CyberPowerPC is going all-out RTX with its gaming laptops. I got to spend some time with the company’s newest model, the Tracer III Xtreme 17R, which comes armed with the recently revealed Nvidia RTX 2070 GPU.
The Tracer III Xtreme 17R will be available to order on Jan. 29. A Core i7 model with an RTX 2070 GPU starts at $1,899.
MORE: USB Type-C FAQ
CyberPower did a good job keeping the overall footprint of this 17-inch beast to a minimum by trimming down its display bezels. The edge-to-edge display is a design trend we’ve seen across the tech industry over the past few years, but gaming laptops are just now catching up.
Those slim bezels border a 17.3-inch, 1080p (FHD) anti-glare display with a 144hz refresh rate. The panel looked bright and vivid in my brief time with the device.
The Xtreme 17R supports USB-C, and comes with an Ethernet connection, separate mic and headphone inputs, an SD card slot and USB Type-A ports on both sides of the chassis.
There are thinner and lighter gaming laptops than the Tracer III Xtreme 17R, but those laptops don’t offer mechanical keyboards. The Xtreme 17R's fully programmable RGB keys not only look fantastic, but they also feet great, with a pleasant clickiness and decent amount of key travel. Because you can never get enough RGB, there is also a light bar on the front edge of the laptop, below the touchpad.
Gamers will appreciate the Xtreme 17R’s thin design and keyboard, but what really matters is what lies under the hood. The 17-inch Tracer III will support up to an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 GPU with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. You can also choose to step down to the RTX 2060 if you don’t need as much power. These mobile GPUs support all the fun features Nvidia has been touting over the past few months, including real-time ray tracing and enhanced AI. Sadly, there is no RTX 2080 config at launch.
The Tracer III Xtreme 17R has plenty of computing power as well, thanks to the included six-core Intel Core i7-8750H CPU. RAM options go up to 32GB and storage up to 2TB. The $1,899 model I saw at CES came equipped with the Core i7 CPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB NVMe storage and a RTX 2070 GPU. Of course, in CyberPower style, you can customize these components to get the power and price you’re looking for.
CyberPower also had the 15-inch model on hand. That model, a refresh from last year’s laptop, can include many of the same components as the Xtreme 17R, including a Core i7 CPU, up to 32GB of RAM and up to 2TB of storage. The GPU also maxes out at the RTX 2070, short of the top-of-the-line RTX 2080 that we’ve seen on other upcoming gaming laptops.
The 15.6-inch model also has a beautiful 1080p, 144hz display, and a customizable RGB keyboard, although it didn’t feel quite as bouncy as the keyboard on the 17-inch model.
We look forward to putting these gorgeous gaming machines through their paces in our forthcoming review.
This post was written by Phillip Tracy
