I Turned This Broken Laptop Into A Powerful Desktop Gaming PC

foreign hey what's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again recently I received a gaming laptop from one of my good friends and as you can see this thing's seen better days I was told it was dropped but that wasn't going to cause this kind of damage this is more of a case of Rage quitting in a game you know losing a game probably uh you know punching the screen off of this thing thrown it on the ground this is more of a case of a serious rage quit and this was brought to me by him just to see if I wanted to use any parts off of it because you know going into this thing replacing the keyboard the shell the screen and anything else that needs to be replaced is just going to cost a little more than it's really worth going into so I figured since this does have HDMI and USB type-c video out we could probably turn this into a makeshift desktop gaming piece scene with the specs here it'd be totally worth it if we can get this thing to boot back up but before we get into it I do want to mention that this video is brought to you by urcd Keys I've actually been using this site for a couple years now they do offer steam keys or origin you played they even offer Microsoft applications like office but the main reason that I use urcd Keys is for their Windows keys right now their Windows 10 Pro OEM key is 19.84 cents but if you use code ETA at checkout you can get 25 off and another great thing about buying from here is they do accept Paypal I just did this build here I need to activate Windows I'm going to head over to my updates and security we're going to go to activation as you can see I've got Windows 10 Pro but it's not activated so I'm going to change product key I'm going to paste it in here choose next choose activate and windows is now activated we're ready to go my warning is totally gone and basically that's it they'll email your code once your payment is processed and that's basically it if you're interested in picking up cheap Windows 10 keys for your new pc builds I'll leave a link in the description I've tried to get it to power on and the power button is totally missing from the top I guess it was connected to the whole shell itself but that's long gone the battery does have a little bit of swelling from being hit so hard so I unplugged it I don't want to mess around with the battery he did include the power supply it's got a 230 watt power supply and that's plenty for what we have here but yeah I'm gonna go ahead and remove the shell and see if we can kind of turn this into a desktop gaming PC first thing I noticed here was the fan over here on this side is kind of locked up I think it's because maybe the case is squishing down on it so once I get everything removed we might be able to get that to free up if not I'd have to replace it or come up with some kind of fan that'll work for this cooling system one of the best things about this is a lot of the screws are already missing because the shell has just been kind of torn apart so I don't have that many screws I need to take out of this bottom panel we'll go ahead and get this off now really the only thing that's missing besides you know the screen and half of the shell here is a m.2 SSD I removed it and gave it back to him because I had his data on there was no way to recover it the way the laptop is right now but you know taking a look at this main board here it doesn't look like it's been cracked in half which is definitely a good sign so next thing I need to do is just remove the whole board itself from the top of the shell so I've got that out everything's looking pretty good here and just as I thought the fan is functional the keyboard bracket here was kind of pushing down on the fan itself keeping it from moving so both of the fans should start spinning up if we can get power to this and this is one of those newer laptops that has half the ram soldered to the board plus we've got a single dim over on the other side this has 16 gigabytes of RAM an 11th gen i7 CPU and an RTX 3060 so it's really no slouch and if we can get this up and running we should see some really great performance out of this machine now like I mentioned the power button was totally missing it's actually got a separate power button from the keyboard itself and the ribbon cable is still here so if we jump two of these pins here we should be able to power this thing up so I'm gonna get my monitor set up we'll plug in HDMI and the power supply and see if we can get this thing to come on all right let's go ahead and plug the power in I've got HDMI to my monitor and there are some LEDs on the board as soon as I plug the power in we do get a red LED indicating that the battery's charging even though the battery is not plugged in and the power lead or the power button lead here it looks like it had four pins so if we jump two of these either the laptop is going to blow up or we can get this thing to come on so I'm just going to jump them all see what happens here oh and I did see the fan move just a little bit but the unit's not on yet so I'm either jumping the reset or holding it too long I don't know I'm gonna try to jump them individually there it is so the unit's coming on we've got both fan spinning HDMI to the monitor my monitor is set up to Auto detect a signal so I'll just wait a second here all right so I've got an idea I'm not getting any signal right now the way it is but it's trying to boot up to the BIOS because we don't have a storage Drive I don't think the BIOS will show up over HDMI luckily we do have USB type c on this I've got a USB type-c monitor here we'll try it one more time and if this doesn't work we'll have to plug in a drive there it is so we're getting to the BIOS over USB type c so now that I know we can get this thing powered up I've installed an m.2 Drive