Barebones / custom laptops

[Flibb]

I have spent eh last month looking for a 2nd hand laptop, as usual started off looking at £200-300, I am now looking at closer to £500 or above. I had settled on a Dell refurb from one of the large ebay box movers, when it turned up the spec supplied was lower (screen res and GPU) than advertised so its going back for a full refund. I started looking at the Clevo barebones systems when one popped up on ebay, seem OK, and offer he size and GPU power I am after.

So is anybody using a Clevo laptop on here? PCSpecialists caught my eye as they offer a 15" chassis with 1080 res screen and a reasonable GPU. The 2 year warranty is appealing, especially when my experience of sorting gaming laptops for other people has been that they suffer with heat problems, especially the GPUs. Or has anybody build a barebones system up themselves, does it work out any cheaper.

General spec
i5 or i7
8 GB of DDR3
GT750M GT840 GTX850M
15" 1920x1080

Struggling to find anybody that selsl the barebones units to build up myself, any pointers would be handy.

[ik9000]

it's a pain and because lappy makers mod their own mobos and it's all so dependent on internal cooling it's very difficult for a BYO market to establish itself. The solution would be for folks like dell to truly open up the customise your spec lists so you could stick a GTX865M in an XPS15 chassis, like the old days. To get that level of GPU they demand you buy a 17 or 18" alienware overpriced machine. Such a shame.

[walibe]

Clevo laptops are alright, I have owned a few but didn't realise until recently when I was clearing out my junk. It appears Mesh and Evesham were two of many who rebranded Clevo laptops and it appears to be what Clevo specialises in. The PC Specialists deal is unbeatable for the price if thats what you are after.

A few build your own laptops have launched over the last 10 years but don't last for long. I think Aopen even had one. China is where this 'build your laptops' are but they are sold in large volumes and branded as part of the deal for various companies which is bad news.

[scaryjim]

My wife's current lappy is a Zoostorm one off ebuyer but it's based off a clevo design and it's a very nice machine - the big plus with them is how easy they are to upgrade - I recently swapped the original Pentium out for an i5 and it was a case of three screws to remove the back cover, three more screws to remove the cooler, swap out the chips, dab on some thermal paste, and screw everything down again - dead easy.

As laptops have to have port routing and cooling built in to the chassis you'll never get a genuine built-your-own laptop - the best you'll get is a barebones chassis + mobo, if you're lucky a choice of panels and GPUs, and then drop your choice of compatible CPU and memory in. It's harsh, but it's what you need to do when you've got something as integrated as a laptop: there's just not enough room for a standard PC approach to the specifications...

[AETAaAS]

I have a P150 EM and it's my main system (in my profile). Easy to maintain and change almost anything really. It is a Clevo, which almost every custom laptop maker will have some variant thereof. There is the updated P150 SM which is a Haswell variant. Given your proposed specs, the P150 might be a little OTT though.

There is a lighter system: http://www.pwnpcs.co.uk/laptops/w650sj-ips

Email PWNPCS and ask for exactly what you want. They were happy to sell me a pretty barebone system for me to do up myself.

[Flibb]

Cheers for the info, will mull over it while on holiday. Seriously considering the Clevo route, although might move up to a 17" for hopefully improved cooling.