Origin EON15-X review

It wasn’t all that long ago that you could only buy a gaming laptop with ceiling-scraping performance if you were willing to shell out upwards of $3,000 — and, in some cases, closer to $5,000. How much those times have changed is exemplified by the latest incarnation of the Origin EON15-X, which today comes in at under $2,500, but performance-wise is on a par with or better than other systems costing hundreds of dollars more.

No, you won’t get every single imaginable bell and whistle at that price. The EON15-X is not the most excitingly designed gaming PC out there, there’s no option for a 4K screen, the audio is a bit iffy, and the battery life is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bad. But it’s packed with quality hardware that enables top-tier performance, which is all you need, and most of what you want, in a laptop like this. If you can live with the minor caveats, the EON15-X is a good way to game.

Origin EON15-X pricing and configurations

Our review unit of the EON15-X was priced at $2,366 (after a currently running $100-off promotional offer) and equipped with a desktop-class 12-core AMD Ryzen 9 3900 processor, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB NVMe primary drive and a 2TB secondary hard drive for storage, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Max-P GPU with 8GB of VRAM, and a 1080p, 144Hz display (apparently the only one Origin offers with this model).

The $1,658 base configuration of this laptop comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, 8GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics card with 6GB of VRAM.

Origin’s configurator offers a sprawling range of options that can push the price of your personal EON15-X upwards of $4,000 depending on which components you select, meaning you can put together a system that will precisely meet your needs and budget.

Origin EON15-X design

As is common with gaming laptops, basic black is the name of the game with the EON15-X.

Everything from the lid to the keyboard deck to the display bezels (about a quarter-inch on both sides, a third-inch on the top, and a full inch on the bottom) is black — a white circular Origin logo is the only real adornment. If you’re willing to shell out some extra cash, you can get yours decorated with HD UV printing, metallic paint jobs, Hydro Dip design, or custom laser etching.

Gentle ridges outlining the exterior and interior and three sharp arrow-shaped vents distributed between the rear panel and the right edge are the only additional defining visual features of the chassis. The EON15-X isn’t ugly by any stretch, but it is a bit boring. Origin is obviously counting on you, and your games, to supply the dazzle here.

Measuring 14.2 x 10.1 x 1.2 inches and weighing almost exactly 6 pounds, the EON15-X is a gaming laptop that makes its presence known. For a 15-inch model, that’s fairly heavy. It weighs more than the MSI GE66 Raider (5.3 pounds, 14.1 x 10.5 x 0.9 inches), the Aorus 15G (4.9 pounds, 14 x 9.8 x 1 inches), and the Acer Predator Triton 500 (4.8 pounds, 14.1 x 10 x 0.7 inches). For a heavier laptop, you can look to the Razer Blade Pro 17 (6.1 pounds, 15.5 x 10.2 x 0.8 inches), but, well, that’s a 17-incher.

All that said, the EON15-X has been neatly streamlined since the last one we reviewed two years ago was both bigger (15.2 x 10.3 x 1.5 inches) and bulkier (7.9 pounds).

Origin EON15-X ports

There’s no shortage of ports to be found on the EON15-X. On the left edge are two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, an Ethernet jack, a microSD slot, and a Kensington lock slot.

A USB 2.0 Type-A port and separate headset/microphone jacks can be found on the right. Gracing the rear panel are a USB Type-C port with DisplayPort, a dedicated Mini DisplayPort jack, HDMI, and, naturally, the power jack.

Origin EON15-X display

With a 144Hz refresh rate, you won’t need to worry about lag on the 1080p display (though some laptops, such as the MSI Raider GE66 have higher refresh rates still — in that case, 300Hz). Metro: Exodus looked smooth and clean, with very little tearing visible amid its fast action, crackling flames, and torrential snowstorms.

The trailer for Christopher Nolan’s eternally upcoming film Tenet didn’t lack for details, but displayed slightly oversaturated colors, giving a too-warm orangey hue to John David Washington’s and Robert Pattinson’s faces as they discussed the mysterious mechanics of time travel .

Our lab testing confirmed our suspicions about the EON15-X’s facility with colors. We discovered that its display reproduced 104.8% of the sRGB color gamut; that’s above our minimum acceptable value of 100%, but significantly below what we’ve seen from the Razer (119%), the Acer (117%), or the MSI (114%). That it also reproduced only 74.3% of the DCI-P3 color gamut further suggests what you may be missing out on, most notably in next-generation video content.

Nor is the screen essentially bright, averaging only 253.2 nits on our brightness test. That’s brighter than we saw from the Aorus (which managed only 243 nits), but not quite at the level of the Predator (277 nits) or the Blade (304 nits), and well below our category average (345 nits).

Origin EON15-X audio

The downward-firing speakers on the bottom of the EON15-X produce sound that will suffice for gaming but isn’t likely to thrill audiophiles. I could detect the presence of bass when playing The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” but it was a dull, atmospheric thumping instead of an integral component of the song, and it was partnered with somewhat muted trebles and muddy vocals. Songs with a lighter mix sounded better, such as Jessica Molaskey’s classic rendition of “Stars and the Moon,” but even there, distortion became inescapable at the laptop’s highest volume levels.

