Origin EVO17-S (2022) Review | PCMag

Florida-based Origin continues to make a name for itself with super-premium products like the EVO17-S, its flagship 17.3-inch gaming laptop. 2022's best tech is inside, including a 14-core Intel “Alder Lake” processor, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti graphics, DDR5 memory, and PCI Express Gen 4 storage. You'd think the EVO17-S isn't cheap, and you'd be right—its starting price is $2,999 and our Core i9 review unit tops out at $3,540. But its strong metal chassis, high-resolution display, and superb scores in our gaming tests show where the money goes. The Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 may be flashier, but the Origin's build is a cut above. The system earns an Editors' Choice award among lavish, big-screened gaming machines.

The Look: Keeping It Stealthy

The EVO17-S comes in two configurations, both based on Nvidia's top-of-the-line 16GB GeForce RTX 3080 Ti laptop GPU. The $2,999 model has a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen with 144Hz refresh rate and a Core i7-12700H processor, and another $300 gets you a 240Hz QHD (2,560-by-1,440) panel and a Core i9-12900H chip. The Core i9 is marginally higher-clocked at 5.0GHz peak or turbo versus 4.7GHz, but the chips otherwise sport the same 14 cores (that is, six Performance and eight Efficient cores; see our Core i9-12900K review for details on Intel's new hybrid architecture). The screen is the bigger reason to upgrade; it has both a higher refresh rate and greater clarity. The RTX 3080 Ti is easily capable of triple-digit framerates at QHD resolution, so there's little reason to stay with FHD.

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(Photo: Molly Flores)

As for looks, the S in EVO17-S might as well stand for stealthy—its black anti-glare finish doesn't reflect light and resists fingerprints nicely. Origin offers UV printing and custom laser etching on the lid should you feel the need to stand out.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

What elevates the EVO17-S even among high-end gaming rigs is its impeccably rigid chassis. The smooth metal is virtually inflexible, and that's no small feat for a large, thin laptop. The EVO17-S measures 15.5 by 10.3 inches wide and deep, no larger than needed to accommodate a 17.3-inch display, but is only 0.78 inch thick. Origin quotes it at six pounds, but my scale said just five.

Connectivity is satisfactory, starting on the left edge with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A port and headphone and microphone jacks. A Kensington lock slot is far left.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Right-side connections include two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a microSD card slot.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Around the back, you'll find a Thunderbolt 4 port, an HDMI 2.1 video output, a 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, and the AC adapter connector.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Screen: High Resolution and High Refresh

The Origin's QHD (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) display is one of its best features. Our DataColor SpyderX Elite colorimeter measured a high peak brightness of 383 nits, better than the 300 nits we saw from the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

The Asus has better color coverage (99% of the DCI-P3 gamut versus the Origin's 77%) and higher resolution (2,560 by 1,600 pixels), but the EVO17-S isn't lacking for color or clarity and looks sublime for gaming and media. Its anti-glare screen surface minimizes reflections, too.

Above the display is a 1080p webcam with sharper picture quality than the usual 720p fare. It also supports IR face recognition for Windows Hello, making the EVO17-S one of the few gaming laptops with built-in biometrics to skip typing passwords.

The Origin's input devices are also a strength. The keyboard's snappy tactile feel is encouraging, and the large touchpad glides smoothly and clicks solidly. Double-tapping the pad's top left corner disables it, a nifty feature. You can also toggle the touchpad by pressing Fn+F5.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Though the keyboard has RGB backlighting, it doesn't allow per-key control; the Origin app lets you set multiple color zones and customize the built-in wave, breathe, and other animations, but if you're looking to color keys individually, you'll be disappointed. The abovementioned Asus, along with the Alienware x17 R2 and Razer Blade 17, are more advanced in this regard, allowing per-key RGB control and advanced effects.

The EVO17-S does have a customizable 23-zone RGB light bar on the front edge. It's not visible when you're sitting in front of the laptop, but it adds a little flair from a distance. There are also built-in speakers for entertainment, but their sound is flat and unexciting.

Good Thermals and Serviceability? Check

Opening the EVO17-S is simple; after loosening the screws, the metal bottom panel comes free without any prying. Two DDR5-4800 SODIMM slots support up to 64GB of memory (two 32GB modules) and there are two M.2 2280 PCI Express Gen 4 slots for solid-state drives. You can also replace the wireless card, an Intel AX201 supporting vanilla Wi-Fi 6 instead of Wi-Fi 6E. Origin told us it will be adding Wi-Fi 6E in the future.

As for thermals, I stress-tested the EVO17-S playing Cyberpunk 2077 for half an hour while logging temperatures with GPU-Z. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti hovered between 85 and 87 degrees C, which is warm but acceptable, and the Core i9-12900H between 84 and 86 degrees C, ditto. Origin rates its GeForce RTX 3080 Ti for 150 watts, and I consistently saw it hitting that level. (See why GPU wattage matters.)

