When you buy or build a desktop gaming PC, you often get to choose your CPU, graphics card, memory, storage, and other hardware. And if you want to upgrade any of those components in the future, you can just pop out the old part and replace it with something new.
But most modern laptops aren’t nearly as flexible. While some allow you to replace memory or storage, that’s not a given these days. And while it’s not impossible to find models with a user-replaceable CPU or GPU, those features are still extraordinarily rare. So it’s interesting to see that a Chinese PC company called Tongfang has designed a laptop with a modular motherboard that puts the CPU and GPU on different boards, opening the possibility that you could upgrade or replace one without disturbing the other. It’s called the GX2.0 modular motherboard, and the first laptop based on this design is expected to be the Firebat 16 Air, which should be available for purchase in China soon from JD.com.
The laptop is a 16 inch notebook that measures just 18mm (0.71″) thick and weighs just 1.98 kg (4.37 pounds), which makes the Firebat 16 Air pretty compact for a gaming notebook. That suggests the modular design doesn’t necessarily add a lot of thickness or weight to the laptop.
But it does add to the flexibility of the notebook. Instead of a single mainboard with the CPU, graphics, and other components soldered to it, the Tongfang/Firebat laptop has a mainboard featuring an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS processor, two SODIMM slots for DDR5 memory, an M.2 slot for PCIe NVMe storage, and another for a wireless card.
But there’s also a separate board that features an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 GPU for discrete graphics. The laptop’s display HDMI 2.1 and Mini DisplayPort 1.4 ports are attached to this board.
The design theoretically opens the possibility of replacing the GPU board without buying a whole new laptop or replacing the CPU board. But I’m going to stress that this remains a theoretical possibility for now. I haven’t seen any evidence that Firebat, Tongfang, or any other company has announced a compatible GPU board with a different graphics processor yet.
Some of the laptop’s other features include an 80 Wh battery, 2 USB4 ports with support for 100W USB power delivery and video output, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, a USB 2.0 Type-A port, a headset jack, SD card reader, and Gigabit Ethernet port.
via @realVictor_M and VideoCardz
