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this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Technology
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You can order a board from the likes of PCBWay... you can even ask them to populate it and solder the components for you... but just designing a board with the complexity of a laptop, will require a lot of expertise, a lot of work... and most likely require several iterations where you'll end up with a bunch of trash boards with some flaw in them, and you'll have to pay for it all.
It's still a tool you could use, but I'd recommend sticking to something like simple adapter boards at most.
See, I knew about PCB way and was wondering if their products would even really work. Or if the sockets for the chips would be available for small batch stuff.
Even if you were able to make your own PCB and somehow solder everything onto it, one of the things that makes complex boards like motherboards so tough to make is signal path lengths. Ever see how some of the traces on motherboards are squiggly and take up more space than the straight ones? That isn’t just for fun - all of the traces have to be incredibly specific lengths for a whole number of reasons, including signal timing and interference with other traces.
"Sockets for the chips" are the least of the problems, most chips don't use sockets at all, they instead get soldered to a board through BGAs. Even multi-chip boards like CPUs, usually get soldered through BGAs. Then, what you need to think about is what kind of boards you want to connect and how.
If you wanted to make something low spec, you might look at the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, that only needs a sort of "breakout board", where you could place a bunch of M.2 connectors for daughter boards... but chances are you will be really hard pressed to make a whole laptop that's cheaper than a much higher spec brand one.