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 b-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 surprised 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 ESS 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 knck features a
sixth generation core i7 quad core processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more
at the link in the video description opening up the sc7 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 sm951 NVMe SSD
accompanied by a 1 TB hard drive notably a 9mm thick one haven't seen one of
those in a while it's got an Intel 8260 ngw wireless card and a 74 1/2 WTH hour
battery which is well positioned for reducing sweaty Palm syndrome directly
under the touchpad which is fortunate cuz 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 gtx980 video card a desktop core
i76700k four sodium slots for memory expansion and all the cooling to go with
it EVGA has gone for a purely mobile
device-based design around a 45 wat 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's improved density they've packed 32 gigs of 2666 MHz RAM
into them and even gone as far as to bake the
gtx980m mobile GPU directly onto the
main board rather than opting for an mxm add in card this seems to have directly
contributed to the SC 17's 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 Intel gigabit Lan HDMI 1.4 normal mini DisplayPort and g-sync
ready mini DisplayPort on the left all right then while it is
slimmer and than many other 17-inch class gaming behemoth
it's still bigger and very dense feeling
compared to an aor X7 why well first and
foremost because EVGA has chosen tank
like construction over portability and while they seem to have brw 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-in laptop with a screen
with this little Flex like wholly 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 heat sink fin 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 and cleverly ensuring that
there is enough clearance on the bottom of the device for ample air flow 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° underload and I to 64
on the CPU and about the same on the GPU
while running unen Heaven even while overclocked by 76 MHz I can't really
complain though it should be noted that the CPU got quite a bit hotter at about
90° C with the canned 3.8 GHz all core
overclock and while this use three
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 tot ability of the sc7 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 manag to build
devices out of aluminum and Corning Glass and still have them feel kind of
cheap so I think there's a lot of Merit to this approach especially for a 17-in
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
two-handed operation are the highlights here the keyboard tuning needs some work
imh the five level backlight is good the
layout is fine other than using prime hotkey space on the up and down arrows
for switching overclocks instead of page up and down and it's not like there's
key cap wobble or anything like that but the top of each stroke is stiff while
the bottoming out is spongy and the space bar in particular is so mushy that
I actually found myself misfiring fairly frequently let's talk screen now EVGA
puzzlingly equipped the sc7 with a 4K 60
HZ 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 lonus why is that
puzzling because the 980m even with
evga's shockingly smooth preconfigured overclock for the CPU and GPU in their
precision software and this is mindbending their full fat Enthusiast
grade BIOS level overclocking features with like mouse support clear seos
button and all that you know just like a desktop just is not really capable of
driving AAA 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's conclusion and
the answer to the question that I posed about 6 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 their 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 overclockability 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 lowlight performance are a bit of a drag but the
speakers on the built-in microphone are both surprisingly good I'm just here for
the food all right jez which means that while I won't be
running out to drop nearly three G's after taxes and shipping on an sc7 I
will have a very close eye on future evj mobile products well done guys Mass drop
is working with high-fi men to bring back their H300 headphones with a
special MD or mass drop Edition so in
their former life uh under solely the high-fi men name these entry Lev
headphones were a whopping $300 the new one is actually very
similar to the older h30s 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 so you can check that out at
draw. lt- hm- 350 or you can just click the
link in the video description and if you're a little confused cuz you've never heard of mass drop before well
I'll explain it Mass drop 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 description so thanks for watching guys
if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit
that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at
Amazon by buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly
contribution now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering hm gee what should I watch next so click
that little button up there to check out our latest video over on channel super
fun I guarantee you it'll be super and fun oh the laptop battery just died
that's okay we were done anyway