Building 12-19V battery for use with Pico PSU

[SilicateWielder]

Hello guys, 

 

I am currently in the process of converting my desktop PC into a laptop, why you ask? Why not?

 

During the early initial planning I decided that I want an on board battery for portability sake. I know enough about electronics to build it but not enough to confidently design my own power system for this project. Any help is appreciated.

 

Assuming that a Pico PSU does not need voltage overhead, can I just run everything I need off of a single 12 volt regulator? And if it does, everything else I use runs at 12 volts, would it be possible to run the Pico PSU off of say a 19 volt regulator, and then everything else off of a 12 volt regulator?

 

Also, is there a way to allow windows to monitor the battery like it would in a laptop? If so, how can I go about this? 

 

 

[Hackentosher]

@iamdarkyoshi is slowly working on basically the same project. I believe he's using old MacBook lithium cells and some kind of something that converts it to ATX connections for power. He talks about it in much more detail in his log.

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, Hackentosher said:

@iamdarkyoshi is slowly working on basically the same project. I believe he's using old MacBook lithium cells and some kind of something that converts it to ATX connections for power. He talks about it in much more detail in his log.

Hi.

[SilicateWielder]

17 hours ago, Hackentosher said:

@iamdarkyoshi is slowly working on basically the same project. I believe he's using old MacBook lithium cells and some kind of something that converts it to ATX connections for power. He talks about it in much more detail in his log.

I considered that too, but all of the Li-ion cells I've managed to pull out of old laptop batteries do not hold a charge any more. I also do not know what wattage they can deliver. I'm currently looking into how to build a high amperage battery unit but relevant search results elude me.

 

18 hours ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Hi.

@Hackentosher mentioned you're using a Macbook's Li Ion cells in your own project? Would you happen know how to get the most amperage out of a cell arrangement?

[iamdarkyoshi]

51 minutes ago, UnbrokenMotion said:

I considered that too, but all of the Li-ion cells I've managed to pull out of old laptop batteries do not hold a charge any more. I also do not know what wattage they can deliver. I'm currently looking into how to build a high amperage battery unit but relevant search results elude me.

 

@Hackentosher mentioned you're using a Macbook's Li Ion cells in your own project? Would you happen know how to get the most amperage out of a cell arrangement?

Look at the cell's discharge C rating. Multiply the cell's Ah rating times this, and its how much current you should max out at. My cells aren't from a macbook actually, they are some 9Ah cells I found in my collection, rated at 2C. I could draw a max of 18A from them.

[SilicateWielder]

1 minute ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

Look at the cell's discharge C rating. Multiply the cell's Ah rating times this, and its how much current you should max out at. My cells aren't from a macbook actually, they are some 9Ah cells I found in my collection, rated at 2C. I could draw a max of 18A from them.

So I'm looking at a battery here with a "Continuous Discharging Current (Max)" of 10 amps , and a capacity of 3000mAh, so I can pull power at at a rate of 30amps, correct?

[Hackentosher]

Sometimes lithium also has a burst rating, don't go up to that for more than 10 seconds at a time. 

[iamdarkyoshi]

22 minutes ago, UnbrokenMotion said:

So I'm looking at a battery here with a "Continuous Discharging Current (Max)" of 10 amps , and a capacity of 3000mAh, so I can pull power at at a rate of 30amps, correct?

No, 10A as they gave you the current directly.

 

If they said 10C, then it would be 30A.

 

But if you went with a 12v config, 10A is still 120W

[SilicateWielder]

1 hour ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

No, 10A as they gave you the current directly.

 

If they said 10C, then it would be 30A.

 

But if you went with a 12v config, 10A is still 120W

Ohhhhh, okay. Thank you for this information. It was quite helpful.

[meenmeen1103]

http://www.illumn.com/18650-samsung-3000mah-inr18650-30q-high-discharge-flat-top.html

If using 18650 size batteries, I'd use these.

[mariushm]

First of all, investigate if you can find motherboards designed from the start to work directly from a single voltage, like 19v for example.

