17-inch gaming laptops are one big compromise

By Ina L. McManus in Gaming November 13, 2019

My favorite English phrase, and one of the first I ever found out, is “games.” Some of my happiest youth reminiscences are of chasing down.Exe sport documents on DOS-powered Pravetz computers in my native Bulgaria at some stage in the ‘90s. The specifics will range with absolutely everyone, but I believe most Verge readers my age and younger have grown up with video games as a vital and inextricable a part of their existence. And as the ones lives become greater cell, we obviously want to take the ones games with us, that’s where portable consoles, smartphones, capsules, and gaming laptops all come into play. Today I want to speak approximately the latter of those, the laptop, and the way it fares in its quest to make Pc gaming mobile.

EVGA, a hardware organisation pleasant known for a successful line of Nvidia pics cards — and my favorite alien mouse — this year launched its first foray into designing and constructing entire computer systems with its powerful 17-inch SC17 laptop. Needless to mention, it’s a gaming powerhouse, touting a 4K display, a 2.7GHz Middle i7-6820HK processor, 32GB of RAM, and a GTX 980M graphics card. I’ve placed it through its paces with stressful video games like the Witcher 3 and Battlefield four and it’s barely broken a sweat, and what’s greater, EVGA has just delivered a model of this pc with a GeForce GTX 1070 inside it (now not a cellular version, the actual desktop card). So can you recreation in this aspect? Hell yes. however then for $2,499, it had higher be able to run Crysis like Usain Bolt handles sprints.

EVGA SC17: Full specs and functions

The exciting questions about the SC17 relate to its practicality, now not its overall performance. This pc weighs a Complete 10lbs (four.5kg), the equivalent of 5 Asus ZenBook 3s or ten nine.7-inch iPad Pros, and I’ve felt the full heft of it on every occasion I’ve attempted to move it. Now, that’s now not for nothing, because the SC17 is encased in a severely difficult aluminum unibody shell that offers it protection, stress, and long-time period durability. I just can’t name this a transportable laptop in any meaningful sense. It qualifies as portable, however then so do all-in-one Computers, that have some of ergonomic blessings and don’t come with the equal miniaturization top class as a laptop.

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To test both my stamina and the SC17’s mobility, I took it on an experience again to Bulgaria at the start of this month. The primary difficulty I encountered was that none of my techie backpacks should accommodate this Computer, so I needed to use a small suitcase instead (Ed. note: LOL). EVGA is addressing this ache point head-on with the aid of now offering a free backpack with purchases of the computer. And another helpful contact from the corporation is the layout of its 240W energy adapter, that’s huge and lengthy, however also quick — so it packs flat instead of fat. All the same, I locate those to be the handiest moderate mitigations to the pervasive issue of this computer’s size and weight. Even transferring it between rooms is a complicated activity that requires planning and clearing out a big enough landing spot.

A large computer THAT HAS All the energy YOU Want, but no longer THE ERGONOMICS

Once at home in Bulgaria, I found out just how many diversifications I’d made at the same time as trying out the SC17 lower back in London. The first element I did become elevate it on a pc stand, because as nice because the 4K display may look — bonus factors for being matte! — it’s anchored to the keyboard and that places it too low on my laptop for top of the line ergonomics. however then whilst I’ve the Computer on the stand, the keyboard is faraway from me, so I have to connect an outside one. A mouse is any other ought to for any midway-critical Laptop gaming, in order that figures on the list of important add-ons, too. And then catastrophe strikes once I find that simply plugging in my simple peripherals occupies the two normal USB ports and if I have something extra like a gaming headset that connects thru USB, I’d higher hope I have a USB-C adapter accessible. EVGA gives one but I left it in London, and that’s actually the crux of the trouble: you wind up wanting extra external accessories with this large machine than you do with the famously connector-starved Apple MacBook. No SD card slot right here either.

Two other problems abate the SC17’s usability, which is probably easily anticipated given its emphasis on high overall performance: warmth and noise. I had first of all hoped to have the ability To check playing on this Pc with its very own keyboard, however that dream become dashed while its wrist rest heated up to an uncomfortably excessive temperature. The fan additionally grows annoyingly loud for the duration of longer gaming periods, so the only choice is to play with headphones. That’s a shame, frankly, due to the fact the SC17’s loudspeakers are truly pretty respectable and provide reasonable spatial imaging.

BATTERY lifestyles, warmth, AND NOISE: THE Eternal FOES OF cellular GAMING MACHINES

In the warmness of the Bulgarian summer season, I genuinely couldn’t tolerate the SC17’s furnace-like operation to trouble with gambling any video games. This pc has top-notch reserves of electricity and performance, and it boots in an on the spot, but I’m dissuaded from tapping its Full potential due to the compromises it demands from me. I restrained my excursion use of the SC17 to watching Valve’s Dota 2 tournaments on Twitch and YouTube, which I may want to have performed a good deal more simply on an iPad. I did attempt the use of EVGA’s laptop in mattress, and I’m able to verify that it’s possible, but I wouldn’t suggest everybody else to test in that manner. You don’t need to doze off and feature a 10lb slab of tough metal touchdown to your nose.

I experience torn approximately the SC17, because I see a few excellent and smart engineering at paintings, however for each upside there appears to be a corresponding drawback. The keyboard is spacious, has a nicely extended key travel and excellent tactile feel, however it’s matched to a poorly appearing Synaptics touchpad that appears unwilling to keep in mind my scrolling alternatives. The display is the undisputed highlight of the SC17, providing rich, barely boosted saturation and exemplary viewing angles, but then it suffers from lingering scaling problems in Windows that imply a few UI factors (together with Steam overlays and Logitech’s Gaming Software program) seem unusably tiny while running in Full 4K decision. Need I also relate the reality that all the almighty overall performance of the SC17 comes at the dire cost of battery existence? Even if I’m now not doing something extra than browsing the net, this system’s battery by no means threatens to remaining longer than four hours.