Every now and then, a Kickstarter hardware project grabs our attention and makes us wonder, "Who even asked for this?"
Now, I am personally fond of bonkers tech. The stranger, the better — especially if that Kickstarter project looks like the laptop equivalent of Frankenstein's monster. I'm the type of person who loves quick-open latches on laptops for easy upgrades to the RAM and storage. I've also been known to do some laptop surgery to keep a device kicking for 10+ years. So, Franken-laptops are something of a personal draw.
The latest Kickstarter to hit that sweet spot of fascination and horror is the UHPILCL liquid-cooled gaming laptop. Touting itself as the "world's first built-in split type water-cooled gaming laptop," the UHPILCL is functionally an ITX gaming desktop with an attached display and keyboard.
So while it's hardly the sleekest looking laptop, something is compelling about its retro approach to clamshell laptop design that looks straight out of a Sci-Fi movie from 1992.
But what's under the hood?
Desktop ITX components for enhanced power
With an 18-watt water pump, the UHPILCL offers up to 720 watts of heat dissipation. Meaning it can support the latest desktop components.
With support for a standard ITX motherboard, the UHPILCL laptop concept can support AMD AM5 series CPUs up to the Ryzen 7 9800x3D and Intel CPUs for the 12th to 14th Gen, as well as the new Core Ultra 200K series.
You can also include a desktop-class GPU with a standard PCIe connection, with the PCB rated to 230MM or less. This means you can also cram a full-power Nvidia RTX 5090 in the laptop. You just need to remove the air-cooled heat sink.
The UHPILCL concept also supports dual-channel DDR5 memory and up to 32TB of SSD storage.
The ITX desktop turned laptop weighs just 11.5 pounds (5.2kg) and can fit in a backpack that's 17.3 inches or larger.
But is it viable as a laptop?
When it comes to gaming laptops, there's always a market for people who want desktop components in a more portable format. While you can technically throw your oversized water-cooled tower, monitor, keyboard, and mouse in a car and drive to your friend's house for a LAN party, sometimes you want to avoid the whole "break apart my entire gaming setup" aspect of moving around a desktop PC. Thus, the gaming laptop was born.
However, gaming laptops often have to make various compromises to fit as much power into a small chassis as possible. This does mean they have less raw power than gaming desktops. After all, there's a much lower thermal threshold in a laptop with a limited number of fans compared to a desktop case.
We have seen some gaming laptops with desktop components before, with the Alienware Area-51 series being one of the more notable iterations of the concept. But few laptops offer full desktop CPUs, ITX motherboards, or water cooling.
Now, you're not going to be putting the UHPILCL laptop on your lap, ever, but you're going to use some kind of desk or table for a gaming laptop anyway.
Not that this Kickstarter is likely to end up with a full production line, anyway. While the Kickstarter does claim the UHPILCL can be mass-produced, the likelihood of any major laptop manufacturer licensing this design is pretty slim. It's just too quirky of a product in an already niche market.
But as far as strange, quirky little Kickstarter projects go, I can't look away from this one.
There is currently no pricing information for the UHPILCL, nor a set release date, though the Kickstarter project indicates it is "launching soon."
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