I've also mounted this to a little piece of fake carbon fiber that I had laying around I used some motherboard standoffs just to keep it up a little bit and I've got this massive power button soldered right to the leads we used to power this up the first time so all I need to do is hit the button once it'll kind of bridge that Gap and it should power up I've got HDMI plugged in because if we're able to get to the operating system HDMI should automatically take over hopefully okay so I've tried this a few times now and I think this is it we've got a blue light on the monitor hope there we go so we're now booting into Windows 11 Pro I just need to go ahead and log in we can take a look at the specs on this unit so for the CPU we've got an i7 11370h 4 course 8 threads kind of wish we had a few more threads here this is going to kind of hold the GPU back 16 gigabytes of ddr4 at 3200 megahertz and we've also got an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 obviously laptop GPU with six gigabytes of G ddr6v Ram it seems to be running decently and I've installed the Armory crate for these Asus or these tough laptops that way it could change the power profile we're going to be set to Turbo performance and I'll tell you even though this thing is out of a laptop shell it still gets pretty hot that little CPU definitely pulls some wattage for what we have here but overall not a bad little system so far let's check out a little bit of Gaming first up we've got cyberpunk 2077 1080p medium settings I figured we'd be getting a little more out of this but if you take a look at the wattage I don't think the Armory crate is working correctly because we're only at around 25 watts on that CPU it really can't boost up to where it needs to be with a game like this so I've got a little bit of tweaking I need to do but I gotta say for a free gaming PC not bad I'm not going to complain about this kind of performance but I'm sure we can get more out of it got a little fluctuation between 60 and 59 but that's something you'd never notice if you were playing this I've just got that frame counter on so I can actually see it do it but yeah I mean with games like these we shouldn't have any issues running them especially even with the CPU only running at about 25 to 26 Watts which we should be getting a little more out of it I think Armory crate is really holding this thing back I also went through ran a few benchmarks we've got 3dmark night raid coming in with a 38 338 fire strike 1681 and finally time spy with a 6650. I've checked out some benchmarks from similarly spec units online these are right on par with everything else with the same CPU and GPU combo moving over to God of War 1080p high now if we take a look at the temps we're on up there but I've manually adjusted the CPU TDP up to 45 watts and we're right there at 42 to 43. I've used throttle stop to do this but there are other applications on the market so it's totally possible to manually adjust the TDP on the CPU and of course it's really going to help out with performance but this cooling system really can't handle it because we're up there around 94 degrees Celsius next up we've got Doom Eternal 1080p ultra settings and this is one of those games that just works I mean it's a really well optimized game we're getting an average over 100 FPS at ultra settings and we could probably go up to nightmare even with the way it's set up right now checking out Spider-Man Miles Morales and this kind of shows us that that CPU is holding this RTX 3060 back I know we're not working with super high-end components here but if we had a more powerful CPU or at least a better cooling system that could keep those clocks up we could get a lot more out of this because we're only at around 65 FPS 1080p High in the final PC game I wanted to test for this video was Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2. we're at 1080p balanced preset and by the end of this we had an average of 94 FPS and a low of 50. if you take a look at the performance submarine CPU bottleneck 99 so this is really holding us back and uh I need to come up with a way to kind of cool this a bit better well overall it definitely works we've got the RTX 3060 which is putting out some pretty decent performance but we're kind of being held back by that CPU now there are some more modifications that I can do to this and I will have another video coming up in the next week or so so keep an eye on the channel I kind of want to case this thing up and I can actually add a larger heatsink just to the top of the heat pipes here to try to keep that CPU temp down that way we can up the TDP and keep those clocks up to get much better performance out of this thing I've got a bunch of old heat sinks and small fans laying around I could definitely rig something up to keep the temps down but that's going to wrap up for this one really appreciate you watching let me know in the comments below what you would have done with something like this I mean if you got a laptop that you know was pretty much smashed up all over the place which you have tried to convert it sold the motherboard or try to repair the whole unit if you've got any questions or if there's anything else you want to see running on this in the next video let me know in the comments below like always thanks for watching

Channel: ETA PRIME

Views: 396,526

Keywords: etaprime, eta prime, old laptop, gaming pc, laptop to desktop, laptop to desktop conversion, laptop to desktop setup, laptop to desktop monitor connect, laptop to desktop diy, broken laptop to desktop, laptop gaming pc, laptop trick, gaming pc build 2023, old laptop restoration, what to do with laptop, gaming laptop, reuse old laptop, laptop transformation, what to make from old laptops, broken laptop projects

Id: dOzz1_vcFzs

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023