Origin EON16-S Review | PCMag

Finding the best gaming laptop for you is a game of balance with generally three factors at play: power, size, and price. The Origin EON16-S (starts at $1,799; $2,408 as tested) tries to find its own balance, coming in as a modestly large system with high-performance parts that have just enough room to run wild. While it might have stood out as a capable contender in the market, exceeding the value of machines like the Razer Blade 18, this year's Origin EON16-S struggles to keep up with the one gaming laptop that continues to put a smackdown on the rest of the field, the Editors' Choice award-holding Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, in more ways than just speed.

A Common Gaming PC Build

The Origin EON16-S has a design that I’m seeing increasingly often on well-built gaming laptops. While much of the frame is simple, the cooling section extends slightly on the sides and rear. Some gaming laptops have extra thick cooling jutting up, but it’s subtle on the EON16-S. The base is built with a sturdy metal frame that has just a little flex to it. The display hinge is a little less solid, with some wiggle to it, and the display itself seems to be housed in plastic rather than the metal of the rest of the frame.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

A large laptop like this comes with some weight, but not as much as you might expect, especially if you read Origin’s specs. The company claims a weight of 5.95 pounds, but I measured it at a noticeably lighter 5.7 pounds. Unfortunately, Origin also appears to get the size wrong, but in a worse way, as the claimed 0.78-inch thickness doesn’t line up with the 0.9 inch I measured with digital calipers. Regardless, it still doesn’t feel overly large for a 16-inch laptop.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

However, this large laptop actually has its keyboard further back toward the screen hinges than usual, which leaves my wrists pressing into the edge of the frame rather than letting my palms rest on the chassis. That does provide space for a huge touchpad, though. Unfortunately, Origin is yet another company that hasn’t grown past the awful keyboard layout that slots a full-size set of arrow keys between the main keys and number pad, letting the arrows cut into the space of the right Shift key as well as the number pad's 0 key. Laptop makers everywhere: Look to Lenovo’s solution for this, please.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

While Origin tends to provide considerable configuration, you won't find much to change on the EON16-S before checkout. All configurations use an Intel Core i9-13900H and include the same 1600p display refreshing at 240Hz. The $1,770 starting configuration comes with a GeForce RTX 4060 GPU, 16GB of memory, Windows 11 Home, and a 512GB SSD.

Origin allows memory increases up to 32GB or 64GB, while Windows 11 Pro is available for $39 extra. The storage can be substantially upgraded with up to two 8TB drives that will add more than $1,600 to the price on their own. The graphics can also be upgraded to an RTX 4070.

As tested at $2,386, our system includes the RTX 4070 upgrade, 32GB of RAM, and upgraded storage combining a 1TB and a 2TB drive, both the Samsung 990 Pro SSD. Origin's many pre-designed screen lid prints increase the price by another $39 or $150 for custom prints. I haven’t factored this into our as-tested price, as it’s completely optional and won’t change the function of the system.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

The display on the Origin EON16-S—again running at 240Hz and packing 2,560 by 1,600 pixels—is made for gaming, capable of smooth motion and an exceedingly sharp 16-inch presentation.

Impressively, Origin includes a 1080p webcam that upgrades the 720p visuals found in so many other laptop webcams, which could be helpful for game broadcasting (at least getting started). The system also supports Windows Hello facial recognition, making sign-in as easy as sitting down in front of the system.

The Origin EON16-S situates its speakers in a typical spot, along the outside edges of the bottom panel, near the front of the machine. It doesn’t specify the wattage of the speakers, however.

Checking off another box, the Origin EON16-S doesn't skimp on ports. It has two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports (one on each side), separate headset and mic jacks, a microSD slot, and a Thunderbolt 4 port. That’s just the ports on the sides.

The rear includes an HDMI port, a Mini DisplayPort 1.4, a 2.5Gb Ethernet jack, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (unfortunately not Thunderbolt 4), and the power input. Using just one Thunderbolt 4 port and putting it on the side instead of the rear seems like an oversight, as a Thunderbolt dock could be useful for this sort of machine, and rear ports make for tidier dock setups.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

For up-to-date wireless connectivity to Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth headphones alike, the system comes with a Wi-Fi 6E chip that supports Bluetooth 5.3.

