If you've ever wanted to see a Mini ITX motherboard converted into a working laptop, you're in luck— SFF.Network member APU_enthusiast posted a completed build project highlighting just that, and FanlessTech brought it to our attention because it is also passively cooled. Unlike active cooling (fans + heatsink or radiator), passive cooling relies entirely on a heatsink and natural air dissipation to get the job done, so generous breathing room is typically nice to have.
The actual build specs are fairly modest but still within usable ranges for basic computing and lightweight gaming/emulation. ASRock's N100DC-ITX board is used alongside 32 GB of Mushkin Essentials DDR4 RAM clocked at 3200 MT/s and is connected to a 1TB Mushkin Pilot-E NVMe Gen 3 drive.
The CPU in use is the Intel N100, which is integrated into the ASRock N100DC-ITX motherboard and offers 4 cores and 4 threads of Intel's Alder Lake architecture. It also uses the Intel UHD graphics engine, which will limit it significantly compared to current-gen Intel iGPUs.
Those caveats stated, it's still impressive to get all of this up and running off of a battery inside a custom enclosure that turns it into a dual-screened laptop. It can at least emulate Nintendo 3DS games, so can it really be that bad? Sure, something like Ayaneo Flip DS can emulate Switch in a yet-smaller form factor, but people make these projects for fun, not practicality.
Besides being a fully functioning Mini ITX laptop project, the use of dual screens here is particularly creative. As showcased in the images above and the original gallery, the bottom screen can either be used to further enhance emulation/media consumption or repurposed as a full touchscreen keyboard. Considering the design is being demoed with 3DS emulation, it seems this dual-screen choice was likely shaped by that workload.
Overall, it's hard to really critique this project since it pretty much achieves everything it sets out to. The final result looks almost clean enough to be a consumer laptop (in a retro-futuristic 90s way, but still), though, of course, it can't be expected to perform like a high-end gaming laptop.
The success of this project also makes us wonder how performant a "proper" Mini ITX laptop project could be, leveraging active cooling and newer board/CPU combinations like ASRock's Core i9-capable MITX board. While chances are any such projects will require sizable external power bricks, the proof of concept for Mini ITX laptops is already here! Another SFF.Network guy already did it with "Thin ITX", too.
