The handful of high-end boutique PC builders targeting gamers tend to concentrate more on desktops than laptops. After all, for a desktop you can use faster, more powerful components (although the difference is shrinking every year), as well as construct elaborate custom cases. When a company such as Origin, founded by former Alienware employees, turns its attention to gaming laptops, there are some additional design obstacles to overcome.
Origin EON17-S
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Origin EON17-S is typical of a boutique gaming laptop. It takes the very latest high-end parts and stuffs them into a slightly customized version of a Clevo 17-inch laptop chassis (Clevo is a Taiwanese manufacturer that makes generic laptops other computer companies tweak and rebrand as their own). What you end up with is a powerful system, hand-assembled and tested, but without the inventive proprietary industrial designs companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Dell can bring to their own gaming systems.
The real advantage Origin brings is its ability to offer not only overclocked CPUs (not something you'd typically find in a laptop, but not unheard of), but also overclocked GPUs. Considering that the overclocked parts in our review unit were already top-of-the-line--an Intel Extreme Edition Core i7-2920XM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580M--it's not too surprising that this config costs a whopping $3,599. The starting price for the EON17-S is a more reasonable $1,676 (with a Core i5-2520), but if you're playing in that end of the pool, more-mainstream brands such as Alienware offer better prices on the entry-level components.