WEBVTT

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normally I would look at a product as complex as a laptop from a new player

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and draw either of these conclusions one

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that they've simply rebadged someone else's probably mediocre b-level design

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unless they paid huge money for an exclusive or two that they did a

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horrible job on it due to their inexperience EVGA has the potential

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though to be different while they have done and continue to pretty much apply

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colorful boxes and stickers to third party designs like oh I don't know this

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one they also have a deeply experienced

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motherboard electrical and software design team giving them way more

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applicable engineering street cred than someone like Razer who surprised think

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everyone over the last four years by bursting onto the scene and

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demonstrating that there is still room for a newcomer to shake things up in

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this category but is EVGA walking down

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that same path to success ESS or is it all just theoretically I guess it makes

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more sense than it at first glance appeared to there's only one way to find

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out Intel skull Canyon knck features a

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sixth generation core i7 quad core processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more

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at the link in the video description opening up the sc7 we get

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pretty much the entire guts laid out before us with none of the configurable

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or upgradable components trickily hiding under the keyboard or anything like that

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my config has a 256 gig sm951 NVMe SSD

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accompanied by a 1 TB hard drive notably a 9mm thick one haven't seen one of

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those in a while it's got an Intel 8260 ngw wireless card and a 74 1/2 WTH hour

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battery which is well positioned for reducing sweaty Palm syndrome directly

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under the touchpad which is fortunate cuz the top of the laptop does get quite

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toasty up towards the screen moving on

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to the rest unlike this Sager unit that

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we reviewed a while back that featured a desktop gtx980 video card a desktop core

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i76700k four sodium slots for memory expansion and all the cooling to go with

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it EVGA has gone for a purely mobile

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device-based design around a 45 wat core i7 6820 HK BGA CPU so that means it's

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soldered directly to the motherboard with a mere two sodium slots though

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thanks to DDR4's improved density they've packed 32 gigs of 2666 MHz RAM

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into them and even gone as far as to bake the

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gtx980m mobile GPU directly onto the

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main board rather than opting for an mxm add in card this seems to have directly

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contributed to the SC 17's Slimmer than

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most 17-inch gaming notebooks design the

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size of which should be pretty easy to gauge looking at the relative size of

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the two a type USB 3 and single C type USB 3.1 and headphone jacks on the right

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as well as the Intel gigabit Lan HDMI 1.4 normal mini DisplayPort and g-sync

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ready mini DisplayPort on the left all right then while it is

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slimmer and than many other 17-inch class gaming behemoth

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it's still bigger and very dense feeling

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compared to an aor X7 why well first and

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foremost because EVGA has chosen tank

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like construction over portability and while they seem to have brw forced it a

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little I mean that bottom cover has to be the thickest that I have ever seen

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they definitely achieved their goal the machined aluminum chassis has less Flex

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with its bottom cover removed than most laptops this size that I've encountered

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that are fully assembled and I have never seen a 17-in laptop with a screen

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with this little Flex like wholly actual and this approach carries over to

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cooling as well with four heat pipes carrying heat away from the CPU and GPU

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toward a total of four heat sink fin arrays that are fed by a pair of large

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blower style fans they intake air from the bottom of the unit right next to

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this beefy rubber heel that pulls double

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Duty adding a subtle angle to the keyboard and and cleverly ensuring that

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there is enough clearance on the bottom of the device for ample air flow and it

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works pretty well I would like for EVGA

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to tune their fan ramping logic which can make these sharp adjustments as

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often as every 5 to 10 seconds while gaming but at 70° underload and I to 64

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on the CPU and about the same on the GPU

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while running unen Heaven even while overclocked by 76 MHz I can't really

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complain though it should be noted that the CPU got quite a bit hotter at about

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90° C with the canned 3.8 GHz all core

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overclock and while this use three

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screws in place of every nail approach

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in spite of evga's efforts to engineer a flatter power brick that slides into

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your bag more easily does not improve the tot ability of the sc7 what it does

