Origin PC Eon17-SLX (GeForce 980) review: A gaming beast that's ready for VR

Gaming laptops have come a long way over the past few years, but the vast majority of even top-end models are not ready for prime time when it comes to the next hot topic in PC gaming -- virtual reality. Origin PC is one of the very first PC makers to shoehorn the required desktop PC technology into a (somewhat) portable laptop body. For anyone interested in upcoming VR hardware such as the Oculus Rift, a desktop/laptop hybrid like the Origin PC Eon17-SLX fills this very specific hardware need.

8.2

Origin PC Eon17-SLX (GeForce 980)

The Good

This is a laptop stuffed with desktop parts, including an overclocked processor and the type of desktop graphics card VR systems such as Oculus Rift require. It's highly configurable, and very powerful.

The Bad

The generic body is clunky and ugly, especially considering the price. A VR-ready configuration costs a lot. The keyboard, touchpad and display are all merely OK.

The Bottom Line

The Origin PC Eon17-SLX is very expensive, and none too pretty, but also one of the only gaming laptops with the specialized components needed for VR hardware such as the Oculus Rift.

Having desktop-level power in a laptop is something PC makers have been chasing for years. There was a time when serious PC gamers laughed at the poor schmoes playing on so-called "gaming laptops." These devices, no matter how heavy and bulky, just couldn't keep up with even midlevel desktop computers with half-decent graphics cards installed.

But PC makers and component companies have spent the past several years building laptop gaming hardware into legitimate platform for games from casual to hardcore. In particular, systems with Nvidia's GeForce 980M GPU, which we started seeing in the fall of 2014, are more than powerful enough to play any new game at full HD resolution (1,920x1,080 pixels) and high detail settings. Decent designs, from HP, Razer, MSI and others have also made some of these gaming laptops slightly more portable, and definitely more presentable, which is especially important for system that need to do double-duty as work or family machines, not just game centers.

Those with higher-resolution ambitions and bottomless pockets can always go for a fully tricked-out desktop with up to three Nvidia Titan X cards, but for everyone else, a standard gaming laptop with an Nvidia 900-series graphics card will do.

So, problem solved, and nothing more needs to be said on the subject, right?

Unless, of course, all this talk about virtual reality has started to take hold. The first generation of modern PC-based VR hardware is almost here, including the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, and PC gamers are a prime audience for these devices. Try hooking up a brand-new $600 Oculus Rift headset to most gaming laptops, no matter how expensive, and it's just not going to work. Try the official Oculus Rift Compatibility Tool and see.

That's because of a quirk in the Oculus Rift system requirements (the hardware requirements for the HTC Vive have not been announced yet, but they will likely be very similar). A desktop graphics card, rather than a mobile one, is required. By way of a simplified explanation, it's not merely because of the graphics horsepower, but also because of how mobile graphics cards send their video signal, which travels through the integrated graphics system on the way to the HDMI port, and that extra step doesn't play nice with the first-gen Oculus Rift hardware.

Fortunately, Nvidia found a way to squeeze a shrunken-down version of the popular GeForce 980 desktop graphics card into a laptop. A handful of PC makers are building systems around this now, and the first one we've tested and reviewed is the Origin PC Eon17-SLX. Both Origin PC and others have occasionally slipped a desktop CPU into thick, bulky laptop body in the past, but this is the first time we're seeing a desktop GPU inside a laptop (some laptops, including models from Dell and Asus, as well as the upcoming Razer Blade Stealth, offer options for connecting desktop graphics cards housed in external add-on boxes).

Oculus calls systems from its official PC partners "Oculus Ready PCs," while Origin PC labels this system as "VR Ready." No doubt we'll see many subtle shadings of these terms over the course of this year.

The basic takeaway here is, anyone who wants to use a new Oculus Rift on a laptop is going to need to make a significant investment. The current Eon17-SLX starts at $2,101 (roughly £1,440 or AU$2,934), but that's for a version with a mobile GPU, the Nvidia GeForce 970M. Moving up to the desktop version of the GeForce 980 jumps the price to $2,824. All configurations include a desktop CPU, either Core i5 or Core i7. The exact configuration tested here includes the desktop 980 GPU, an overclocked Intel Core i7 6700K desktop CPU and a combination of 256GB of solid-state storage and a 1TB hard drive, for $3,505 (£2,402). The lesson? Being an early adopter in the world of virtual reality is going to cost. (The closest configuration available in Australia will set back around AU$5,500.)

Not sold on Oculus or its competitors? This is still the most powerful gaming laptop we've tested, thanks to the powerful desktop parts hidden inside its massive black chassis. But, it requires a commitment to taking on a 10-pound (4.5kg) laptop, and that's without the massive power brick. To call the Eon17-SLX portable is a stretch, but you could carry it from room to room at home easily, or very occasionally pack it in a (large) backpack for a trip. But this is a laptop that's meant to stay in one place, tethered to the wall, for most of its life.

The reason for the somewhat clunky overall design and generic keyboard/touchpad combo is that this is a mass-produced laptop chassis that speciality PC builders such as Origin PC buy and fill with custom components, often carefully tweaked and overclocked. Only a handful of companies can afford to design and produce their own laptop bodies, although Origin PC has a couple of custom desktop chassis that are very well-designed. What you get, instead of a custom laptop body, is wide component selection, and expert assembly, tweaking and overlocking, and a very hands-on level of service and support.

Performance and gaming

The parts inside the Eon17-SLX can handle 4K gaming with ease, but the 17.3-inch display here has a 1,920x1,080 resolution. It has a pleasing matte finish, so there's minimal glare, but for real room-filling views, sending the video output to a big 4K TV would be fun. One cool thing that is included in the built-in display is support for Nvidia's G-Sync. This is a technology that helps the GPU and display refresh rate sync up perfectly, so the graphics card spits out a frame of animation only when the display is ready to show it -- that saves GPU processing power and makes for a very smooth look while gaming, with no screen tearing. G-Sync is explained in more detail here.

It should come as no surprise that this laptop is faster at both application and game performance than other high-end gaming laptops we've tested recently. This is truly a hybrid product with the body of a laptop and the brains of a desktop. What's more, Origin PC has overclocked the CPU -- something seen frequently on gaming desktops but only occasionally on laptops, in this case up to 4.5GHz. It's almost unfair launching a newish game such as Fallout 4 (which honestly isn't that much of a hardware-pushing game) and cranking the details levels up to Ultra. A standard gaming laptop with an Nvidia 980M card can handle that, so there's nothing new to be seen here. But at higher resolutions like 4K, the extra power comes into play.

Battery life is nothing to write home about, but that's a given going into a power-hungry system such as this. With such a large body, there's actually room for big battery, so this system ran for 2 hours, 29 minutes on our streaming video playback battery test, which is not much different than some of the gaming laptops with mobile GPUs and CPUs we've tested. Actual on-battery gaming time, depending on the game and settings, would be about an hour or so at most.

Conclusion

What the Eon17-SLX offers is two distinct advantages. First, it's future-proofed against at least the next few holiday seasons of new PC games, so it'll be several years before it feels old (today, even laptops with the older, slower Nvidia 860M chip still play most games decently). Second, it's one of the more convenient, if not price-conscious, ways to get ready for the oncoming virtual-reality onslaught. And if $600 for a largely unproven VR headset isn't a big deal for you, then $3,000/AU$5,500 or more in gaming hardware might not be, either.