EVGA Unleashes SC17 1080 Gaming Laptop

EVGA announced its plans to cram a GTX 1080 into its SC17 gaming laptop back at Computex, and today, the SC17 1080 became available.

The new EVGA SC17 1080 is mostly unchanged from its predecessor, the SC17 1070. It still features an overclockable Intel Core i7-7820HK Kaby Lake processor, 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4-2666 memory, a 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD, a 1TB 7,200RPM HDD, and a 17.3” 3840 x 2160 IPS display with Nvidia G-Sync onboard. One of the few negatives from our review of the SC17 1070 was that the GPU was somewhat underpowered for gaming at 4K (although it was still better than its predecessor, the original EVGA SC17, which had a GTX 980M), but EVGA seems to keep throwing more graphics horsepower under the hood with every iteration, and the SC17 1080’s GTX 1080 should get you closer to comfortable framerates at the display’s native resolution.

Another gripe we had with the SC17 1070 was that although it had enough horsepower to power virtual reality (VR) games and HMDs, it wasn’t entirely VR friendly, with only two USB 3.0 ports and a USB 3.1 Type-C port (with a Type-A adapter) residing on the opposite side of the chassis as the display outputs. Three ports is fine for running an HTC Vive (so long as you had a USB extension to get the cable near the display output), but not if you want to use the Oculus Rift with Touch (which requires four USB 3.0 connections).

However, the SC17 1080 remedies these issues with three USB 3.0 ports, in addition to the USB 3.1 Type-C port (with a Type-A adapter), giving it enough connectivity to run an Oculus Touch setup. Even better, the third USB 3.0 port is right next to the display output (two mini DisplayPort 1.4 interfaces and an HDMI 2.0 port), making it much more adept for a mobile VR gaming solution.

EVGA had to sacrifice some of the SC17 1070’s 1.07-inch profile to accommodate the new GPU, with the thickest part of the SC17 1080 measuring in at 1.3 inches. It’s thicker towards the back of the device (where the beefy cooling system and GPU is housed), but it thins out towards the front. The company also somehow managed to shave some weight off the SC17 in the process of bulking up, with the SC17 1080 listed at 8.93lbs to the SC17 1070's 9.04lbs.

Both the CPU and GPU are overclockable using EVGA’s Precision XOC Mobile software or a hotkey preset (SC mode or downclock with EOC hotkeys), and the keyboard’s LED backlighting can also be controlled using the company-branded software.

The EVGA SC17 1080 is available now on EVGA’s website for $3,000.