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do is sidestep the Trap that many newcomers and even many multinationals

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fall into where they either to save

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weight or material cost manag to build

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devices out of aluminum and Corning Glass and still have them feel kind of

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cheap so I think there's a lot of Merit to this approach especially for a 17-in

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gaming device where realistically were you going to be carting it around to

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class every day anyway not for the

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keyboard unfortunately while I think they did a good job of the touchpad it's

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got a slightly heavy click but zero noticeable latency and Flawless

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two-handed operation are the highlights here the keyboard tuning needs some work

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imh the five level backlight is good the

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layout is fine other than using prime hotkey space on the up and down arrows

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for switching overclocks instead of page up and down and it's not like there's

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key cap wobble or anything like that but the top of each stroke is stiff while

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the bottoming out is spongy and the space bar in particular is so mushy that

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I actually found myself misfiring fairly frequently let's talk screen now EVGA

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puzzlingly equipped the sc7 with a 4K 60

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HZ IPS panel from sharp that manages

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great color fantastic contrast with a non-distracting amount of motion blur

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actually very little backlight bleed as well sounds great lonus why is that

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puzzling because the 980m even with

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evga's shockingly smooth preconfigured overclock for the CPU and GPU in their

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precision software and this is mindbending their full fat Enthusiast

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grade BIOS level overclocking features with like mouse support clear seos

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button and all that you know just like a desktop just is not really capable of

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driving AAA titles at 4K with high details not today and definitely not 2

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to 3 years from now and since there are no g-sync 4K panels that I'm aware of

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their decision left them with no support for what is in my opinion the only

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technology that NVIDIA provides aside from just putting a faster GPU in there

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a desktop grade one that could compensate for a GPU resolution mismatch

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like this with smoother animations at lower and highly variable frame rates

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they did say that they're working on it at CES but that doesn't help buyers

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today which I guess leads us very gracefully into today's conclusion and

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the answer to the question that I posed about 6 minutes ago it depends on how

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you evaluate success if I were to pick

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on what was bad I could say that at the

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price I don't think their spec competes

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well with the fatter heavier and uglier but significantly faster gaming laptops

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that are out there from competitors but if I were to look at what they got right

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there is a lot to like here they built a chassis and a unique product identity

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around quality and overclockability that I believe they can carry forward for a

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couple of years at least without anyone properly competing with it the machine

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was Rock Solid in my testing with zero odd behavior and they even avoided most

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of the oopsies that first time laptop

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makers fall into the 1080p webcams soft

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image quality and poor lowlight performance are a bit of a drag but the

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speakers on the built-in microphone are both surprisingly good I'm just here for

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the food all right jez which means that while I won't be

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running out to drop nearly three G's after taxes and shipping on an sc7 I

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will have a very close eye on future evj mobile products well done guys Mass drop

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is working with high-fi men to bring back their H300 headphones with a

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special MD or mass drop Edition so in

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their former life uh under solely the high-fi men name these entry Lev

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headphones were a whopping $300 the new one is actually very

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similar to the older h30s but with an updated and more lightweight structure a

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more neutral sound signature and an all black appearance compared to the silver

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and black of older Generations the most important thing though the biggest

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change is the price they've reduced it to a very low

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$99 so you can check that out at

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draw. lt- hm- 350 or you can just click the

00:10:04.200 --> 00:10:12.600
link in the video description and if you're a little confused cuz you've never heard of mass drop before well

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I'll explain it Mass drop takes sellers

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and buyers lots of buyers and puts them together the more people buy the lower

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the price goes they've got deals on all kinds of stuff knives camping supplies

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keyboards headphones for example and you can check it all out again at that link

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in the video description so thanks for watching guys

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if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit

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contribution now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering hm gee what should I watch next so click

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that little button up there to check out our latest video over on channel super

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fun I guarantee you it'll be super and fun oh the laptop battery just died

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that's okay we were done anyway