The cooling fans take air from the underside and exhaust it around the rear corners. They're audible but surprisingly not annoying under gaming load and shouldn't disturb others. The fans are almost silent when the laptop's idling and can turn off completely for silent operation, especially on battery.

(Photo: Molly Flores)

Here's a shot of the EVO17-S under our FLIR One Pro at the end of the gaming session:

We prefer the surfaces you touch to be no warmer than 110 degrees F, and the Origin mostly accomplishes that; the WASD key cluster and palm rest are both below 100 degrees F. The center of the keyboard and the shelf below the screen are toasty, but those aren't places you rest your fingers while gaming. Overall, the EVO17-S does a respectable job staying cool for a thin metal laptop.

Dealing from the Top: Benchmarking the EVO17-S

As mentioned, our $3,540 Origin EVO17-S has a 17.3-inch QHD display, a 14-core Intel Core i9-12900H processor, a 16GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPU, 32GB of DDR5-4800 memory, a 1TB Corsair MP600 Pro PCIe 4.0 solid-state drive, and Windows 11 Home. The standard warranty is one year.

It may cost a fortune, but the EVO17-S isn't the most expensive laptop on the block. Razer's Blade 17 commands $3,999, and that only gets you a Core i7-12800H. (See our review of the similar Blade 15 Advanced Model.) The Alienware x17 R2 is also $3,999 and offers a more aggressive Core i9-12900HK, but it forces you to get a 4K resolution display instead of a more game-friendly QHD. Meanwhile, the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17 is less expensive at $3,049, but has just 16GB of RAM and no webcam.

For our benchmark testing, we challenged the EVO17-S with other top-end gaming laptops. In addition to the Asus, they included the 17.3-inch Aorus 17 XE and MSI GE76 Raider and the 16-inch Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6. The Aorus packs the Core i7-12700H found in the base EVO17-S; the MSI uses a previous-generation but still formidable Core i9 HK chip; and the Lenovo has a powerful eight-core AMD Ryzen HX processor. The Origin should have the strongest GPU of the bunch. See the test group's basic specs in the table below.

Productivity and Content Creation Tests

Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive. The EVO17-S performed strongly in the main test, though it didn't excel in the storage test. 

Our other three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using 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 Primate Labs' Geekbench 5.4 Pro 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).

Our final productivity test is Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop(Opens in a new window), 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.

The EVO17-S earned top scores all around. It edged the Asus in Cinebench R23 despite using the same Core i9-12900H CPU, indicating it maintains more aggressive clocks in long-running tasks. The MSI's previous-generation silicon and the Lenovo's AMD chip weren't anywhere close.

Graphics and Gaming Tests

For Windows PCs, we run both synthetic and real-world gaming tests. The former includes two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for systems with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs). Also looped into that group is the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which we use to gauge OpenGL performance.

Moving on, our real-world gaming testing comes from the in-game benchmarks of F1 2021, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and Rainbow Six Siege, representing simulation, open-world action-adventure, and competitive/esports shooter games respectively. On laptops, we run Valhalla and Siege twice (the former at Medium and Ultra quality presets, the latter at Low and Ultra quality), while F1 2021 is run with and without Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS anti-aliasing switched on.

Driver issues likely prevented the EVO17-S from completing 3DMark Time Spy, but it did great in Night Raid, and more important produced top numbers in the real-world gaming tests. Its RTX 3080 Ti proved much stronger than the ROG Strix's RTX 3070 Ti and showed big gains over the non-Ti RTX 3080s of the Lenovo and MSI. The effect of its 12th Generation Core i9 chip versus the latter two machines can't be discounted, either.

Though we test games at 1080p resolution, you'll want to play at the Origin's native QHD resolution for the sharpest picture. Its frame rates at that setting were still more than playable: 89fps in F1 2021 (Ultra with DLSS), 69fps in Assassin's Creed (Ultra), and 205fps in Rainbow Six Siege (Ultra).

I ran the QHD benchmarks a second time with the system's turbo feature, which gives the GPU up to an extra 25 watts of power and is toggled by a button at top right of the keyboard. But the numbers I saw were barely different from those above, despite louder fan noise. More GPU-heavy games might show a measurable difference, but ours didn't.

Battery and Display Tests

PCMag tests laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with screen brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting are turned off during the test.

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

Just over six hours of unplugged runtime is good for a 17.3-inch gaming laptop. The Origin's screen is also plenty bright (brighter than all save the 16-inch Lenovo) and offers satisfactory if not standout color coverage.

Lonely at the Top

The Origin EVO17-S' gaming performance and build quality set it apart among elite gaming machines. It's surprisingly slim without the usual compromises and even manages to be reasonably priced, or what passes as reasonably priced in this ultimate tier. We'd like to see more sophisticated keyboard backlighting and Wi-Fi 6E, but nearly everything else is praiseworthy. The Origin claims our high-end, jumbo-screen gaming Editors' Choice award.