OCZ DIY Gaming Notebook 15″

Looking Inside & Assembly

Before we get down to the building of the DIY, it’s probably a good idea that we familiarise ourselves with some of the internal components. Turning the notebook upside down, we can see that there are two compartments which can be opened with a cross head screwdriver. The compartment closest to the front of the notebook houses the hard disk along with the Realtek wireless card, and as you’d expect from a modern system, the DIY uses a standard SATA interface that is capable of taking any 2.5″ drive including SSD’s.

OCZ DIY 15" Underneath OCZ DIY 15" Disk Area

Opening up the second compartment reveals access to the CPU socket, memory slots and various other components. Moving from left-to-right in the image below, we can see two DDR2 SODIMM slots followed by the 478-pin FCPGA CPU socket (pink) with the Intel PM45 chipset positioned just below. Over on the far right is the ATI HD3650 GPU covered with an orange shim and surrounded by three Qimonda memory chips.  

OCZ DIY 15" Inside  OCZ DIY 15" Inside

OCZ DIY 15" NB OCZ DIY 15" ATI

If you’re unsure what parts would be suitable for the DIY, OCZ provides a list of validated components in a PDF file over on their website. OCZ also have a number of guides in both text and video format to assist users with the building of the notebook once you’ve got all of the parts. However, rather than simply linking to OCZ’s guide, we’ve created our own video of the installation process which can be seen below:
 

 
Hopefully the video will convince you to some extent that there really isn’t much to the building of the DIY, with probably the hardest parts being the inserting of the CPU and positioning of the cooler. But as always, taking things slowly and using a little bit of common sense should see a completely trouble-free install. Below are a few pictures taken during the install process that will hopefully give you a clearer picture of how everything should look:
 
OCZ DIY 15" CPU OCZ DIY 15" MEMORY

OCZ DIY 14" HDD Caddy

OCZ DIY 15" HDD Installed
 

Now that we’ve got everything put together (and hopefully working), let’s see just how well our system performs over on the next page…