Thinnest Mini pc with decent hardware

[Guest]

Are there any thin Mini PC's that are under 4cm (1.5 Inches) thick that have decent hardware ( i3 and possibly some Low Power Mobile gpu for accelleration)

[Pooherino ツ]

2 minutes ago, 9291Sam said:

Are there any thin Mini PC's that are under 4cm (1.5 Inches) thick that have decent hardware ( i3 and possibly some Low Power Mobile gpu for accelleration)

Get a laptop, the Dell Inspiron 7577 has decent hardware for around $1000. I dont think theres any pc thats around an inch thick.

[Mortis Angelus]

5 minutes ago, 9291Sam said:

Are there any thin Mini PC's that are under 4cm (1.5 Inches) thick that have decent hardware ( i3 and possibly some Low Power Mobile gpu for accelleration)

May I ask why it has to be so thin?

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Mortis Angelus said:

May I ask why it has to be so thin?

Trying to cram it into a homemade laptop and I do not want the laptop to be 10 cm tall (4 inches)

Was going to use a Nuc but I wanted to see of there was anything with something like a 930M for accelleration

[dizmo]

You could try using a NUC motherboard. Though the enclosures are thicker than that.

I don't think you'll find anything but a laptop GPU to fit in something that size.

 

Honestly, more work than it's worth.

[Guest]

I was going to remove the board from the Nuc anyway

I also want to do it because I can not find anyone else on the internet who has made a laptop at home.

[Mortis Angelus]

Just now, 9291Sam said:

Trying to cram it into a homemade laptop and I do not want the laptop to be 10 cm tall (4 inches)

 

Well.. the best option here would probably be an asrock stx motherboard and mxm gpu, and then you will need to make your own heat dissipating system (custom heat block, heat pipes and heatsink with blower style cooler etc) for both cpu and, gpu. And you will get rear IO for free..

[manikyath]

a homemmade laptop... you're well aware that mini PC's all essentially run low power / mobile hardware right? at that level of bodge you could just as well gotten a laptop and get the same (if not better) result.

[manikyath]

14 minutes ago, Pooherino ツ said:

Get a laptop, the Dell Inspiron 7577 has decent hardware for around $1000. I dont think theres any pc thats around an inch thick.

HP elitedesk SFF, if you dont count the rubber feet that make up about 25% of the thing's thickness.

 

EDIT: correction, not SFF, DeskMini is what i meant

[Mortis Angelus]

6 minutes ago, manikyath said:

HP elitedesk SFF, if you dont count the rubber feet that make up about 25% of the thing's thickness.

 

EDIT: correction, not SFF, DeskMini is what i meant

Actually, you meant HP EliteDesk Mini  But that was an excellent suggestion! I was unaware that HP made such a computer.

 

OP: If you wanna go balls to the walls, buy an AsRock DeskMini-gtx (I suggest the 1060 variant). Then buy an Intel t-series CPU and make that custom heat dissipation system. 

 

But as was said above; might be a bit too much work to be worthwhile.

 

 

 

[iRileyx]

Just now, 9291Sam said:

I also want to do it because I can not find anyone else on the internet who has made a laptop at home.

Lots of people have done homemade laptops before.

[NTDaws]

I mean we are getting to the point where consumers will be able to build laptops.

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, Being Delirious said:

I mean we are getting to the point where consumers will be able to build laptops.

we're far from tbh, even those "custom laptop" brands have to rely on someone else to make the products for them. there's a lot of iffy details tho go into producing laptops like handing the battery, the choice of battery (eg, number of cells in series), the screen, the interface with the screen (note stuff like backlight handling), and after all that there's still no standard for laptop parts past MXM modules, so you're forced into getting a chassis with one or two screen options, one or two mobo options, a battery and if lucky an extended battery, maybe MXM modules, 4 CPU options, and after all of that it'll end significantly more phat than buying something off the shelf.

[Guest]

30 minutes ago, manikyath said:

HP elitedesk SFF, if you dont count the rubber feet that make up about 25% of the thing's thickness.

 

EDIT: correction, not SFF, DeskMini is what i meant

That thing starts at $800 That is a bit high (Sarcasm)

[Guest]

16 minutes ago, RKRiley said:

Lots of people have done homemade laptops before.

Where can I see proof?

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, manikyath said:

we're far from tbh, even those "custom laptop" brands have to rely on someone else to make the products for them. there's a lot of iffy details tho go into producing laptops like handing the battery, the choice of battery (eg, number of cells in series), the screen, the interface with the screen (note stuff like backlight handling), and after all that there's still no standard for laptop parts past MXM modules, so you're forced into getting a chassis with one or two screen options, one or two mobo options, a battery and if lucky an extended battery, maybe MXM modules, 4 CPU options, and after all of that it'll end significantly more phat than buying something off the shelf.

I have already done Mose of those things and I am going to 3 print a case/

[manikyath]

3 minutes ago, 9291Sam said:

Where can I see proof?

all around, it's hard to find anything near a propper execution tho, probably with reason.

[mariushm]

Not quite i3 level of performance but have a look at this :

 

ASRock J3160DC-ITX Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo (includes 19v 65w laptop adapter in the box)

 

You add a so-dimm and a small SSD and you can power the board directly from 19v, the board has DC-In jack... this would also make it easy to make a battery pack out of let's say 6 lithium batteries in series (to have ~ 21v..25v at the input) and with a DC-DC converter you can step it down to 18-19v which the board will take in happily.

With a SSD and a single so-dimm, the whole thing should idle under 10w

 

You could also unscrew the heatsink on the cpu and replace it with a more traditional flat heatsink with lots of fins (or pins/needles) but lower height and maybe put a 92-120mm 15mm (thin) fan over it , or have one of those laptop style fans blow some air over the heatsink (to reduce the size)

You could also pretty much desolder all the connectors except the DC in jack from the back side, and use a usb header from the motherboard to get usb for mouse and keyboard, you could solder wires where the stereo out and line in and microphone would be or just use the front panel header for sound jacks

The only tricky part would be the ethernet port which I think has the magnetics inside it... you can buy the ethernet jack separately and just solder the port to the board with some wires (here's just one example of a standalone jack with magnetics) ... or just shove a mini-pcie wireless card inside for wireless networking or a wireless card on a usb stick.

 

If you can work with mATX sized board, an alternative from AMD would be this 55$ board: ASRock QC5000M AMD FT3 Kabini A4-5000 Quad-Core APU SOC Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo

About the same performance as the J3160 cpu but better graphics at a slightly higher power consumption (the intel is a 6w tdp, the amd is 15w tdp but graphics are a big part of that)

There's a lot of empty space around the cpu so again you could replace the heatsink with a bigger but less tall one easily and basically your total height would be set by the ddr3 memory you use... some low height ddr3 will make your board only 2-3 cm in total.

Again, you have 4 usb 2 headers onboard so you could use usb brackets to have usb connectors at the edge of your laptop and you have front panel header with speakers and microphone pins so you could desolder the tall  ps2/usb tower, the usb+ethernet, the sound , and leave just the two usb 3 ports and the vga and hdmi ports on the back. which are low height.

You could desolder the ethernet and disable the onboard lan and either use separate ethernet jack soldered with wires to board or you could use a pci-e x1 ethernet card and a pci-e riser cable to lay the ethernet card horizontally to keep things flat laptop style.

You could use a picoPSU style power supply with wide input voltage (let's say 10..24v) to power the board and a SSD easily, and you could power that picoPSU with 12v..19v  from a laptop adapter or from some battery pack