Asrock is just one of the companies that makes such motherboards, which have a DC In jack which accepts a regular laptop adapter rated for 18.5-19v and 65w and the motherboard has the DC-DC converters to generate 12v and 5v for classical SATA hard drives and for the video card (pci-e slot). 

Here's such motherboard examples:

 

1. Socket 1150 : Asrock H81TM-ITX R2.0 : http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/H81TM-ITX R2.0/index.us.asp

2. Socket 1151 : Asrock H110TM-ITX : http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/H110TM-ITX/index.us.asp

3. Socket AM1 : Asrock AM1H-ITX : http://asrock.com/mb/AMD/AM1H-ITX/index.us.asp

 

and others, can't be bothered to look them up right now.

 

If you decide to go with PicoPSU style power supplies, first of all you should understand that there are two types:

1. picoPSU that works with 12v only and does 12v pass through to computer components, and then has dc-dc converters to produce 5v, 3.3v and -12v to the motherboard and maybe a couple of molex/sata connectors

2. picoPSU that works with variable input voltage, which means the picoPSU has a dc-dc converter onboard to produce 12v for the system and dc-dc converters for the other voltages.

 

The first style is better suited if you plan to use separate video cards (to push 12v into the pci-e slot and maybe additional 6pin pci-e connector) because the 12v is pass-through, but the downside is that you'll have to regulate the voltage coming into the picoPSU to 12v +/- 5% because the 12v also goes directly in motherboard components.

 

The second style saves you the trouble of having additional dc-dc converter to stabilize the battery voltage to 12v, but the downside is that the dc-dc converters which produce 12v on such picoPSU models typically can only output about 10-12A, which is barely enough for a 65w TDP cpu and a pci-e slot and maybe a couple of hard drives. Anything more and the picoPSU would overheat or go into overcurrent protection mode. So you shouldn't use such a picoPSU with a video card that requires additional pcie connectors.

 

As for batteries, I would advice against going with independent 18650 batteries and go directly with a pre-made battery made out of several cells and which can be charged with a factory made charger that cab balance the cells when they're charged, prelonging their life.

Hobbyking has loads of lithium batteries and custom chargers.. there's probably loads of companies but this one is just easy to link to. 

Here's for example a good charger with cell balancing :

 1. up to 6 cells :  http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__58285__IMAX_B6AC_V2_Professional_Balance_Charger_Discharger.html

 2. up to 3 cells ( ~ 12v) : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__49338__Turnigy_E3_Compact_2S_3S_Lipo_Charger_100_240v_US_Plug_.html

 

Here's loads of batteries : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__86__85__Batteries_Accessories-Li_Poly_All_brands_.html

For a motherboard that has a 19v connector, i'd probably go with first charger and a 6s battery pack, which will have around 22-24v when full, so i'd use a dc-dc buck regulator to convert voltage from battery down to 18.5-19v that the motherboard will accept. Minimal losses, over 95% efficiency stepping down to 19v and easy to charge battery packs.

For the 12v route, you could go with a cheaper charger and a 3S battery pack that would have 11.1v .. 14v when full, and use a SEPIC/syncro  (step-up/step-down dc-dc converter) to always output 12v to the picoPSU, or go with a higher voltage 4s to 6s battery pack and use a cheaper buck only (step-down dc regulator to take it down to 12v) 

Something like this  or like this can take a wide input voltage and output a fixed voltage like 12v or 19v with fairly good efficiency.

 

Anyway, first thing anyone that plans this should do would be to really figure out the power consumption of the system because that would be a deciding factor on battery choice and determine if using a picoPSU would be feasible or not (or if you'd rather save the money you'd spend on a picoPSU and invest in a motherboard with DC In jack and 19v input). There's things like Kill-A-Watt power meters which can tell you how much a computer uses (but keep in mind that the numbers include the low efficiency of power supply). Also, you should decide on a video card and investigate how much you could optimize the peak power consumption by maybe reducing the chip voltage down slightly or tweaking the memory frequency and voltage down a notch - you could potentially make the video card 10-20% less power hungry yet lose only a few percents of performance this way.

