Origin PC EON13-S review: High-powered parts in a portable package

For most of the history of PC gaming, your choices were limited to either an immovable desktop PC or a massive 17-inch-or-larger laptop, at least if you wanted the kind of dedicated graphics and high-end CPU required for decent performance.

8.1

Origin PC EON13-S

The Good

The <b>Origin PC EON13-S</b> has great gaming performance for a 13-inch laptop, and unlike a few other portable gaming PCs we've seen recently, it has a full 1080p display.

The Bad

The thick, generic-looking body feels like a throwback to a time before ultrabooks, and the high-end parts require some seriously loud fans.

The Bottom Line

Small-screen gaming laptops are rare because they require serious engineering sleight of hand. The EON13-S walks the line between power and portability, but it would be so much cooler with a custom body.

Previous portable gaming laptops, including the 14-inch Razer Blade and the 11-inch Alienware M11x, have all required serious compromises in design despite their high prices, from low-resolution screens to underpowered components. More recently, the new Alienware 14 was a strong performer, both in terms of design and components, but it was still too big and bulky to be easily portable.

Origin PC is one of the few boutique PC makers we've come to count on for solid, if expensive, gaming laptops over the past few years, making 15- and 17-inch systems with big, bulky bodies that required a padded backpack to carry around even somewhat comfortably. Now the company has a rare 13-inch gaming laptop, called the EON13-S.

The EON13-S starts at around $1,200, but our review unit clocked in at almost double that, $2,145. For that, however, you get a new fourth-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GeForce GTX 765 graphics, 16GB of RAM, dual 120GB mSATA solid-state drives (SSDs), and a separate 750GB hard drive. What you don't get for that price is Windows 8 or a touch screen. Windows 8 is available as a further option, a touch screen is not.

While the $1,200 starting price may seem tempting, it doesn't get you the level of components anyone is really looking for in a gaming PC. I'd say you can get away with spending around $1,600 and get an excellent gamer-ready configuration.

The EON13-S is small enough to slip into a decent-size shoulder bag, but an ultrabook this is not. At first glance, it looks a bit like a throwback to laptops from several years ago, when bodies were thicker and gunmetal gray was the standard. That's because, like nearly every laptop from a small boutique PC maker, this system is built into an off-the-shelf third-party chassis, slightly customized with a new panel on the back of the lid. Only very large PC makers, such as Alienware (which is owned by Dell), can afford to create unique custom laptop bodies, like the Alienware 14's.

Despite its lackluster looks, the EON13-S passed my most important test, in that it was fun to use. But a 13-inch screen may be too small for full-time gaming, depending on your eyesight or tolerance for squinting. I found myself plugging the system into a 27-inch 1080p monitor via HDMI more often than not.

The EON13-S beats the Alienware 14 in terms of portability, but both suffer from extremely loud fan noise -- a universal problem when you're running such high-end parts in a small chassis. It also has serious advantages over the slimmer Razer Blade 14, an ambitious 14-inch gaming laptop undone by a poor-quality, low-res screen.

Price is always important, but in this rarefied air, the differences are not extreme. The closest Alienware 14 configuration runs $2,299, but you could knock the CPU down a few pegs (while still getting a quad-core Core i7), and get down to $1,800. And make sure to note the intangibles. Origin PC has a reputation for excellent hands-on customer service, and you'll want someone reliable on the other end of the phone if you encounter a problem with such a hefty investment.

Design and features
With all the sharp-looking 13-inch laptops crossing our Lab bench these days, from the Samsung Ativ Book 9 to the Acer Aspire S7 to the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, the Origin PC EON13-S looks especially drab. It's functional, but also feels like a laptop from several years ago before the shift to thinner, lighter laptops, and doesn't reflect the $2,000 or more you could easily spend on it. It's a trade-off, to be sure: the best parts and expert assembly and service, in exchange for a less-than-sexy outer wrapper.

The thick body tapers toward the front, but leaves the side panels with enough real estate for plenty of ports and connections. The best-looking part is the custom soft-touch matte-black panel on the back of the lid.

The sparse interior offers no extras such as dedicated media controls, just a basic island-style keyboard and two-button touch pad. For PC gaming, the keyboard is especially important, and the keys here, while standard for a 13-inch laptop, don't really have the depth and comfort serious gamers look for -- another issue with the off-the-shelf body. The Alienware 14, in contrast, has thick, soft-touch keys that feel great for WASD gaming. The keyboard here is certainly functional, but was not designed with gamers in mind.

System controls, such as volume and brightness control, are still mapped to the Function key row and require the Fn key to use. Changing the volume while playing a game will sometimes bounce you back to the desktop, which is something that happens in many gaming laptops, and always annoys me.

The touch pad is small, with separate left and right mouse buttons, rather than the larger clickpad style found on so many current laptops. It's fine for casual Web surfing and navigation, but unimpressive. Fortunately, any sort of PC gaming will have you using an external mouse or gamepad, so the amount of time spent with this touch pad should be minimal.

