Temperatures, Cooling and Noise

Origin has packed lots of computing power into the EON17-S and has even gone as far as to overclock the already powerful and power hungry hardware. This means they have a lot of heat to deal with and the results show that they do an elegant job of this in some respects.

The EON17-S does a great job of keeping the heat away from the user, an important aspect when someone is going to be gaming on this machine for hours at a time. It's especially important to keep the heat away from the keyboard.

As you can see, on the front of the system, we logged a maximum temperature of 93 degrees Fahrenheit. It should be noted that this max temperature was located directly over the WASD keys.

Moving around to the back side, temperatures were higher. The maximum observed temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit. While you probably don't want prolonged exposure to your skin at that temperature, this machine certainly shouldn't have any issues being used on a lap if it's not fully loaded.

The maximum observed GPU temperature was 81 degrees Celsius, a temperature well within the limits for a video card. The CPU reached a maximum of 103 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the chip starts to throttle performance so as to not destroy itself. However, most games won't be stressing the CPU nearly as hard as Prime95, so it shouldn't be too much of a problem.

The EON17-S produced a sound level of 53 decibels in our measurement. This is the loudest system we've tested. Our measurement is taken in front of the laptop at roughly head level. For comparison, 30dB is a totally quiet night time in the desert, 40dB is whispering, and 60dB is a normal conversation.