With GPUs now out of range courtesy a sharp increase in their demand, one cannot simply afford a gaming PC even when they once did. Though, what if there was a laptop with a built-in dedicated graphics card, eliminating the need for buying a separate GPU altogether? Yes, you heard that right, the Origin Eon 17 SLX is one such laptop which offers what gamers crave for.

Origin is quite popular for cramming everything they can into a laptop chassis, making a laptop, the gaming power horse. With a Skylake Core i7 processor and a Nvidia chip as the dedicated GPU, the laptop can surely handle. The Nvidia G-Sync display offers crisp quality, while the audio is worth listening to. The SSD drive used is perhaps one of the fastest right now.

Furthermore, laptop supports Virtual Reality as well, so you are future proof for that matter. Although it might be a burden to carry this laptop around, as this weighs a lot, so do many other gaming laptops. At least you can still carry it around rather than a desktop which you obviously can’t.

Design

Origin knows what the customers want, therefore they opted to refresh the design of their EON laptop so that it doesn’t look like the outdated-year-old model. At the rear, there are black metallic honeycomb vents, so that the laptop with all its heat generating specifications, doesn’t get hot. Although the laptop is offered in black metallic color, you can always get it in a colored metal of your choice for $225. In case, you want everything done out of the factory, you can get the company’s stock paint jobs for $299.

In case you want a custom paint job by Origin PC, you can get that at a lower price; for $ 200.

There isn’t the usual black, soft touch finish with the blood red Origin PC insignia, but there are a rather simplistic black plastic and a chalk white symbol. Though, competing with Alienware, the laptop does have a pair of customizable backlit LEDs. Although of course, the laptop isn’t at par with Alienware when it comes to design since it is a little bit shy of what gamers may be looking for.

As for the weight, it weighs a lot, i.e. around 10.5 pounds; Not something you can carry around all day. Measuring 16.8 x 12 x 1.8 inches, the laptop is perhaps one of the heaviest 17-inch gaming laptops in town. The Acer Predator 17, weighing 9.2 pounds, or the Asus G751JY and MSI GT72 Dominator Pro Dragon weighing equally 8.4 pounds or the Alienware 17 at a recorded weight of 8 pounds is no match for a laptop whose weight is halfway between the 10 and 11-pound mark.

Display

Since the display is a matte one, you shouldn’t be worried about glares. Although usually matte displays aren’t so vivid, the Eon 17- SLX handles vividness perfectly courtesy its whopping screen resolution of 1920 x 1080, and that in a 17.3-inch panel. The laptop display does manage to produce deep hues and too while observing sharp detail.

sRGB gamut is one thing gamers look for, and EON-17-SLX can make that 114 percent! This essentially means that the laptop display is able to differentiate between a lot more colors than usual. Compared with other gaming laptops in the industry, the Eon 17 –SLX has a lead over Asus G751JY and its own desktop replacement. Though it is below par when it comes to Alienware 17’s 174 percent sRGB gamut. Still, at 114 percent, it is a gamer’s dream.

The laptop has a pretty good color accuracy too, with a score of 0.87 on the Delta E-test, while on the brightness side of things, the laptop beats even the Alienware 17 with 275 nits, though still falling out on the category average of 293 nits.

Keyboard and TouchPad

There is a slight curve along the keyboard and along with a key travel of 1.89 millimeters, your typing speed could improve a lot using this keyboard. This is also because only 62 grams of actuation force is required to press a key. Although, you might find the right shift key to be a bit small.

The best thing is that the keyboard can emit lights of your choice.

Another great thing about the laptop is its 4.2 x 2.4 inch Synaptics touchpad. Therefore there is enough space for you to perform gestures, all of which are pretty responsive.

There is also a fingerprint scanner, with the discrete mouse buttons on the trackpad. This can come in handy if you want to unlock your laptop quickly.

Ports

When it comes to ports, you will find a plethora of them on either side of the laptop. On the right side, there is a USB 3.0 port, a USB 3.1 Type-C port, a 2-in-1 card reader, two mini DisplayPorts and a secure lock slot. While on the left side of things, there are 3 USB 3.0 ports, and instead of just one, two Gigabit  Ethernet ports. There are the usual jacks for microphone, headphones as well. Those who want to connect an S/PDIF peripheral, there is a jack for that as well along with an amp.

In case you were wondering, where the laptop’s another USB 3.0 port, coupled with an HDMI port and the most important power jack was, well no surprises, they are on the laptop’s rear.

Battery Life

It is true that most gaming laptops don’t last out long when it comes to batteries. You would need to be near a wall outlet most of the time if you plan on using the laptop often. The laptop lasts a meager 2 hours and 54 minutes before its battery is depleted completely. This was over continuous Web-surfing while using the Wi-Fi at a brightness level of 100 nits.  That’s way below for other gaming laptops in the industry.

Though if you are buying the laptop for gaming purposes in the first place, then probably you would have set up some desk space for gaming as well, so it shouldn’t be a problem connecting the laptop to power every time once you have set up your gaming environment.

Price and Configurations

The base model Eon-17 SLX would cost you $2,093, which would be powered by a 3.2-GHz Intel Core i5-6500 CPU, 8GB of RAM, a 250GB SSD and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M GPU with 6GB of VRAM.

In case you want even more you can always spend extra, for instance for $3,382 you would be getting a laptop with a 4-GHz quad-core Intel Core i7-6700K processor with 16GB of RAM, a 256GB m.2 SSD with a 1TB solid-state hybrid drive and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 GPU with 8GB of VRAM.

Considering that most gaming laptops do cost a lot, so the price level is justified. If you have that amount of money lying around, then you should probably go and buy this laptop right now.