[SilicateWielder]

On 9/30/2016 at 5:17 PM, mariushm said:

First of all, investigate if you can find motherboards designed from the start to work directly from a single voltage, like 19v for example.

Asrock is just one of the companies that makes such motherboards, which have a DC In jack which accepts a regular laptop adapter rated for 18.5-19v and 65w and the motherboard has the DC-DC converters to generate 12v and 5v for classical SATA hard drives and for the video card (pci-e slot). 

Here's such motherboard examples:

 

1. Socket 1150 : Asrock H81TM-ITX R2.0 : http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/H81TM-ITX R2.0/index.us.asp

2. Socket 1151 : Asrock H110TM-ITX : http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/H110TM-ITX/index.us.asp

3. Socket AM1 : Asrock AM1H-ITX : http://asrock.com/mb/AMD/AM1H-ITX/index.us.asp

 

and others, can't be bothered to look them up right now.

 

If you decide to go with PicoPSU style power supplies, first of all you should understand that there are two types:

1. picoPSU that works with 12v only and does 12v pass through to computer components, and then has dc-dc converters to produce 5v, 3.3v and -12v to the motherboard and maybe a couple of molex/sata connectors

2. picoPSU that works with variable input voltage, which means the picoPSU has a dc-dc converter onboard to produce 12v for the system and dc-dc converters for the other voltages.

 

The first style is better suited if you plan to use separate video cards (to push 12v into the pci-e slot and maybe additional 6pin pci-e connector) because the 12v is pass-through, but the downside is that you'll have to regulate the voltage coming into the picoPSU to 12v +/- 5% because the 12v also goes directly in motherboard components.

 

The second style saves you the trouble of having additional dc-dc converter to stabilize the battery voltage to 12v, but the downside is that the dc-dc converters which produce 12v on such picoPSU models typically can only output about 10-12A, which is barely enough for a 65w TDP cpu and a pci-e slot and maybe a couple of hard drives. Anything more and the picoPSU would overheat or go into overcurrent protection mode. So you shouldn't use such a picoPSU with a video card that requires additional pcie connectors.

 

As for batteries, I would advice against going with independent 18650 batteries and go directly with a pre-made battery made out of several cells and which can be charged with a factory made charger that cab balance the cells when they're charged, prelonging their life.

Hobbyking has loads of lithium batteries and custom chargers.. there's probably loads of companies but this one is just easy to link to. 

Here's for example a good charger with cell balancing :

 1. up to 6 cells :  http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__58285__IMAX_B6AC_V2_Professional_Balance_Charger_Discharger.html

 2. up to 3 cells ( ~ 12v) : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__49338__Turnigy_E3_Compact_2S_3S_Lipo_Charger_100_240v_US_Plug_.html

 

Here's loads of batteries : http://www.hobbyking.com/hobbyking/store/__86__85__Batteries_Accessories-Li_Poly_All_brands_.html

For a motherboard that has a 19v connector, i'd probably go with first charger and a 6s battery pack, which will have around 22-24v when full, so i'd use a dc-dc buck regulator to convert voltage from battery down to 18.5-19v that the motherboard will accept. Minimal losses, over 95% efficiency stepping down to 19v and easy to charge battery packs.

For the 12v route, you could go with a cheaper charger and a 3S battery pack that would have 11.1v .. 14v when full, and use a SEPIC/syncro  (step-up/step-down dc-dc converter) to always output 12v to the picoPSU, or go with a higher voltage 4s to 6s battery pack and use a cheaper buck only (step-down dc regulator to take it down to 12v) 

Something like this  or like this can take a wide input voltage and output a fixed voltage like 12v or 19v with fairly good efficiency.

 

Anyway, first thing anyone that plans this should do would be to really figure out the power consumption of the system because that would be a deciding factor on battery choice and determine if using a picoPSU would be feasible or not (or if you'd rather save the money you'd spend on a picoPSU and invest in a motherboard with DC In jack and 19v input). There's things like Kill-A-Watt power meters which can tell you how much a computer uses (but keep in mind that the numbers include the low efficiency of power supply). Also, you should decide on a video card and investigate how much you could optimize the peak power consumption by maybe reducing the chip voltage down slightly or tweaking the memory frequency and voltage down a notch - you could potentially make the video card 10-20% less power hungry yet lose only a few percents of performance this way.

