EVGA SC17 1070
This powerhouse will power through your bank account
PRICE $ 4,299 www.evga.com EVGA
is better known for its close relationship with Nvidia in Australia, so it was with great interest that we accepted an invitation to check out this chunky 17-inch gaming laptop from the brand. EVGA is renowned for being a premium brand, so we were expecting a rather hefty price tag… just not quite this pricey.
Weighing in at a hefty 3.7kg, it’s not the kind of machine you want to stuff in your backpack. This is largely due to its size, based around that whopping 17.3-inch display. It’s a full-blown 4K panel, and we have to hand out praise where it’s due – this is one o f the sexiest 4K panels we’ve seen. There’s no motion blur whatsoever despite being based on IPS technology, though it’s a shame there’s no G-sync support at this price point.
The chassis is a beautiful black aluminium unibody design, with a full sized keyboard and numpad. We have to say that the touchpad is one of the worst we’ve ever used though, in both its accuracy and the responsiveness of the buttons. Due to the large size of the unit there’s an absolute boat-load of I/O options, far too many to mention here. It’s great to see EVGA have included a USB 3.1 Type-C to Type-A adaptor, as well as a splitter that allows you to plug a separate mic and headphone cable into the single audio 3.5mm input/ output; most laptops require the user to buy this separately.
EVGA is promoting this as one of the world’s first truly overclockable laptops. The Intel Core i7 6820 HK CPU is multiplier unlocked, and can be tweaked via the EVGA software, or even simply by using shortcut keys on the keyboard.
we managed to get its quad-cores running at 4GHz, though paid a 5dB price in fan noise in the process
At default it runs at just 3.6GHz, which seems rather lowly for a machine of this price; we managed to get its quadcores running at 4GHz, though paid a 5dB price in fan noise in the process. 32GB of G.Skill DDR4-2666MHz is bucketloads, while the small size of the 256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD is offset by the inclusion of a secondary 1TB mechanical hard drive.
Finally we have Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 mobile GPU. As you can see from the benchmarks, it’s a speed demon, but for this price we really expected a faster CPU and GPU. When compared to the likes of Metabox or Aorus, this machine feels about a grand too expensive, despite the exquisite build quality and 4K display. Thankfully we’ve seen one store offering this machine for $3,799 ( www.mwave.com. au) which makes it more palatable. If you can manage to get it at this price point, it’s a better value proposition, yet is still a little more expensive than more powerful laptops. BENNETT RING
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