Best laptops for hacking

You decided to buy a high-performance portable computer, but you look at the prices and feel sad: power and portability at the same time are expensive. In this article I will tell you how to assemble a portable laptop from standard desktop components with your own hands, as well as what are the advantages of this approach. Let's try to imagine our best laptops for hacking.

Why can't you just buy a powerful laptop?

To begin with, mobile processors with a reduced TDP are installed in laptops.

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TDP (Thermal Design Power) is a design requirement for heat dissipation. This value indicates the maximum amount of heat that the chip's cooling system must dissipate.

Manufacturers assume that TDP is equal to the maximum power that the chip consumes. Power consumption is easier to measure and eventually all of it will be dissipated as heat.

TDP is not equal to power consumption, although it is related to it. In most cases, a processor with a higher TDP consumes more power (and generates heat) than one with a lower TDP, but this is true when comparing products from the same manufacturer, such as Intel or AMD. It happens that an AMD chip with a declared power of 95 W is more economical than an Intel chip with 90 W.

Let's compare the characteristics of several mobile and desktop processors from Intel. Let's take the i5-2500 processor, which is used in desktop computers, and the i5-2557M for laptops.

We will compare on the Intel website. As you can see, the calculated power – aka TDP – is very different for these processors. For the mobile i5-2557M, it is 17 watts, while for the desktop i5-2500 it is as much as 95 watts.

No wonder engineers underestimate the main parameters of processors: the number of cores, the frequency of the processor. This allows you to achieve a decrease in TDP. Cooling the processor in a thin laptop case will become much easier.

In factory laptops, I am not satisfied not only with weak processors, but also with limited opportunities to upgrade hardware. Of course, in more expensive gaming laptops, you can upgrade the processor, SSD, RAM, and even a discrete graphics card, but often only within the same generation of processors. It is possible that in a few years your laptop will become obsolete and there is nothing you can do about it.

Another disadvantage of factory laptops is that the matrix is ​​located at a fixed distance from the keyboard, and this can only be corrected by connecting an external monitor or keyboard.

All this led me to the idea of ​​building my own laptop. Let it not be especially thin, just enough so that you can transport it from place to place without much difficulty.