One of the system's highlights is its 1,920x1,080-pixel-resolution 13.3-inch IPS display. In the $1,000-plus price range, one should expect at least a full 1080p display, even on a smaller 13-inch laptop, if not one of the new generation of ultrahigh-res screens. Interestingly, Windows 8 with its tile interface is a better match for the small screen-high resolution combo, as text and icons on Windows 7 can be small and harder to use.

The screen itself is bright and crisp, and not too glossy, similar to the matte display on the Alienware 14. Running games at 1080p isn't a problem for the high-end hardware, but you could also easily knock the resolution down to 1,600x900 pixels and get even better frame rates. There's a good chance you'll spend part of your game time using the 13-inch display, but also a significant chunk outputting to an external 1080p monitor, which will hopefully include speakers because the onboard sound here is serviceable, but not particularly stirring.

Connections, performance, and battery
Plenty of USB ports for a 13-inch laptop here, but you'll probably need them if you plan on connecting, for example, an external mouse, keyboard, and gamepad. The body is thick enough to support a full-size Ethernet port, which is a plus because most of your multigigabyte PC games will probably be downloaded from a service such as Steam. There's a VGA port as well as an HDMI one, but that's just because of the off-the-shelf body, not because gamers are crying out for VGA.

When it comes to comparing performance between gaming laptops, our CNET Labs benchmarks are just one piece of the puzzle. While we can compare recent gaming laptops from Dell/Alienware, Origin PC, Maingear, and Toshiba, those are all going to be different configurations at different prices (although all are Haswell-generation Core i7 systems with 700M-level Nvidia graphics). One area where the Origin stands out, and part of why this configuration costs more, is the triple-hard-drive setup, pairing two 120GB mSATA drives in a Raid 0 configuration with a 750GB, 7,200rpm hard drive.

The faster Intel Core i7-4900MQ processor in the Origin EON13-S helped in some tests, but didn't make a huge difference compared with the Core i7-4700 series chips found in most of the other gaming laptops we've seen recently.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M seems to be the GPU of choice for gaming laptops today, although our 17-inch Toshiba Qosmio X75 has a GeForce 770M. Scores were very close across the board, although the Origin ran BioShock Infinite faster than other gaming laptops, at 37 frames per second, and was just a bit behind the Qosmio X75 in Metro: Last Light, at 12 frames per second, with both systems at 1,920x1,080 and high detail settings.

In anecdotal use, I could play any game smoothly, including my new obsession, the free-to-play online mech shooter Hawken, at full 1080p resolution, with some concessions to medium detail settings. Even a high-powered gaming laptop such as this won't measure up to a serious gaming desktop, especially as those can cram in two or more GPUs at once, but it's hard to imagine anyone who understands the limitations of laptop gaming being disappointed with the results here.

It's difficult to judge the battery life of such a unique laptop. On one hand, it's designed to be easily portable and, as with other 13-inch laptops, one should expect good-to-excellent battery life, at least when not playing games. On the other hand, it has a high-powered CPU/GPU combo and three hard drives, all of which make demands on the battery.

In our video playback battery drain test, the Origin PC EON13-S ran for 3 hours and 24 minutes, which we'd call good for a gaming laptop but poor for a 13-inch laptop. The 17-inch Qosmio X75 ran for only 1 hour and 45 minutes on the same test, but the Razer Blade 14 more than doubled the Origin's time.

Conclusion
As is often the case with gaming laptops from boutique PC makers, the Origin PC EON13-S is a case of loving the inside, but not the outside. Still, the thick 13-inch body is far from unusable, and you can definitely fit it in a modest shoulder bag for easy transit.

For actual gaming, I think a 14-inch display, such as the Alienware 14, works better (and that system has a much better keyboard), but it's not nearly as comfortably portable. The EON13-S is for someone who's willing to sacrifice some comfort and battery life in order to play high-end games on the go, but also has a monitor/keyboard/mouse docking station set up at home for longer play sessions. If that's you, you can configure a great EON13-S that would cost less than our admittedly expensive review unit.

Find more shopping tips in our Laptop Buying Guide.

System configurations

Origin EON13-S
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.8GHz Intel Core i7-4900MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M; (2) 120GB SSD RAID 0 750GB 5,400rpm WD hard drive

Razer Blade 14
Windows 8 (64-bit); 2.2GHz Intel Core i7-4702HQ; 8GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M; 128GB Samsung SSD

Maingear Pulse 14
Windows 8 (64-bit); 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-4720MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 760M; (2) 128GB SSD RAID 0 1TB 5,400rpm WD hard drive

Toshiba Qosimio X75-A7298
Windows 8 (64-bit); Intel Core i7-4700MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 3GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 770; 256GB SSD + 1TB 7,200rpm HD

Alienware 14
Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit); 2.4GHz Intel Core i7-4700MQ; 16GB DDR3 SDRAM 1,600MHz; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 765M; HDD#1 256MB Lite-On IT SSD, HDD#2 750GB, 7,200rpm Western Digital