It’s just a concept for now, but this RTX 5090 liquid-cooled gaming laptop is possibly the craziest thing I’ve seen in a while
- A new laptop concept on Kickstarter may turn out to be a great design going forward
- Its design is focused on fitting desktop GPUs and CPUs into a laptop form factor, with water-cooling components
- It would be the first of its kind, making desktop gaming PCs portable
PC gaming tech is constantly improving – most notably right now with Nvidia‘s new Blackwell RTX 5000 series GPUs and AMD’s RDNA 4 cards – and it’s a constant arms race for gaming laptops to catch up to desktop gaming PCs. Now, it looks like that gap might be getting even smaller, thanks to a concept for a laptop design that could work wonders for portable gaming.
As reported by VideoCardz, a laptop concept on Kickstarter known as UHPILCL (Ultra High Performance Integration Liquid Cooled Laptop – catchy, I know) features built-in liquid cooling while supporting the desktop RTX 5090 and Ryzen 7 9950X3D. This design supports ITX motherboards, with the Kickstarter page highlighting support for mini-ITX boards such as the Z890I generation.
This is all made possible through an 18W water-cooled pump, cooling both the CPU and GPU while giving room for different custom heatsinks depending on the hardware chosen – the page claims that the UHPILCL is capable of heat dissipation up to 720W. If the Kickstarter is successful, it’ll launch with two models – the T1000 (it’s not a Terminator, I promise) and the T1000 Super, with the latter offering greater heat dissipation (up to 735W) with its thicker build for housing the likes of an RTX 5090.
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It’s an absurd – and rather ugly, if I’m being honest – yet exciting concept that essentially means gamers could have a functioning desktop hybrid laptop gaming PC (evident in UHPILCL’s YouTube video below) – while we can say the same for handheld gaming PCs, they certainly don’t pack as much power as this laptop would. That’s before even mentioning that the concept model features a 3K 120Hz WLED display, a 4K camera, and Wi-Fi 7 support, so it’s certainly no slouch.
I genuinely want this to become mainstream…
As ridiculous as it seems, this is a concept that could actually end up working well. While multiple factors come into play, such as longevity, battery life, and noise levels (claimed to be at a maximum of 55DB), it’s a design I believe could be pulled off if backed properly. The creators of the UHPILCL also claim that almost every component from the GPU to the RAM will be user-upgradable, which would be a huge advantage over traditional laptops – although the Kickstarter page doesn’t go into detail about this, so it might be a bit of a pipe dream at this point.
Since I’m adamant about testing out my Asus ROG Ally with a desktop eGPU, this is another portable alternative that could suffice – bear in mind, I’ve never been a fan of water cooling (sorry, I just don’t want any liquid near my components) so for me personally, it would be a scary thought to spend a lot of money on such a product. However, this could hypothetically save consumers money when it comes to purchasing the hardware required for a full setup – no need to buy a separate monitor and keyboard here, for example.
Again, it’s just a concept so there’s little point in jumping to conclusions now – it’s worth noting that it’s not started the crowdfunding phase on Kickstarter at the time of writing. But if this does become a larger-scale project and is successful, it could completely rearrange the gaming laptop market – albeit at a ridiculously high cost, I would assume.