A unique new modular Nvidia RTX 4060 laptop has just been unveiled, which could potentially enable you to upgrade the graphics card. Rather than integrating all of the components onto a single board, the new Firebat Huan 16 Air gaming laptop showcases a new design that separates the GeForce RTX GPU onto a separate board from the rest of the components.
The best gaming laptop designs might be powerful enough, but upgrades are usually restricted. Sure, you can switch out the odd SSD, but switching to a better Nvidia GPU is usually off the cards, with the graphics hardware typically soldered directly onto the motherboard, or integrated into the CPU itself, as with AMD’s APUs. This modular laptop design used by the Firebat, however, could change all that.
This Firebat laptop, which was spotted by Videocardz, uses a special chassis from another Chinese manufacturer called Tongfang labeled as a GX 2.0 modular design. The laptop’s motherboard contains most of the main components, including an AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS CPU, while the Nvidia GPU sits separately on an independent board, connecting with the motherboard using a specialist connector.
Despite the additional space, this proof-of-concept laptop itself is quite slim, with a thickness of just 0.71 inches, and a weight of 4.37lbs. It has several USB ports (both Type-A and Type-C) and includes both HDMI 2.1 and Mini DisplayPort 1.4 connections.
While there’s nothing from Firebat directly about this laptop’s particular upgradability, the design itself would strongly suggest that it’s possible, while also giving the manufacturer an easy way to create versions of the machine with different GPUs. The problem, of course, will be the lack of widely available compatible graphics cards – you can’t just throw a desktop-sized card in here. This is just one laptop, but Tongfang’s efforts could suggest that it might be trying to entice other manufacturers into using its GX 2.0 design for their laptops.
Modular laptops like this one are rare, but not unprecedented, with Framework’s laptops being popular models. Dell has also experimented with a concept modular laptop in the past, but it didn’t bring it to full production. The inability to upgrade the core components in your laptop is one of the key factors behind their obsolescence, and the ability to change the GPU would make it easier to keep a gaming laptop for longer without needing to replace it, reducing e-waste in the process.
This Firebat Huan 16 Air gaming laptop is available from Chinese retailer JD for around 5,599 Yuan, or $780, making it a pretty affordable option if you can pick one up. There’s no information about a release outside of China, but let’s hope that some GX 2.0 modular laptops like this one find their way across to Western gamers in the near future.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for the best budget gaming laptop, check out this Asus TUF RTX 4070 laptop deal, which enables you to get a new machine with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU for just $999.99, and will be great for playing the latest games with ray tracing enabled.