Holy crap that's a buttload of useful info. Thanks! I completely forgot they make motherboards that can accept a straigh up single 12V power source.

 

I don't have much money so I'm going to be going with my current hardware, which currently consumes about 120 watts under load. Here are the specs, this :

• AMD Athlon 5350 @ 2.05 Ghz (Degrading prematurely, I plan on upgrading to the 5370)
• MSI AM1I mITX motherboard
• MSI R7 240 2GB OC Edition 900Mhz @ stock, currently @ 1000Mhz, stock memory speed.
• Klevv Fit DDR3 Memory 2x4GB, stock speeds @1600Mhz
• Western Digital 1TB Enterprise 3.5" HDD @7200RPM (2009 Model HDD, loud, purchased for $50~ as clearance, 
• Western Digital 500GB WD Blue 2.5" HDD @ 7200RPM (Salvaged from dead laptop)
• LG 10.1" LCD panel & display driver board (Rated for 6V, but functions well at 12V, modified to use Molex Connector)

PC part picker estimates my wattage at about 125 watts, but I'm getting a 160watt Pico PSU for peace of mind, if I have to I will save up and buy a second PicoPSU if one is not enough to power the hardware + LCD + speakers.

 

How can I identify between PICOPSU's that accept fixed 12V and variable voltage?

 

As for batteries, thank you for the links, will keep those bookmarked; however, I am still interested in a custom battery solution as it gives me greater flexibility over charge lifespan and the layout given my size constraints. There isn't much room to work with in this case be truly honest so if getting a battery in here means I'm gonna have to build my own battery pack, then so be it. I'm currently looking into finding a 5S battery balancing PCB.

[mariushm]

Wow... really...

 

1. There's very minimal benefits to upgrading from 5350 to 5370. According to cpubenchmark, 5350 scores 2567 points while 5370 scores 2791 .. if we take 5370 as 100% performance then 5350 would be 92% of the 5370 performance. It's basically just 150 Mhz difference. With a bit of luck you can just overclock the 5350 from bios by 50-100 mhz and get it closer to 95%+ of the 5370 performance. In real life, it would be barely if any noticeable.

Not sure what you mean by degrading prematurely. Spend the extra money you'd waste on the 5370 on a low profile heatsink which may even work passively since you won't use the integrated video card.

Just the cpu alone (without the integrated graphics) will probably use up to 15 watts. The motherboard itself (audio, network ic etc) will probably eat up about 10w ... i know for sure there are whole systems that idle at under 30 watts with cpu and integrated graphics and a hard drive installed.

 

2. Do yourself a huge favor and sell that motherboard on eBay or somewhere else for $30+ and buy an ASRock AM1H-ITX with 19v DC In jack and all the features that MSI board has. That MSI board is ridiculous, requiring a 4pin power cable for the cpu, for cpus with tdp lower than 25w.

 

Yeah, you're going to lose 10-15$ here but you're saving yourself the cost of a whole picoPSU by just letting the motherboard generate all the voltages it needs from the 19v input. It's also easier to just use a dc-dc converter to boost or step-down whatever voltage you have at the battery to 18.5-19v and let the motherboard produce the other voltages with an efficiency higher than the dc converters on a picopsu (because they don't have to squeeze the converters in that picopsu size favoring small components over efficiency)  - if you don't use a small board with the circuit in the picture below you can just solder a couple of wires under the DC jack of the motherboard and push 19v there from the battery when you remove the DC jack (a simple diode can protect the dc-dc converter of the battery from being fed 19v from the laptop adapter you could normally use to power the system from the wall,see the picture)

 

Another downside of those picoPSUs is that they'll be somewhat tall and they'll be installed vertically - you may find out they're taller than the backplate with connectors so you'll just have big height on your "laptop". Without it, you could just use some low profile ddr3 and a pci-e riser cable and basically the highest point on the board would be the connectors in the back.

