I have built two of these NB50TZ's now, one for a friend and one for my household (my daughter and myself). I have built, repaired and upgraded many desktops/laptops over the years for myself/others. I liked the idea of basically "building your own laptop", minus the obvious things you can't put together with a laptop (shell, screen, motherboard, port layout, etc...) With that in mind I did enjoy installing my own CPU, SSD's and RAM in this laptop. My friend's laptop consisted of the Intel Core i3 9100, Crucial MX500 250GB M.2 2280 SATA 3 SSD and Seagate 1TB BarraCuda 5400 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 3 2.5" HDD. I just finished my NB50TZ that has a Intel Core i5 8400, WD BLUE 250GB M.2 2280 SATA 3 SSD, Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SATA 3 2.5" SSD and both my friend's laptop and mine have 16GB (2x8) G Skill RIPJAWS DDR4 2666 RAM. I did not use the standard thermal paste that was shipped with the laptop but rather my trusted compound for years, Arctic Silver 5. Both laptops were installed with Windows 10 Home...Now the good things that this laptop does/has is a very nice keyboard, keystrokes are smooth and satisfying. Backlit keyboard is nice and helpful at night. I hate touch pads but this laptop's is better than most I have used on other laptops. The Intel AC 9560 WLAN Adapter is always solid, great wireless connection. The 15.6" IPS Full HD screen is nice. All components were easy to install. Included driver CD, need to switch to USB in the future, was helpful. Packaged well when shipped. USB Type C is nice to have. 6 in 1 SD card reader also a bonus. Bluetooth 4.2 and HDMI 1.4 are nice to haves. Solid ventilation at the bottom of the laptop, most components stay pretty cool...With all the positives there are some negatives. Heat pipe design, specifically one pipe, for CPU cooler doesn't make sense how it was placed and the desktop CPU cooling would probably benefit a little from a better placement of this heat pipe. The full 65W is not utilized for the CPU, I got about 61W max stress testing with Intel XTU and CPUZ. For both the i3 9100 and i5 8400 I tested they did not reach max turbo boost clocks of 4.2 and 4.0 probably due to lower power limits, lower reference base clock frequencies (99.8MHz average, not 100.0MHz norm) and memory frequency did not hit 2666Mhz but rather 2600MHz average (which is also due to the lower Base Clock Frequency). All this does is reduce performace in favor of lower temps. But really you may just need a slightly better CPU cooler design to get full potential out of 65W DESKTOP CPU. But temps were still idling around high 30's, low 40's and stress testing thermal throttled CPUs, stopped both tests at 99 C. Even putting CPU fan at max I still saw low 90's C. The web cam is weak, 1.0MP is hardly HD in this day and age. Microphone and speakers are sub par. 1 VGA port, really, who uses those anymore with modern hardware. I wish instead of 2 USB 2.0 ports there were 2 USB 3.0 ports, they are backwards compatible. Control Center 2.0 Automatic Fan Control kind of sucks, curve needs to be adjusted to cool a Desktop CPU properly. And a 6-Bit Color Bit Depth on a 1080P IPS HD screen is uncalled for. Even older, cheaply made 1080P IPS/VA/TN monitors use at least 8-Bit color depth. No excuse for 6-Bit other than to save money......All these things aside this is a decent, affordable laptop that can be used for some basic work functions, internet browsing, streaming video applications and possibly playing some games a 720p. I think Eluktronics has the potential to really make a great, affordable product that could really take off.

Tremendous bargain, but limited in a few ways

I've had this now for a little under a month, and I love it. For the price of $700 that I ended up paying for the whole system, it's amazing. Compared to the other $1700--$2500 laptops with a desktop CPU that I was looking at though, it's missing a lot. First here are the upsides: - Desktop CPU. Amazing. I have the i5 9500, which I bought separately. Remember that it's designed for a 65W part, not a 95W one like the K series. - Wireless card is great and works well with Linux, unlike my last Clevo laptop which had an obscure wireless card that ended up being a huge pain. - You don't have to buy overpriced internals that you don't want. - Eluktronics support was extremely helpful when I called for information before I bought this. Also they package the laptop very well for shipping, so I'd be surprised if anything was ever damaged in transit. - Space for two storage devices. I use a fast M.2 SSD and a slow but capacious 2.5" HDD. - Cool and quiet. My system stays in the high 30s (celsius) when idle and the high 60s or low 70s under stress. The fan is usually inaudible or barely audible, ramping up to reasonable levels under stress. It's never crazy loud, like some comparable systems are. Not having a GPU probably helps this. - No ugly or flashy branding. It's surprisingly hard to find a powerful laptop that doesn't look stupidly macho, but this is one. Mine doesn't even have the Eluktronics logo on the back, which I was pleasantly surprised to find out. - Battery life is about 2.5--3 hours under slight load and 4--4.5 hours under no load at all (writing). Haven't really tested it under heavy load because I keep it plugged in for that. This is on Linux, mind you. Windows is probably more power hungry. I think this is good for a laptop this powerful. Again, no GPU probably helps. Now the downsides: - I don't like the big touchpad. There's only a very thin place to rest my fingers between it and the keyboard, and the click buttons have basically no travel. This is very annoying to me. - Keyboard keys also don't have much travel, but I think that's become standard nowadays. Doesn't bug me nearly as much as the touchpad. - The screen is darker (in terms of colors, not physical brightness---the physical brightness is good) and the colors are more saturated than on most screens. I can't tell if this is actually good since now other screens like my phone look washed-out to me, but it took some getting used to. Also it's a matte screen. Not necessarily a downside, but just so you know. - The M.2 storage slot is SATA only. No NVMe SSDs. This also means you can't hook up an eGPU through the storage slot. It might be possible through the wireless card PCIe slot, but (a) that's only one lane, and (b) it uses Intel's weird new CNVIO thing, which might complicate matters. Anyway I haven't tried. - No Thunderbolt. That would've been fantastic for a laptop with no GPU (hint hint if anyone from Clevo reads this). - Intel's iGPUs aren't very good at the moment, so don't expect to play any remotely sophisticated games on this. - Not many people online have this (the Clevo NB50TL with a GPU is more common though, and it's very similar), so there's not a huge support community. Eluktronics support is good though, as I said above. - The BIOS has very few options. I'm sure this is standard for laptops, but don't expect to mess with clocks or voltages. - Taking the back off to put in the core components requires pulling with substantial force to overcome these weird snap things, which are totally unnecessary since there are also screws holding the back on. Not a huge deal, but I can imagine them breaking after a few years of taking the back off and on. It might not matter if they break though, since again, there are also screws holding the back on. All in all, I think this is a great laptop. I love Clevo (the original manufacturer---Eluktronics resells from them), since (a) they make things that are this customizable, and (b) my last laptop from them lasted eight years and still hasn't really died. I was a little afraid to buy from Eluktronics since I had never heard of them, but after calling support and seeing how knowledgeable and friendly they were, I was reassured. Basically the internals are fantastic and the externals are a little cheap, but for $700 ($300 barebones), I can't complain.