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Today we’ve got Origin’s massive EON17-S gaming laptop in the lab. This beast of a machine is one of the most powerful laptops on the market and has blown through our benchmarks with lightning speed. The EON17-S is styled similarly to the EON11-S that we reviewed last week. Save for a difference in size and performance, the two are very similar. Both have excellent build quality and performance packed into a mobile chassis. The EON17-S is the big brother of the EON11-S. It features a massive 17-inch screen, compact Laptop Keyboard and features that put my desktop system to shame. Let’s take a look at the specifications and how it does in our benchmarks. 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 Laptop 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. Keyboard and TouchPad The EON17-S has a keyboard that attempts to emulate the island-style keyboard without actually being an island-style keyboard. As you can see in the picture above, the keys do not have any space in between them. Instead, the caps are raised in the middle to give the appearance of an island-style keyboard like the HP Pavilion DV7-6197 (Black Frame) Keyboard . While it isn’t an island-style keyboard, I’m still able to type accurately and with good pace. The keyboard is comfortable and provides a nice typing experience. The keyboard also comes with a customizable backlight. The backlight can be changed through a range of colors and set to do different actions. It can pulse, rainbow, waterfall, and numerous other cool effects. During testing, I had the backlight set to a rainbow color scheme with the each zone of color a different color of the rainbow. The keys have a good amount of travel and bottom out without making too much noise, even when flying across the keys. They feature a very mild grainy texture. There seems to be no flex across the entire keyboard, a good sign of the system’s build quality like the HP Pavilion DV7-6197 (Black Frame) Keyboard . The keys should be able to take a pounding without failing. The touchpad is a three-piece assembly. The touchpad portion and click buttons are three different pieces. The left and right click buttons are two separate pieces of textured plastic, which is different that the surrounding brushed aluminum texture. The left and right click are separated by a fingerprint reader in the middle. The Laptop Keyboard and touch-sensitive area of the touchpad has a slightly different texture than the surrounding material and is marginally less “sticky.” This allows your finger to move easier when trying to move the cursor. Accessory Port Testing Ports to which an external storage device can be connected to are tested using HD Tune Pro to obtain their maximum, minimum and average read and write speeds. USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and eSATA ports are tested using a Corsair Neutron GTX 240GB SSD that is capable of saturating the theoretical bandwidth available. The Corsair Neutron GTX is housed inside an Icy Dock external enclosure which features a SATA I/II/III to USB 3.0 and eSATA converter.
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