At over 100w those picoPSU would be HOT HOT HOT, especially if you buy the ones with variable voltage input, because you add the heat generated by the anything to 12v converter on the picoPSU. At over 100w they will need cooling, a fan moving some air around that area. They're expensive and not worth it.

 

3. That R7 240 is basically a Radeon 7750 or something like that, rebranded. It's really old and not particularly power efficient. It probably uses up to 50w in games.Normally, I would suggest selling such a board on eBay for around $50 and buying a RX 460 which would have much better performance for just a bit more power consumption (goes up to 70w but you have much better control over voltages so with a couple of hours of fine tuning and voltage configuration for the gpu chip and memory chips, you could probably get it down to 50-55w in games for very little performance drop.

However in this particular case, i'm not sure it's worth it. The card would cost over $100 and wouldn't bring much extra to the table. It is also so powerful it would be limited by the 5350 cpu in the first place, then it would be limited by the pci-e slot (which is x4 electrically - even though the rx 460 chip is maximum pci-e x8, it will lose some performance when running electrically at x4)

When running from DC In jack, I'm not sure the 12v regulator on the motherboard is powerful enough to give 50-60 watts to the video card. However, you can use a separate DC-DC converter to power the video card completely outside the motherboard. For example, you can buy a pci-e riser cable, like this one or this one for example and then cut the 12v wires coming from the pci-eslot on the motherboard to completely remove the 12v coming from the motherboard.

It's simple, the 12v contacts in the slot are right at the start of the slot, three contacts on one side and two contacts on the other side. So you can just cut the first three wires in the ribbon cable on one side and  the 2nd and 3rd wire from the other side (if you have a digital multimeter you can just use the continuity feature of your meter to see which of the six wires are connected to the yellow 12v wire in the molex connector.

So another problem very nicely solved, and these riser cables allow you to have the video card flat and get your system more laptop like.

 

4. are you sure you need two memory sticks ? The AM1 is single channel, it won't give you performance boost to go with 2 sticks, and one stick uses 2-3 watts of power. If you don't use the integrated video card, you don't even need to run them at 1600 Mhz since you probably won't notice any difference.

 

5 and 6. those drives use about 12v at 0.7-0.9a so about  5-6w for the motor, and maybe 5v at ~0.3-0.5a or around 2w for the electronics on them. The 2.5" one I guess uses only 5v, so maybe about 3-4w. So overall your two drives probably use around 10-15w constantly.

So overall, I'm not sure you're going over 100-120 watts with the setup you have.  With a bit of luck and some careful planning, everything should run just fine from a standard 120w laptop adapter that's around $30, plenty of them on Amazon.

 

Here's a circuit i drew real quick that would let you use either the dc in jack or your battery circuit (excuse the quality, it's made in a few minutes in ms paint) :

 

 

 

 

much later edit: here's an example of one of those chips which can do automatic switch between dc-in and battery: LTC4412 : http://www.linear.com/product/LTC4412

 

You can make a tiny pcb with this chip (about 3.2$ if you buy just one and a p-channel mosfet which would cost about 1$ and the chip basically will automatically disconnect the battery when power on dc in jack is detected and connects the battery again as soon as there's no more power on the dc in jack. Super simple and the chip's datasheet has all the info needed to make it (though soldering the tiny chip on a board can be a bit hard, but even then there's workarounds like ready made boards which convert the surface mount shape to dip package to make it easy to use

[SilicateWielder]

16 hours ago, mariushm said:

Wow... really...

 

1. There's very minimal benefits to upgrading from 5350 to 5370. According to cpubenchmark, 5350 scores 2567 points while 5370 scores 2791 .. if we take 5370 as 100% performance then 5350 would be 92% of the 5370 performance. It's basically just 150 Mhz difference. With a bit of luck you can just overclock the 5350 from bios by 50-100 mhz and get it closer to 95%+ of the 5370 performance. In real life, it would be barely if any noticeable.

