Hands-On Look at the MaCase B21, a DIY Rugged Briefcase Laptop

If you’ve always wanted to build a rugged briefcase laptop, there’s the MaCase B21. This $400+ ‘military chassis’ includes a keyboard, 300W PSU, 16.1″ LCD, 4B of DDR3 RAM, a G1630 CPU, and a 500GB hard drive, all in a package that weighs in at nearly 18-pounds.

Linus decided to equip his MaCase B21 with an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X 3D processor, a Gigabyte AORUS B6501 Ultra gaming motherboard, a Noctua NH-L12S cooler, 32GB of G.Skill Ripjaws S5 DDR5-6000 RAM, an NVIDIA RTX 4070 graphics card, and a SilverStone FX600 Platinum power supply. Let’s just say that things can get a bit warm, but for the price, it’s definitely worth a second look. Interested? You can find several sellers on Aliexpress offering various configurations, with some being just the barebones briefcase chassis.