VR Ready? EVGA Announces SC17 1070 Gaming Laptop Featuring GTX 1070, Core i7 6820HK

The world of laptop gaming is about to be changed forever. Nvidia just launched its mobile Pascal lineup, which delivers desktop-level graphics performance in a mobile package. We’ve never seen such capable portable gaming machines ever before, and EVGA isn’t wasting time getting involved. The company just revealed the SC17 1070 gaming laptop, which comes equipped with a GTX 1070 GPU and an unlocked i7 CPU.

EVGA said the SC17 1070 has been designed with overclocking in mind. The laptop features an unlocked Intel Core i7-6820HK processor, and the GTX 1070 has headroom for overclocking. The SC17 also features a full GUI BIOS with mouse support that lets you take manual control of the details such as voltage, multiplier and memory timings. The laptop even includes a clear CMOS button on the chassis in case you push your hardware too far.

EVGA also included Express OC (EOC) buttons that will allow you to adjust the CPU clock speed on the fly. EOC cycles through a couple of performance presets, including a Superclocked profile for top performance and an underclocked setting that preserves battery life.

EVGA built its own power supply--in a new form factor--to handle the power requirements of the overclockable CPU and GPU. EVGA said that it's capable of delivering “up to 240 watts of power when needed, without compromising battery life.”

EVGA’s SC17 1070 will come equipped with a 17.3-inch 4K Sharp IPS display, 32 GB of G.Skill 2666 MHz DDR4, a 256 GB M.2 MVMe PCI-e SSD, and a 1 TB 7200RPM hard drive. Somehow, EVGA managed to fit all of this high-end PC hardware into a 1.05-inch thick aluminum unibody chassis.

Remember when we took a gander at EVGA’s first-ever gaming laptop? At the time, we noted that it was a sleek (and frankly, beautiful) laptop to behold, but that its GPU performance left us wanting. The onboard GTX 980M graphics module was not suitable for the 4K display when it came to playing games, and reducing the resolution made us pine for a more powerful GPU to properly drive the 3840 x 2160 display res.

The new SC17 1070 features a GeForce GTX 1070 graphics module, which eclipses the performance of its predecessor's GPU (the GTX 980M). Now the SC17 can run games at 4K resolutions using moderate detail settings, and the GPU horsepower is an adequate match for the display's native resolution. Naturally, the addition of a GTX 1070 means the SC17 is VR ready as well, doesn’t it?

VR Ready? Mostly...

As we noted during our first look at the notebook, the SC17 doesn’t provide many USB interfaces, with only two USB 3.0 Type-A ports and a USB 3.1 Type-C connection available. If you are gaming with at least a mouse, you have only one open Type-A USB port for an additional peripheral. This is fine for the HTC Vive, but you need to ditch the mouse and use the provided USB Type-C-to-Type-A adapter to run the base Oculus Rift setup (one each for the HMD, sensor and Xbox controller).

Unfortunately, the SC17 falls short of the four port requirement to be deemed “Oculus Ready” (the minimum requirement is three USB 3.0 ports plus a USB 2.0 port) because it doesn't have enough ports to connect Oculus Touch, even with the provided USB Type-C-to-A adapter. On paper, you could use the SC17 to power an Oculus Rift (sans Touch), but expect a mess of wires trying to connect to either mainstream VR HMD; the USB and HDMI ports are on opposite sides of each other. The SC17 1070 may be VR ready, but it doesn't appear to be VR friendly.

The EVGA SC17 1070 gaming laptop isn’t available just yet, but you can sign up to be notified when it is. Be prepared to shell out some serious coin, though. This 4K gaming laptop will set you back $2,799.