OriginPC's EON17-X Laptop Review, a modern mobile(ish) marvel?

Introduction

OriginPC has been in the business of making gaming focused laptops (and desktops) since 2009 when the founders of OriginPC made their exit from another well-known PC company. They've been seeking out the best way to provide consumers and enthusiasts alike custom pre-built PC services that check all of the boxes that we want in buying a ready-made, or made-to-order PC.

They've expanded heavily into the laptop market, using the best ODM's available that can provide the mixture of power, performance, and good looks. That hasn't always been the best combination of components in the past, but more pressure from companies like OriginPC and better availability means that we get our choice of fantastic machines, of which we have here on the test bench. The EON17-X is no ordinary laptop, either, with a very fast desktop CPU, room for copious amounts of RAM, and the second best mobile GPU that money can buy (and they have a laptop that offers it all, too).

You'd be excused if you mistook this beast of a machine for a portable laptop. It's portable in the sense that you can unplug it and take it with you. It's also far smaller than you'd probably expect. But this isn't something you'll be pulling out on the bus to get a few lines of your next great American novel written. This is a massive machine that's almost the epitome of "mobile" performance. Here, mobile is defined as the ability to take the machine with you to set up in a static place. In fact, as a gaming machine this excels, but more surprisingly is how useful the EON17-X becomes when you consider it as more than just a mobile gaming powerhouse. This is indeed a desktop replacement in more ways than one, and the CPU inside is valuable given the CPU limited workloads you might encounter as a developer or researcher.

Availability & Price

The EON17-X is available directly from OriginPC's website and can be custom configured in a variety of different ways. Their website and customization pages are well-thought out and easy to navigate. There are ready to ship models available, or custom orders that can take weeks to months to assemble depending on availability of everything you select. Customizing the case can add more wait time, of course.

The starting price of the EON17-X is $1823, with a non-NVIDIA G-Sync display, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M, a desktop Socket 1151 Intel Core i5-6500, 8GB of DDR4 2133, and a 500GB 7200RPM HDD. As configured here, it's $2714, but has an overclocked Core i7-6700K and a 980M underneath. Configurations can top out at around $3683, but that's with an OriginPC paint job on the exterior, G-Sync, 64GB of DDR4 2400, a 512GB PCIe m.2 drive, and more storage than you'll likely need in a laptop, even a desktop replacement such as this.