It seems everyone’s going to play at the Max-Q gaming laptop party. In addition to the usual suspects whose Max-Q gaming laptops we saw at Computex -- Asus, MSI, Gigabyte -- this week at E3, Origin showed us its latest creation, which is an impressively thin gaming laptop with a variety of customization options, as is Origin's system integration practice.
Nvidia unveiled Max-Q at Computex, touting a rigid process by which it provides gaming laptop design requirements that include keeping the systems within thermal/power limits, allowing for devices that are thin, light, quiet, and cool. We provided a closer look at Max-Q here.
There has been some confusion around what Nvidia announced. The company touted gaming laptops that would be around 18mm in thickness, and we've seen a couple already, including one from Alienware, that defy that limitation. Nevertheless, all of the Max-Q gaming laptops we've seen are not only thin (or more thin than equally equipped non-Max-Q gaming laptops), but almost all of them look incredible, and that’s partly a factor of size, since we aren’t talking about exhaust grilles that look like something out of a Pixar movie.
Origin's offering is no different. It's 0.76" thick, weighs 4lbs, and packs in a Core i7-7700HQ CPU, a GTX 1060 or 1070 GPU, up to 32GB of RAM, and an M.2 PCIe SSD and/or 1TB HDD. Origin will offer a variety of options, including display resolution (FHD up to UHD), memory configuration, and storage options. All of these will come in only a 15" display size. A company representative was unsure about TDP, but we're guessing the standard Max-Q 90W. The laptop should get about five hours of battery life, although the parameters under which that happens are unknown--we'll have to do our own testing on that front.
We didn't get a look at the internal cooling, but the laptop includes two intake vents on the sides, and air intake throughout the entire bottom panel. The exhaust vents are in the standard positions on the rear of the laptop.
The laptops will come with a fingerprint scanner, backlit keyboard (three zones, all colors), TPM chip, and support for up to three additional displays. I/O includes one HDMI port, two mini-DisplayPorts, two USB 3.1 Type C ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and standard gigabit Ethernet. The Origin logo on the laptop's lid is also backlit. The gunmetal gray is the only color for now, but as with other Origin systems, you'll soon be able to have it custom painted and laser etched.
Origin is shooting for availability at the end of the month, when we expect to see other Max-Q based gaming laptops. The base system will start at $1,000 and will include the GTX 1060 GPU, 8 GB of RAM, and either a 128 GB SSD or 1 TB HDD. Since we have a similarly configured Origin gaming laptop in the lab, we'll be excited to see what the performances differences will be, so stay tuned.