Using the Origin EON16-S

The Origin EON16-S has a so-so keyboard that leaves a bit to be desired. While the switches have a hearty pop to them, the keycaps aren’t contoured, and the stabilizers don’t keep the keys from wobbling if pressed on the edges. While I am able to hit 110 words per minute with 99% accuracy typing in Monkeytype, the wobble of the keycaps has me feeling on edge constantly. It isn't comfortable typing at that pace, whereas other keyboards have let me type at a similar speed with more ease.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Origin's touchpad is a high point at least: It’s massive, and I haven’t run into palm-rejection issues. The surface is delightfully smooth, and it makes swiping, scrolling, and multi-finger gestures a breeze. A huge portion of the pad depresses when clicking, and it feels a little flimsy as a result, but the pad is responsive enough that I tend to rely on tap-to-click almost exclusively.

As mentioned, the display is perfectly sharp for its size, even cleanly presenting tiny text. An anti-glare finish makes it easy to view with a lot of lights in the background that might have otherwise caused disruptive reflections. Unfortunately, it’s still not quite bright enough for use outdoors unless you’re just working on bright documents. The anti-glare finish will help, but it’ll be uncomfortable for long stretches. Though the 240Hz refresh rate is largely meant for gaming and would impact battery life, the extra smoothness of motion is also helpful for scrolling outside of gaming.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

With the speakers firing down, the audio can get a little muffled when the laptop is on a soft surface or on your lap, but you'll find enough volume to power through in a small room. The laptop uses Creative’s Sound Blaster Studio Pro app for extra sound effects, which boost the volume beyond what the system can do without. It can be useful to have that extra headroom to go louder, but it can start to become grating at max volume with effects added through these speakers. On the plus side, the system actually packs in a little bit of bass, giving music and movie audio some much-needed fullness. 

Origin delivers one of the cleanest Windows installs I’ve seen in a long time. This laptop has no bloatware to be seen. It doesn’t even pack in apps like Facebook and Instagram, which I see pre-loaded on so many machines still. All you'll find is just a control center app for managing performance profiles and keyboard lighting—essential for this type of machine—and an app for the Creative audio system.

Testing the Origin EON16-S: The Power of Balance

This year, the Origin EON16-S has its work cut out for it when it comes to standing out from the crowd. As configured, this EON is up against some true powerhouses. Most notably, it has to contend with the superb Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, which can come similarly configured and has recently been on sale in a dramatic fashion, bringing an RTX 4080-equipped model down to $2,250, which gives this Origin EON16-S virtually no breathing room.

However, the Origin EON16-S manages to put a strong foot forward while staying well below the price of the newest Razer Blade 18, which packs only an RTX 4060 in its base $2,899.99 configuration, and the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 (G733P), which at least has an RTX 4080 to justify the same high starting price as the Razer model. Then again, it’s not the only competitively priced laptop with comparable hardware, as the MSI Katana 15 packs in an RTX 4070 and 13th-Gen Intel H-Series processor for hundreds less than the competition.

Productivity Tests

To assess real-world productivity with metrics we can compare across machines, we use UL's PCMark 10 to simulate office and content-creation workflows and measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10's Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop's storage.

We stress the CPU with a series of three benchmarks that use all available cores and threads to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we finish off by challenging the system with a creative workload through PugetBench for Photoshop by Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

At PCMag, any score above 4,000 points in PCMark 10’s productivity benchmark is viewed as exceptional and a telling sign that the machine will more than meet the needs of everyday office work. Given the powerful hardware on deck in all of these machines, it’s no surprise that they all not only met that 4,000-point threshold but also flew well past it. Impressively, the Origin EON16-S actually managed to score the highest despite not running the most effective CPU and GPU pairing. As we see in the PCMark 10 Storage test, it easily topped the pack with one of the most impressive results we’ve seen. That’s thanks to the Samsung 990 Pro SSD inside, which is one of the most capable on the market. That fast storage likely played a part in the Productivity Test lead as well.

The Origin EON16-S started to lose ground when the CPU had to bear more of the brunt, such as in HandBrake and Cinebench, where it fell well behind the Intel Core i9-13900HX in the Lenovo and the AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX in the Asus. It defeated the MSI Katana 15's Intel Core i7-13620H and impressively topped even the Razer Blade 18’s Intel Core i9-13950HX, which was stifled by its underwhelming cooling. Geekbench saw the Origin EON16-S neck-and-neck with the Razer Blade 18, ahead of the MSI Katana again, but still trailing Lenovo and Asus.

