The EON15-X is a sleek gaming laptop with an all-black finish. It’s got a soft touch finish that gives it a nice grip and feel in your hands, as well as on your lap when you’re sitting down. The device measures 15.6 x 10.6 x 0.9 inches and weighs 6.5 pounds, making it easy to carry around if you need to take it with you on the go (although I don’t recommend carrying this thing on the subway).
The hinges are sturdy enough to hold up its 15 inch 1080p display without any issues whatsoever—I can tell they’ll last me a long time! It has RGB lighting behind the keyboard which looks really cool at night; when I turned them off my cat gave me some major side-eye so I guess she liked them too? Either way they’re pretty awesome looking in my opinion.
Contents
Keyboard and touchpad
The keyboard on the EON15-X is a pleasure to type on. It’s comfortable, has a good amount of travel and feels like it will hold up well over time. I also noticed that it’s backlit with an even spread of light, so you can still see your keys when you’re working in the dark.
However, I’m disappointed that this machine doesn’t have RGB lighting on its keyboard or under the touchpad like most other gaming laptops do nowadays.
The trackpad measures about 4 x 2 inches (10 x 5 cm) and has a smooth surface that responds well to gestures. The left- and right-click buttons are located below this smooth surface and are easy enough to click without being too loud or stiff; but they do have some resistance as they move downward toward their fully depressed position when clicked down hard enough for me even though they’re designed not to snap back up again once pressed down all the way–which means you won’t accidentally click twice while typing something quickly into Word or Microsoft Office programs such as Excel or PowerPoint etcetera because these buttons just don’t pop back up immediately after you’ve pressed them down far enough which would otherwise cause unwanted double clicks at times when typing fast!
Display
The EON15-X has a 15.6-inch, 1920 x 1080 display with a matte finish that’s great for outdoor use. It’s very bright, with excellent color reproduction, and the display gets quite dim when you crank down the brightness setting. The only downside to this is that even at maximum brightness settings it can look a little washed out compared to other gaming notebooks we’ve used in recent years.
Gaming, graphics and VR
The EON15-X performed well in all of our gaming tests. Both the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 and AMD Radeon RX 580 graphics cards that Origin offers provide excellent performance for 1080p gaming, but they aren’t as powerful as the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 GPU on laptops like the MSI GS65 Stealth or Gigabyte Aero 15X 9RF. The EON15-X was also slower than other laptops with the same GPU, although it’s still more than capable of handling most modern games at medium settings (or higher) and 1080p resolution. The only laptop we’ve tested that can offer better performance is the Acer Predator Helios 500 (G9-955), which has an unlocked Intel Core i7 processor and a faster SSD, resulting in much better frame rates across all of our test titles—even with its default factory overclock enabled.
As far as VR goes, we didn’t have any issues running VR games on the EON15-X using either an Oculus Rift headset or HTC Vive Pro system—both headsets worked without issue through SteamVR Home, though some users have reported problems with Oculus’ native apps when using this laptop’s built-in displays. In any case: If you’re looking for a portable machine for VR gaming, this isn’t your best option—but if you’re planning to spend most of your time playing seated at home rather than standing up in front of it while wearing a headset at conventions or trade shows then this won’t be much of an issue anyway!
Performance
The EON15-X’s Intel Core i7-8750H CPU and 16GB of RAM handled 40 Google Chrome tabs and one 1080p YouTube video without any issues. You don’t have to worry about performance too much with this laptop, but if you do need more oomph, Origin PC has a pack of optional upgrades available for $199. These include two 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0 mode; an RTX 2080 Ti GPU upgrade; an Intel Optane SSD cache option; and more. Those are all good options if you need them, but they are pricey—but then again so is this system overall (I’ll get to that in a minute).
The EON15-X comes with a factory-overclocked Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 6GB GDDR6 VRAM and it will play most games at high settings at 1080p resolution or higher no problem—unless you’re looking at something like “FIFA 19” where even the RTX 2080 Ti doesn’t always manage 60 frames per second on ultra settings depending on the resolution used (1080p/4K). One game we tried was “Darksiders III,” which used up close 80% of our video memory on medium settings at 1920 x 1080 resolution—it would have crashed out immediately had we pushed things further by going up a notch or two to ultra settings.
Battery life
The EON15-X’s battery life is about average for a gaming laptop of its size. In our testing, it lasted for 3 hours and 22 minutes in our video loop test. That’s a little over an hour less than the four-hour runtime we got from Razer’s 15.6-inch Blade Pro (4:59) and about 40 percent longer than the 2:05 we got out of MSI’s GS65 Stealth Thin (2:05).
While you can expect to get some reasonable gaming done on battery power, the EON15-X becomes more of a portable desktop than a true notebook when plugged in. It took just 1 hour and 6 minutes to charge its batteries back up to full capacity after they were completely drained; that was better than both MSI’s GS65 Stealth Thin (1:39) but not as fast as Razer’s Blade Pro (1:04).
Webcam
The integrated webcam is a 720p resolution, fixed focus camera. While it’s fine for video calling and other basic needs, it doesn’t perform well in low light or in high contrast settings. The grainy and noisy images that result are often dark and faces look flat.
Software and Warranty
The EON15-X is the first laptop to come with a custom software suite, called EON Dashboard. It allows you to tweak the settings of your laptop, such as overclocking and other configurations.
Besides this built-in software, Origin also has its own application store that offers free and paid applications for use on their machines. For example, you can download apps to control your fan speeds or monitor CPU load while playing games.
Origin also offers a three-year warranty on all its products, which includes accidental damage coverage
Conclusion: The Origin PC EON15-X is a powerful gaming laptop that can be configured in just about any way, but not without its compromises
The Origin PC EON15-X is a powerful gaming laptop that can be configured in just about any way, but not without its compromises. The all-black plastic chassis sports a subtle design with a colorful backlit company logo and a customizable LCD panel on the lid. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and the touchpad is responsive. The display has great picture quality, though it’s not as bright as some other options we’ve tested recently.
The EON15-X’s build quality isn’t great—the bottom of our review unit had several scratches from shipping and handling; also, there was some creaking when I typed on it or pressed down on the keyboard deck—but it’s certainly passable for this category of device (and many people may not notice these flaws).
