

This is quite interesting so you can be sure I'll be keeping track!

[rossbin]

6 hours ago, DocSwag said:

Wow interesting... Have you by any chance considered using a mini-stx board or something? This is extremely thick, though I understand you aren't aiming at a thin laptop. P.S. Do you have any idea how heavy it is when fully loaded with parts (how heavy it is when you have everything such as CPU, mobo, GPU, etc. in there)?

 

I was just looking at thin mini-itx and it seems like a great solution to potentially make the slabtop a bit thinner except thin mini-itx doesn't give you a pcie x16 slot so...

 

This is quite interesting so you can be sure I'll be keeping track!

Mini STX is very interesting, though it does lack a regular PCi-E interface. M.2 could be utilised for an x4 connection much like on the Thin ITX boards but these boards aren't widely available nor cheap at the moment so we decided to stick with Mini ITX which is widely available and covers a broad price range.

 

We actually experimented with Thin ITX before, but the main bottleneck in designing this enclosure is the thickness of GPUs, not motherboards (CPU cooler is also an issue). If a single thermal interface for all GPUs and motherboards could be designed, we'd definitely consider it, heatpipe everything and have some huge fin arrays pumping out the heat like in a traditional DTR. Problem is things vary from GPU design to GPU design and motherboard to motherboard so it would be very hard to do and very costly; we want to keep the price down as much as possible and by compromising on thickness it makes the system much easier to work in and brings the potential cost down. As for PCI-E x4, we've never seen that as a big issue, based on many benchmarks, at 3.0 speed x4 isn't a huge bottleneck, but obviously x8 or x16 is better.

 

Weight as I said before is around 3-4kg with its current configuration and that's fully loaded at the moment. Weight will change based on what components are used and what material the final case is composed of.

[DocSwag]

4 hours ago, rossbin said:

Weight as I said before is around 3-4kg with its current configuration and that's fully loaded at the moment. Weight will change based on what components are used and what material the final case is composed of.

Including all the components? Wow that's pretty light considering all the punch it comes with. From your previous comment my impression was 3-4kg was the weight of the case itself without components. In that case (pun not intended) the slabtop won't be super heavy then (compared to high end gaming laptops) but rather just thick.

[rossbin]

Just now, DocSwag said:

Including all the components? Wow that's pretty light considering all the punch it comes with. From your previous comment my impression was 3-4kg was the weight of the case itself without components. In that case (pun not intended) the slabtop won't be super heavy then (compared to high end gaming laptops) but rather just thick.

No, lord, 3-4kg for the case, it'd have to be made out of steel! We want to experiment with aluminium next, so it'll be interesting to see how that would affect the weight of the chassis versus the acrylic which is only being used since it's quick and cheap to prototype with. The idea is to keep the weight moderate with it being in a thicker profile, yes. I mean, I can hold it in one hand if I'd want to, much like any standard 15-17" performance notebook, I wouldn't want to for any period of time but I can do it, which means that in a bag it's a nice comfortable weight.

[DerekAnaya]

I just want one I can build in WITHOUT the batteries.

[SlipperyPete]

wow I forgot all about this project. Is it still being worked on @rossbin?