Are you done with all the laptop brands because they don’t meet your needs? Do you need a laptop that can do everything without compromising your personalized needs? To be very honest, building your own laptop is far better than a prebuilt branded laptop as it’ll provide you with the desired performance that you have wished for all these years. In order to understand how to build a laptop at home, this article may prove itself a helping hand to lead you to build one avoiding mistakes.

Now the main question is how much does building a laptop cost? The answer is simple, there are no limitations on the cost. The process is directly proportional. The more you increase the price, the much better laptop you’re going to build.

Should You Use The Laptop Customization Service?

I would personally not recommend you use the laptop customization service only if you have budget problems. Companies like Dell and HP are providing such services and also allow you to choose your required components specifications like processor, GPU, RAM, Storage, etc and that isn’t very much cost-effective as you also have to pay them for their services.

Only if you don’t know how to build a laptop, you can avail of the services as there isn’t any other way. But we have also solved that for you by explaining everything on how to build a laptop at home.

Should You Build a Laptop Yourself?

Yes, this is highly recommended, and most importantly, building your own laptop has far better performance and it can also be done at a low cost which is our main priority here. Let’s find out how to do that.

How To Build Your Own Laptop

Starting from scratch, the first thing you need to do is to select your barebones laptop, hardware components, and secondly, assemble them together. Sounds simple? But the building part is a little complex but not that much. Please follow the steps as explained.

How To Choose Laptop Components

This is the part where you need to go to an online trusted hardware components store like amazon, eBay, Newegg, etc, and order the barebones like RAM, motherboard, power supply, processor, Hard drive, GPU, and network card.

Now it depends on how powerful a laptop you need. Some people use laptops for high-end gaming, graphics designing, android development, etc which require high-end components. This definitely means that the hardware components are directly proportional to the purpose of a laptop.

What is a Barebones Laptop?

A half-assembled laptop actually falls in the barebones laptop category which includes a laptop shell, motherboard, power supply, cooling system, keyboard, camera, etc and the other components like CPU, GPU, RAM, etc can be installed by a user, later on, to make it a proper laptop.

The barebones laptop is mostly provided by the Original Design Manufacturers(ODM) like Quanta, Compal, Wistron, Pegatron, ECS, FIC, ARIMA, Mitac, Clevo, MSI, Inventec, etc. You can take the example of HP, DELL, Lenovo, Acer, Mac, TOSHIBA, etc which are associated with these ODM companies and they build PCs for these brands since the beginning. Afterward, these ready-made products are sold to these big brands as Original Equipment Manufacturer(OEM) products.

While choosing your barebones laptop, keep in mind that you get the one where the RAM upgradability is more, graphics card and CPU are replaceable, how many hardware components can be added to it, check the screen interface properly and if it meets your requirements then go for it.

I will not make it more complex for you and simply get into where you can get all of these components. To get the barebones laptops, you first need to select any of the ODM companies and get your barebones laptop as shown below:

For other hardware components, go to Alibaba and you’ll find all the hardware components like RAM, CPU, GPU, etc there.

You can also find other online platforms that might provide you with these components but Alibaba is the cheapest one right now.

2. CPU

The CPU or processor is more likely a chip in a laptop whose main job is to interpret computer instructions and process all data in computer software and without the CPU, don’t expect that the laptop or PC will work.

When choosing the CPU, you need to understand a few things:

• Cores: For the sake of processing the different instructions, Cores are the separate processing units added to a CPU. Mostly, you’ll find the CPUs have dual-cores. However, let’s say, you’re a graphics designer, for much better processing, it’s highly recommended to choose the 4-cores processor in this case.
• Clock Rate: If I define the clock rate in simple words, it’s actually a frequency at which the clock generator produces processing pulses and that is really important for better performance. If you’re a gaming person who is more into playing games and 3D modeling, a processor with a higher clock speed will help you in the best possible way.
• Processor Brand: AMD and Intel are most of the famous brands that manufacture the best processors out there. You know what, they’re actually in competition with each other and each year they come up with something new to beat the competition. What I would recommend is to go for an AMD Ryzen Series processor as they are beating Intel in most cases.