Origin's balanced build focus comes through one last time in PugetBench, with a narrow victory achieved over the Asus and Lenovo laptops, again likely leveraging its fast storage to come ahead. The Razer Blade 18 and MSI Katana 15 B13V, unfortunately, couldn’t complete the PugetBench test due to an error experienced on some Raptor Lake chips, but given the other results, it’s a safe bet Origin would have won again here.

Graphics Tests

To measure the graphical performance of each system, we test Windows PC graphics with a pair of DirectX 12 gaming simulations using UL's 3DMark Night Raid (low-intensity)  and Time Spy (high-intensity) tests.

We also run GFXBench 5, a cross-platform test we can use to compare performance across Windows and Mac that stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, which are rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The results of our synthetic graphics tests almost perfectly aligned with the class of GPU inside each machine. Expectedly, the RTX 4070 inside the Origin EON16-S was simply not capable of pulling ahead of the RTX 4080 or 4090 inside these other machines. The results of these tests tell a story about the importance of cooling, however: The Razer Blade 18 again struggled to keep up with the similarly configured Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, which itself managed to run its RTX 4080 at levels that nearly met and sometimes even exceeded the RTX 4090 in the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17. Unfortunately, the Origin EON16-S couldn't quite pull the same trick against the Razer Blade 18. It did manage to keep a lead on MSI’s laptop, but it’s also considerably more expensive.

When it came to gaming, the Origin EON16-S continued to hold its own. While the Lenovo and Asus laptops continued their own little rivalry at the top of the pack, the Origin EON16-S snuck in its own small victories, beating the Lenovo in one F1 result and beating the Asus in another. It was a close race between the Origin EON16-S and MSI Katana 15, which is bad news for Origin given how much cheaper the MSI is. (Anyone searching for a machine that’s just focused on gaming performance and not build quality will find it at a bargain price from MSI.) The Origin EON16-S did a decent job keeping pace with the Razer Blade 18, which at least makes it a compelling alternative to anyone considering the Razer.

Ultimately, the star of the show throughout these tests continues to be the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8, which is constantly punching above its weight and can cost much less than the Origin EON16-S with a discount.

The gaming tests do call into question the display pairing for this system. While our benchmarks run at 1080p, we also test laptops at the native resolutions of their built-in displays. While the Origin EON16-S can do a tidy job at 1080p, constantly hitting above 100fps, its performance at 2,560 by 1,600 struggles a bit more without DLSS or lowered settings to lighten the load. It’s fine in esports games like Rainbow Six Siege, where it ran at 289fps, but games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed won’t be able to take advantage of the max refresh rate of the display when running at full resolution and max settings.

Battery and Display Tests

To compare the battery life among laptops, we do a battery rundown test playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with the laptop’s display brightness set to 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

We then perform the display tests using a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and 100% brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The Origin EON16-S had impressive results for a gaming laptop when it comes to battery life. The key is the laptop's ability to switch over to integrated graphics and turn off the RTX 4070 GPU. However, it’s not the only laptop with this trick, and we saw similar battery life among all of the machines with this ability, with only MSI trailing the pack by a wider margin. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 was an outlier.

Displays were a bit of a mixed competition. The Origin EON16-S wasn't bad, at least producing a decent color gamut, but with underwhelming brightness. It was much better than the MSI Katana 15's display, but MSI had to cut costs somewhere to drive its price down so low.

The Origin couldn't quite keep up with the Lenovo, though, with its high-resolution and fast screen but with a slightly higher color gamut and a much higher peak brightness. While the ROG Strix Scar 17 had a wider color gamut than others, its limited brightness wouldn't make it a winner for HDR visuals. The Razer Blade 18 netted its only clear victory here with both the longest battery life and the best display, which was far and away more colorful and brighter than the rest, thanks to mini LED backlighting that provides substantially superior HDR performance.

Verdict: ‘Just Fine' in a Field of Exceptional Gaming Laptops

Capable of well-balanced performance across the board in a respectable if uninspired chassis, the Origin EON16-S is a decent gaming laptop. The value equation isn’t bad, either, but this laptop simply can’t hold a torch to the Lenovo Legion Pro 7i Gen 8. Lenovo's laptop pretty much only fell behind when the Origin’s Samsung 990 Pro SSD comes into play, and that machine continues to hold our Editors' Choice award for midrange value.