Origin EON17-SLX
Desktop power, minus the desktop
WE’VE BEEN EVALUATING a lot of lowerpowered laptops in the last few months. Well, in relative terms at least. You can get a lot of mileage out of a GTX 1060 or 1070-powered mid-tier laptop, especially if all you’re interested in is gaming at 1080p. But for gaming at 4K, and benchmarks that match up to high-end desktops, you’re going to need something more.
The EON17-SLX from Origin PC is just that—all the components and performance of a top-end desktop PC crammed into a portable machine. Sure, it’s heavy and bulky for a laptop, weighing 12 pounds (not including the two 330W power bricks) and measuring just shy of two inches thick, but that’s to be expected, considering the components inside.
Let’s start with the CPU. The EON17SLX we tested opts for a desktop-class Intel Core i7-7700K clocked at 4.2GHz. Combined with 32GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, the EON17 scored some of the highest benchmarks we’ve ever seen for a laptop. In Cinebench R15, the EON17 scored 893, which blows out our (admittedly outof-date) laptop zero-point, and nearly matches the bar for desktops. TechARP’s x264 told a similar story: 19.76 blows out the laptop competition, and nearly matches some of the best desktops we’ve tested.
Storage is also an area where the EON17-SLX excels, because its primary storage is handled by a super-fast 512GB Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSD—more than enough for the OS and several large triple-A games. If that’s not enough, the 960 Pro is backed up by a 2TB Seagate FireCuda flash-accelerated HDD. That’s a ton of snappy storage space that makes the EON17 an excellent mobile workstation. TWO FOR THE ROAD Now let’s talk games. For pixel-pushing, the EON17-SLX packs two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080s—the kind of hardware that makes gaming at 1080p seem rather pointless. Nonetheless, we conduct our gaming benchmarks at 1080p, so bear with us as we go through some numbers we would classify as “overkill.”
FarCryPrimal was the EON17’s weakest showing, with a frames-per-second score of only 91 in the game’s built-in benchmark. That’s still a good 20–30fps higher than most laptops we’ve tested, but not especially impressive compared to desktop hardware. TheDivision was a different story, with the EON17’s 137fps nearly doubling the desktop zero-point. We saw the same thing in Riseof the TombRaider, where the EON17 scored an average of 115fps across the game’s threepart benchmark (163fps in the Mountain Pass, 101fps in Syria, and 80fps in the Geothermal Valley)—much higher than both our laptop and desktop zero-points. 3DMark Fire Strike returned a score of 24,498—similarly impressive, even by desktop standards.
Like we said, it’s overkill for 1080p. But what about 4K? Origin’s EON17-SLX is available in 1080p, 1440p with 120Hz refresh rate, or 4K at 60Hz refresh variants, all with G-Sync. The unit we tested was the 4K variant, which seems the most apt for a GTX 1080 SLI loadout—especially considering that SLI doesn’t always play nice at 1080p.
The pair of cards performed handily at 2160p, maintaining average frame rates above 60fps in every gaming benchmark we performed. Riseof the TombRaider returned scores of 94fps in the Mountain Pass, 71fps in Syria, and 70fps in the Geothermal Valley, for an average of 79fps. Similarly impressive, FarC ryP rimal and TheDivision scored 75fps and 64fps, respectively. Of course, laptop or not, most top-end gaming rigs that offer that sort of performance come with a price tag to match. The EON17-SLX is no different, coming in at a few hundred dollars shy of five grand for the unit we tested. That’s a big pile of cash—but, hey, you can’t take it with you. The EON17, you can. –