Before Jumping into buying anything, please make sure if the CPU, hard drive, RAM, etc are compatible with your barebones laptop as you might end up getting the components that don’t work with the raw laptop and I don’t want that for you.

RAM

Let me explain the RAM in my words. It’s actually the backbone of the laptop that connects the Hard drive with the CPU. The RAM is where the raw data goes and is converted to memory. After that, it’s passed on to the CPU to process it. To run the programs much faster, fast memory is what you need.

• RAM Generation: The RAM is actually having four mainstream generations these days, DDR1, DDR2, DDR3, and DDR4. The fastest RAM these days is DDR4 and is the most commonly used these days in laptops and PCs.
• Capacity: The ideal capacity of a RAM should always be 8GB on a laptop as you would have to run the heavy program and a 4GB RAM can’t run that butter smooth.
• Frequency: The memory frequency is directly proportional to the performance. Please make sure you choose a RAM with a higher frequency.

Storage

I would leave the storage capacity on you but the main thing that I would love to mention is the type of storage component that you shall use. There are two main storage components, HDD and SSD. Now the question is which one to choose?

I would personally recommend you go with hybrid storage(SSD + HDD). SSDs are faster than HDDs but it’s also expensive. On the other hand, HDDs are slow and affordable in price. What you can do is select the low-capacity SSD which doesn’t cost much and a more capacity HDD. Both together can do miracles.

Graphics Card

In most cases, the barebones laptop that you purchase has a Built-in GPU soldered on the motherboard or CPU. Here you have no upgradability or replacement option. So before you get the thought of buying a graphics card, first check your barebones laptop whether it comes along with an extra graphics card socket or not. Only then you can proceed with buying a graphics card for building your own laptop.

Which Graphics card you should buy?

• Graphics Chips: There are two most common chips known these days, AMD and Nvidia. Nividia chip works better for games. Whereas, the AMD graphics cards are best at picture rendering. Now you decide for which purpose you’re building a laptop and choose the graphics card accordingly.
• Brands: The most common brands that are famous for any computer related products including graphics cards are ASUS, Gigabyte, Dylan, Saphire etc.
• Architecture: The architecture of a graphics card is actually the technology used in a GPU which ultimately means that better and new technology graphics cards are much better.
• GPU Frequency: The GPU performance is also decided by the frequency. As long as the frequency of a graphics card is higher, the better the performance, more power consumption, and more heat are produced. Whereas, a low frequency is also directly proportional to the above factor.
• Memory: It doesn’t matter if your memory is higher if your GPU architecture is old. You can’t get high performance in this case. However, if the architecture is new and memory is high, you’re going to get a better performance.
• Stream processors: The stream processors also play a great role in enhancing the performance. A GPU with more stream processors performs better than a GPU having fewer stream processors.

How To Assemble a Laptop

Buckle up because now you came across the final and the most important phase of the process. Follow along with the steps that will help you in assembling your laptop:

Step 1: First all you need to do is to pick up a screwdriver and face the back of the laptop upwards. Remove the baffles and you’ll find a lever on the right side. Pull up that level to access the CPU socket. Install the CPU and undo the previous steps.

Step 2: The next thing you need to do is to install the RAM. graphics card and network card. Once you’re done with it, you need to connect the cables to all sockets properly.

Step 3: Install the hard drive or SSD and you’re good to go to another step.

Step 4: Install the operating system and enjoy using your new laptop build.

Conclusion

All of the steps explained here are well researched and you have a full guide on how to build a laptop now. Please, it’s highly recommended to follow all the steps carefully as you might do something wrong if you don’t follow the steps. Hopefully, you’re going to build a great laptop in the end. If you have any further queries, you can contact us and we’ll respond back for sure. Thanks.