Not sure what you mean by degrading prematurely. Spend the extra money you'd waste on the 5370 on a low profile heatsink which may even work passively since you won't use the integrated video card.

Just the cpu alone (without the integrated graphics) will probably use up to 15 watts. The motherboard itself (audio, network ic etc) will probably eat up about 10w ... i know for sure there are whole systems that idle at under 30 watts with cpu and integrated graphics and a hard drive installed.

 

2. Do yourself a huge favor and sell that motherboard on eBay or somewhere else for $30+ and buy an ASRock AM1H-ITX with 19v DC In jack and all the features that MSI board has. That MSI board is ridiculous, requiring a 4pin power cable for the cpu, for cpus with tdp lower than 25w.

 

Yeah, you're going to lose 10-15$ here but you're saving yourself the cost of a whole picoPSU by just letting the motherboard generate all the voltages it needs from the 19v input. It's also easier to just use a dc-dc converter to boost or step-down whatever voltage you have at the battery to 18.5-19v and let the motherboard produce the other voltages with an efficiency higher than the dc converters on a picopsu (because they don't have to squeeze the converters in that picopsu size favoring small components over efficiency)  - if you don't use a small board with the circuit in the picture below you can just solder a couple of wires under the DC jack of the motherboard and push 19v there from the battery when you remove the DC jack (a simple diode can protect the dc-dc converter of the battery from being fed 19v from the laptop adapter you could normally use to power the system from the wall,see the picture)

 

Another downside of those picoPSUs is that they'll be somewhat tall and they'll be installed vertically - you may find out they're taller than the backplate with connectors so you'll just have big height on your "laptop". Without it, you could just use some low profile ddr3 and a pci-e riser cable and basically the highest point on the board would be the connectors in the back.

At over 100w those picoPSU would be HOT HOT HOT, especially if you buy the ones with variable voltage input, because you add the heat generated by the anything to 12v converter on the picoPSU. At over 100w they will need cooling, a fan moving some air around that area. They're expensive and not worth it.

 

3. That R7 240 is basically a Radeon 7750 or something like that, rebranded. It's really old and not particularly power efficient. It probably uses up to 50w in games.Normally, I would suggest selling such a board on eBay for around $50 and buying a RX 460 which would have much better performance for just a bit more power consumption (goes up to 70w but you have much better control over voltages so with a couple of hours of fine tuning and voltage configuration for the gpu chip and memory chips, you could probably get it down to 50-55w in games for very little performance drop.

However in this particular case, i'm not sure it's worth it. The card would cost over $100 and wouldn't bring much extra to the table. It is also so powerful it would be limited by the 5350 cpu in the first place, then it would be limited by the pci-e slot (which is x4 electrically - even though the rx 460 chip is maximum pci-e x8, it will lose some performance when running electrically at x4)

When running from DC In jack, I'm not sure the 12v regulator on the motherboard is powerful enough to give 50-60 watts to the video card. However, you can use a separate DC-DC converter to power the video card completely outside the motherboard. For example, you can buy a pci-e riser cable, like this one or this one for example and then cut the 12v wires coming from the pci-eslot on the motherboard to completely remove the 12v coming from the motherboard.

It's simple, the 12v contacts in the slot are right at the start of the slot, three contacts on one side and two contacts on the other side. So you can just cut the first three wires in the ribbon cable on one side and  the 2nd and 3rd wire from the other side (if you have a digital multimeter you can just use the continuity feature of your meter to see which of the six wires are connected to the yellow 12v wire in the molex connector.

So another problem very nicely solved, and these riser cables allow you to have the video card flat and get your system more laptop like.

 

4. are you sure you need two memory sticks ? The AM1 is single channel, it won't give you performance boost to go with 2 sticks, and one stick uses 2-3 watts of power. If you don't use the integrated video card, you don't even need to run them at 1600 Mhz since you probably won't notice any difference.

 

5 and 6. those drives use about 12v at 0.7-0.9a so about  5-6w for the motor, and maybe 5v at ~0.3-0.5a or around 2w for the electronics on them. The 2.5" one I guess uses only 5v, so maybe about 3-4w. So overall your two drives probably use around 10-15w constantly.

