I don’t expect to play a lot of games on this, but if I like how it turns out I want to try it again with a Lattepanda Alpha which is much more expensive but it can play GTA 5 at 720p 30fps. Not Ideal, but the fact it can do that tells me it should be able to play older AAA games nicely.
I’m just testing the waters with this.
Components:
Brain: Awow PC stick with an Atom X5-Z8350 Processor and 4gb of RAM.
Controller: Arduino Nano with Switch analog sticks, and tactile switches. (not sure if I can use the Switch analog sticks though). I also have a trackball that I’m going to experiment with using in place of the right analog stick.
I’ve already been playing with the PC stick and I’m fairly impressed with it when playing games at 800×480 (same as my screen). It plays Minecraft over 50fps (unless it’s loading chunks), and I think I can get Borderlands running @ 30fps after I beef up the cooling.
I’ll be ripping everything apart, replacing ports with ribbon cables, and cutting parts of the monitor controller board off to save space, but at the same time I want better cooling, sooo yeah… It’s probably still going to be much bigger than I want.
I plan to use my fathers extremely nice carbon fiber 3D printer (thin and strong walls), and maybe plexiglass to hopefully make a nice looking case to Tetris all this hardware in to.
My inspiration is a PS Vita (sorry for the lights, there was just too many reflective surfaces).
Despite being very delicate, I managed to break the digitizer when I was trying to remove the monitor control board, so I no longer have touch input. There’s no visual damage, and there wasn’t any popping or cracking when I was removing the board… IDK.
Guess I’ll rip the PC stick apart next and see what I’m working with in there. I got some recordings of game play for a base line to compare against my (hopefully) upgraded cooling.
Downloading Horizon 3 just for kicks. I don’t expect it to play at all though. Lol
I’m down to give that a try, but any particular reason to use Ubuntu? I personally think Ubuntu is trash. I have been wanting to give Pop OS a try, but I still don’t like that it’s Ubuntu based.
This works surprisingly well. I gave it a try on this, and I’ve had worse lag on a TV before, and that was streaming with both PCs on Wi-Fi. Lol
I’m pleasantly surprised, and it would be just fine for racing games. Shooting games it gets a bit harder. I’ll see about recording it.
That COD is impressive, slow as it might be it is better than I thought.
For the board when I saw it taken apart my first idea was something like an m.2 heatsink both sides. in a perfect world a machines block that would be a replacement case and heatsink all in one with the mini fan blowing through it.
Was not expecting what you did though, even better. Are you gonna hide it on the back of the monitor, or is there room enough for the whole thing on there?
I repeatedly find my self think the same thing. It’s slow, but man is it better than I thought it would be. I didn’t actually expect it to play CoD.
I’m attaching it a bit playing FPS games, but it’s played all the top down and platformer games I’ve thrown at it, and it plays them all 50+ fps.
Good idea, I’m going to look into those, but this board is a fair bit bigger than a M.2.
I am a CNC operator, and my father is a CNC programmer so it not impossible.
This CPU will run all the way up to 90c so I’m concerned about comfort. I was going to try and keep the heatsink on the inside with plastic insulating you from the heat.
This isn’t the heatsink I’m going to use, this is just to give me an Idea of what I can possibly squeeze out of this thing. I’ll most likely poke around on eBay until I find a heatsink that looks about right.
I might make one, but I would like it to have a heatpipe.
Oh my gosh, I just took everything back apart and put the stock heat spreader on trying to troubleshoot why it kept crashing everytime I hit the start menu, and it was the micro USB cord I was using for power. Hahahahaha
I’m just glad I didn’t break this too. Time to do all
mods again.
Fortunately I got a couple female USB type-c plugs to put on this thing when I’m working on it’s final form.
Guess while I have it apart here it is next to a Pi 3.
Holly crap. It can play Black Ops 2 with what I’d consider to be almost a reasonable experience! Average 33fps, but there is something funny going on because there’s really bad input delay. I think it’s this screen because it has some auto upscaling nonsense in it.
I’m looking into using other screens right now like an OLED phone screen, but the control board is kinda large.
Here’s the CoD gameplay. Notice the GPU is the bottleneck instead of the CPU this time.
(sorry I forgot to set the ISO so it’s really washed out)
Thanks for the input! I am looking for capacitive touch, and it seems it’s often built into these MIPI displays. Trying to figure out how to use it with windows. I remember seeing similar overly touch panels with capacitive touch, so I might have to go that direction.
You will almost certainly end up with PenTile in that case unless you get one of the very few OLEDs like the Note 2 screen. I am not sure how windows or the controller would deal with this or if it can at all without being a mess, after all it will be missing a good chunk of one of the subpixels, usually blue. Worth looking into before putting money down.
)
