"It's been nearly one year since Legit Reviews has written an article on building your own custom whitebox gaming notebook and boy how times have changed. In early 2004 I published my first Do-It-Yourself article (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on building a gaming notebook and to make our notebook game worthy we had to modify desktop drivers to work on a laptop and overclock the graphics card to get enough power to play games at decent frame rates. The Intel Pentium M 1.7GHz (Banias) processor and ATI Radeon 9600Pro 64MB video card provided the power to run games, but everyone wanted more. Assembly required the removal of plastic bezels, the keyboard and the back cover of the notebook, leaving a mess of screws to deal with. On top of all this no one carried whitebooks as their future was still uncertain in 2004.

In the summer of 2005 I published an article on how to build an Intel Sonoma based notebook (How To Build A Sonoma Notebook). This notebook featured an Intel Pentium M Dothan processor paired with the mainstream GeForce 6600 PCI Express graphics card for performance on a budget. The ASUS Z71V used in the article had no plastic bezels that needed to be removed, but the keyboard and back access panels had to be removed for hardware installation. Finding the ASUS Z71V in the channel was fairly easy and before you knew it DIY notebook articles were popping up all over the web and in magazines. It looks liked whitebook notebooks were something that was going to survive the market."

Related Products

Read on at Legit Reviews