So overall, I'm not sure you're going over 100-120 watts with the setup you have.  With a bit of luck and some careful planning, everything should run just fine from a standard 120w laptop adapter that's around $30, plenty of them on Amazon.

 

Here's a circuit i drew real quick that would let you use either the dc in jack or your battery circuit (excuse the quality, it's made in a few minutes in ms paint) :

 

 

 

 

much later edit: here's an example of one of those chips which can do automatic switch between dc-in and battery: LTC4412 : http://www.linear.com/product/LTC4412

 

You can make a tiny pcb with this chip (about 3.2$ if you buy just one and a p-channel mosfet which would cost about 1$ and the chip basically will automatically disconnect the battery when power on dc in jack is detected and connects the battery again as soon as there's no more power on the dc in jack. Super simple and the chip's datasheet has all the info needed to make it (though soldering the tiny chip on a board can be a bit hard, but even then there's workarounds like ready made boards which convert the surface mount shape to dip package to make it easy to use

By degrading I mean I seriously lost out in the silicon lottery. my CPU which used to be stable when OC'd to 2.1 Ghz (Negligible difference, I know) is now becoming unstable at stocks speeds. I have to buy a new CPU regardless. And yeah I'm already ahead of you on cooling, my stock heat sink comes right up to the edge of the case so I'm gonna get a shorter cooler, and possibly retrofit a blower style fan to the side of it, I have plenty of those things, all I have to do is make sure they can accept 12V without blowing up, they probably do, but it doesn't hurt to make sure.

 

Thank you for informing me of the AM1H-ITX, I didn't realize they made such a motherboard for the AM1 platform. (probably because I don't know what search terms to use to google these) I'll have to start saving up for it if I can't work out a deal with my mom and sell my AM1I afterwards, good thing I like to keep hardware packaging. (I do have a job at my school but it doesn't pay cash, instead it's paying for me to take my certification exams)

 

Yeah, I didn't quite realize that AM1 is only single-channel, until after buying the motherboard. I may switch for a single 8GB stick at some point. 

 

With the hard drives, I am now considering buying a $5 mSATA to SATA adapter and putting a 240GB SSD I salvaged to good use. I'll definitely lose some storage but I think it will be worth it. considering how well suited SSDs are for mobile computing purposes anyways. Of course, I need to do the same for my 1TB HDD but I'm gonna wait and save up.

 

As for that circuit, thank you for the diagram. Do you know where I can obtain diodes capable of handling my power needs?

[Factory Factory]

Digikey would be my bet. Just plug in the part number.

 

Or click this link where I did just that. http://www.digikey.com/product-search/en?keywords=stps10l25d

[mariushm]

Yeah, that's where I found them.. just went into the diodes section and filtered to see only Schottky diodes (special diodes with very low forward voltage drop), and then picked one that has leads instead of being surface mount (thinking it would easier for you to work with) and capable of more current than what your circuit needs (10A is probably double what you'd need). You can also get DC in jacks both male and female from there and other things you would need to make this project. You could also get that LTC4412 chip from there and the p-channel mosfet and schottky diode it would need, which would be much better since you won't lose energy all the time in the diodes.

 

If it wasn't for the dedicated video card requirement, at this point considering the cpu is also going bad, I would have recommended to just go with an Asrock J3160DC-ITX .. for $105 you get a motherboard with fixed J3160 cpu (slightly worse than an AMD 5150 on socket AM1)  but passively cooled and you also get a quality 65w adapter in the package (which saves you about $15-20) so cosidering it's mb+cpu+psu package, 105$ is a good deal. It's a 6w tdp cpu, so with just a SSD installed, it would probably idle at around 15-20 watts which would give you huge batery lifetime.

Sadly, it has only one pci-e x1 port, and you could use a pci-e x1 to x16 riser cable but the video card would still be throttled big time and i'm not even sure the bios would let you switch from integrated graphics to dedicated, you would have to check reviews for that board.