Gadgetory

normally I would look at a product as complex as a laptop from a new player and draw either of these conclusions one that they've simply rebadged someone else's probably mediocre be level design unless they paid huge money for an exclusive or two that they did a horrible job on it due to their inexperience EVGA has the potential though to be different while they have done and continue to pretty much apply colorful boxes and stickers to third party designs like oh I don't know this one they also have a deeply experienced motherboard electrical and software design team giving them way more applicable engineering street cred than someone like Razer who's surprised I think everyone over the last four years by bursting onto the scene and demonstrating that there is still room for a newcomer to shake things up in this category but is EVGA walking down that same path to success or is it all just theoretically I guess it makes more sense than it at first glance appeared to there's only one way to find out intel skull canyon nook features a 6th generation Core i7 quad-core processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more at the link in the video description opening up the SC 17 we get pretty much the entire guts laid out before us with none of the configurable or upgradable components trickily hiding under the keyboard or anything like that my config has a 256 gig sm 951 nvme SSD accompanied by a one terabyte hard drive notably a nine millimeter thick one haven't seen one of those in a while it's got an Intel 82 sixty and GW wireless card and a seventy four and a half watt hour battery which is well-positioned for reducing sweaty palm syndrome directly under the touchpad which is fortunate because the top of the laptop does get quite toasty up towards the screen moving on to the rest unlike this sager unit that we reviewed a while back that featured a desktop gtx 980 video card a desktop core i7 6700 K four sodium's lots for memory expansion and all the cooling to go with it EVGA has gone for a purely mobile device based design around a 45 watt core i7 6820 HK BGA cpu so that means it's soldered directly to the motherboard with a mere two sodium slots though thanks to ddr4 Zim proved density they've packed 32 gigs of 26 66 megahertz ran into them and even gone as far as to bake the gtx 980m Mobile GPU directly onto the main board rather than opting for an annex an add-in card this seems to have directly contributed to the SC 17s slimmer than most 17-inch gaming notebooks design the size of which should be pretty easy to gauge looking at the relative size of the two a type USB 3 and single C type USB 3.1 and headphone jacks on the right as well as the until Gigabit LAN HDMI 1.4 normal mini DisplayPort and gsync ready mini DisplayPort on the Left alright then while it is slimmer and then many other 17 inch class gaming behemoths it's still bigger and very dense feeling compared to an A or a sex 7 why well first and foremost because EVGA has chosen tank-like construction over portability and while they seemed to have brute forced it a little I mean that bottom cover has to be the thickest that I have ever seen they definitely achieved their goal the machined aluminum chassis has less flex with its bottom cover removed than most laptops this size that I've encountered that are fully assembled and I have never seen a 17 inch laptop with a screen with this little flex like holy actual and this approach carries over to cooling as well with four heat pipes carrying heat away from the CPU and GPU toward a total of four heatsink Finn arrays that are fed by a pair of large blower style fans they intake air from the bottom of the unit right next to this beefy rubber heel that pulls double duty adding a subtle angle to the keyboard and cleverly ensuring that there's enough clearance on the bottom of the device for ample airflow and it works pretty well I would like for EVGA to tune their fan ramping logic which can make these sharp adjustments as often as every 5 to 10 seconds while gaming but at 70 degrees under low tonight at 64 on the CPU and about the same on the GPU while running unige in heaven even while overclocked by 76 megahertz I can't really complain though it should be noted that the CPU got quite a bit hotter at about 90 degrees Celsius with the canned 3.8 gigahertz all core overclocked and while this use 3 screws in place of every nail approach in spite of EVGA s efforts to engineer a flatter power brick that slides into your bag more easily does not improve the thoth ability of the SC 17 what it does do is sidestep the trap that many newcomers and even many multinationals fall into where they either to save weight or material cost managed to build devices out of aluminum and corning glass and still have them feel kind cheap so I think there's a lot of merit to this approach especially for a 17-inch gaming device where realistically were you going to be carting it around to class every day anyway not for the keyboard unfortunately while I think they did a good job of the touchpad it's got a slightly heavy click but zero noticeable latency and flawless 200 operation are the highlights here the keyboard tuning needs some work iMHO the 5 level backlight is good the layout is fine other than using prime hotkey space on the up and down arrows for switching over clocks instead of page up and down and it's not like there's keycap wobble or anything like that but the top of each stroke is stiff while the bottoming out is spongy and the spacebar in particular is so mushy that I actually found myself misfiring fairly frequently let's talk screen now EVGA puzzlingly equips the SC 17 with a 4k 60 hertz IPS panel from sharp that manages great color fantastic contrast with a non distracting amount of motion blur actually very little backlight bleed as well sounds great Linus why is that puzzling because the 980m even with EVGA shockingly smooth pre-configured overclock for the CPU and GPU in their precision X software and this is mind-bending they're full fat enthusiasts grade BIOS level overclocking features with like mouse support clear CMOS button and all that you know just like a desktop just is not really capable of driving triple-a titles at 4k with high details not today and definitely not 2 to 3 years from now and since there are no g-sync 4k panels that I'm aware of their decision left them with no support for what is in my opinion the only technology that Nvidia provides aside from just putting a faster GPU in there a desktop grade one that could compensate for a GPU resolution mismatch like this with smoother animations at lower and highly variable frame rates they did say that they're working on it at CES but that doesn't help buyers today which I guess leads us very gracefully into today his conclusion and the answer to the question that I posed about six minutes ago it depends on how you evaluate success if I were to pick on what was bad I could say that at the price I don't think they're spec competes well with the fatter heavier and uglier but significantly faster gaming laptops that are out there from competitors but if I were to look at what they got right there is a lot to like here they built a chassis and a unique product identity around quality and overclocked ability that I believe they can carry forward for a couple of years at least without anyone properly competing with it the machine was rock-solid in my testing with zero odd behavior and they even avoided most of the oopsies that first time laptop makers fall into the 1080p webcams soft image quality and poor low-light performance are a bit of a drag but the speakers and the built-in microphone are both surprisingly good I'm just here for the food all right please which means that while I won't be running out to drop nearly three G's after taxes and shipping on an SE 17 I will have a very close eye on future evj mobile products well done guys mass drop is working with HiFi man to bring back their 8300 headphones with a special MD or mass drop Edition so in their former life under solely the hi-fi man name these entry-level headphones were a whopping $300 the new one is actually very similar to the older HP 300s but with an updated and more lightweight structure a more neutral sound signature and an all-black appearance compared to the silver and black of older generations the most important thing though the biggest change is the price they've reduced it to a very low 99 US dollars so you can check that out at draw dot slash ltte - HM - 350 or you can just click the link in the video description and if you're a little confused because you've never of mass drop before well I'll explain it master up takes sellers and buyers lots of buyers and puts them together the more people buy the lower the price goes they've got deals on all kinds of stuff knives camping supplies keyboards headphones for example and you can check it all out again at that link in the video 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