Yesterday, a Kickstarter campaign page for an upgradeable liquid-cooled laptop design dubbed the UHPILCIL T100 went live, paired with a YouTube video demonstrating one of these watercooled laptops in action. The UHPILCIL T100 and its slightly larger T100 Super variant (identical dimensions except for an extra 7 mm of cooler height on the Super) both resemble extra-thick 17-inch laptops, with lots of additional ventilation (and extra bulk) behind the screen to account for a liquid cooling radiator and pump. Since this isn't a closed loop, end users will need to provide their own de-ionized water to add to the loop before the laptop can be used.
What's extra interesting about this UHPILCL T100 laptop design, though, is that the large form factor and dedication to full-blown open-loop liquid cooling allows for fully-fledged desktop PC hardware to be used inside. The build not only supports up to 720W TDP of heat dissipation across the CPU and GPU, it also supports full Mini-ITX motherboards from AMD and Intel, and can even be saddled with an RTX 5090 so long as you opt for the T100 Super model.
So, all that's pretty cool...but when and how will the UHPILCL laptop designs be sold? This much is not yet clear, since the Kickstarter campaign hasn't officially "launched" at time of writing and thus even early bird prices are not yet available. It's also unclear if UHPILCL will be providing the T100 and T100 Super laptops as barebones Mini ITX PC kits or require buyers to pick starting specifications before it is built and shipped to them. Flaunted support for top-end Mini ITX motherboard chipsets and CPUs from AMD and Intel alike seem to exhibit confidence from UHPILCL that this solution should just work with standard Mini ITX hardware, though.
This take on laptop liquid cooling isn't actually the only one of it's kind, though it's certainly unique— and if funded fully and executed properly, could certainly prove promising for those who want truly powerful on-the-go workstations and /or gaming rigs without needing to compromise with lesser-performing hardware.
But it might just be more practical to opt for solutions like XMG's Oasis MK2 Laptop Liquid Cooler, which instead offers liquid cooling performance enhancements with an external radiator and pump while still using a hybrid air-cooled design on the compatible XMG laptops. But of course, as practical as solutions like XMG's are, they still tie you down to a docking station and mobile hardware — not like UHPILCL's T100 and T100 Super laptop designs, if they truly work as advertised or ever even come to market.