Creative’s Sound Blaster Cinema 6 software provides equalizer functionality for tweaking various aspects of the audio quality. There were some subtle differences switching between the four available preset modes—Gaming, Cinema, Music, and Streaming—but you’ll need to experiment to get the best out of whatever you listen to. I found Music particularly hollow and a little unpleasant, and got better results sticking with the default Gaming mode.

Origin EON15-X keyboard and touchpad

The EON15-X’s keyboard has an above-average feel, with island-style keys that offer a pleasing amount of travel, but none of the aural or tactile feedback you’ll find on better mechanical keyboards. Typing on it was not uncomfortable for me, which is saying something, and I had no trouble (or pain) reaching 115 words per minute on the 10fastfingers.com typing test, which is par for the laptop course for me.

Measuring 2.5 x 4.3 inches, the touchpad offers a goodly amount of pointing-and-clicking real estate, and the separated buttons are a nice touch I always like to see. The left button was a bit clickier than the right, however, which makes it easy to distinguish between them without having to look, but adds just a touch of muddiness to right-clicking (which I do frequently).

Origin EON15-X gaming, graphics and VR

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 with 8GB of VRAM is a top-notch card that makes the EON15-X well suited for any type of PC gaming, from traditional to VR. Although Nvidia does make more powerful cards, you hardly need them when your system has a 1080p display.

In every gaming test we put to it, the EON15-X scored well above our usual playability thresholds, though a number of its competitors’ frame rates were higher on those same games. Its result of 88 frames per second on Far Cry New Dawn, for example, is above the category average of 85 fps, but below the MSI’s 99 fps. It hit 86 fps on Grand Theft Auto V, compared with 91 fps for the MSI, 89 fps for the Razer, and a category average of 85 fps. It actually fell just short of the category average for Shadow of the Tomb Raider (67 fps versus 71 fps), and was outpaced by the MSI (109 fps), the Razer (98 fps), and the Aorus (76 fps). But in any event, you don’t have to worry about the EON15-X not giving you a good gaming experience on the highest graphics settings with a majority of titles.

If you’re interested in hooking up a VR headset to the EON15-X, don’t worry—it has you covered. It earned a score of 7,126 on the midrange Cyan Room portion of UL’s VRMark synthetic benchmark, easily passing the Aorus (6,575) but not the MSI (8,423) or the Razer (8,056).

Origin EON15-X performance

Loaded with a high-end AMD processor, the Ryzen 9 3900, and a hefty 32GB of RAM, the EON15-X is well-positioned to blaze through productivity and gaming tasks alike. In our regimen of benchmark tests, it earned an outstanding multicore score of 41,968 on the Geekbench 4.3 CPU test—trouncing not just the MSI (32,767, Intel Core i9-10980HK), the Aorus (28,508, Intel Core i7-10875H), the Razer (22,810, Intel Core i7-10875H), and the Acer (20,990, Intel Core i7-8750H), but also the category average of 26,538. The EON15-X’s score of 10,980 on the newer Geekbench 5 is, again, well beyond the MSI (8,347), the Aorus (7,101.3), the Acer (5,996), and the Razer (5,989).

Multimedia tasks were no chore, either. The category average for our Handbrake video-encoding test is 8 minutes and 48 seconds—considerably slower than the EON15-X’s time of 5:17. Behind the Origin were the MSI (6:59), the Aorus (7:59), the Razer (9:31), and the Acer (11:04). The EON15-X’s score on the PugetBench Photoshop test, which runs through a series of intense activities on a loop, was an eye-catching 883.9; this score is a bit less than the MSI’s (905.7), but it surpasses that of each of our three other comparison systems by nearly 150 points.

The EON15-X took 4.6 seconds to copy a 4.97GB folder of video, music, and image files to its primary storage drive, a 1TB Samsung 970 Plus SSD. This amounts to a transfer rate of 1,106.4 megabytes per second. That’s well above the category average (944.1MBps), as well as the speeds of the Razer (848MBps, 512GB PCIe NVMe) and the Aorus (658MBps, 512GB SSD), but behind both the Acer (1,696.4MBps, dual 512GB NVMe PCIe SSDs) and the MSI (1,458.2MBps, 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD).

Origin EON15-X battery life

No laptop is perfect, and gaming models usually flaunt their imperfections when it comes to how long they last when not plugged in. The EON15-X is no exception. Its best time on our battery test, which consists of continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi with the screen set to 150 nits of brightness, was a facepalm-inducing 1 hour and 10 minutes, drastically short of the category average of 4:19. All of our other comparison laptops lasted a lot longer: The Aorus came in at 6:16, the MSI at 4:57, the Razer at 4:41, and the Acer at 3:04.

On the PCMark 10 gaming battery test, which runs a 15-minute clip of a 3D game on an endless loop, the EON15-X lasted only 47 minutes.

In short, the Origin may deliver a good time—but keep it anchored to the wall.

Origin EON15-X heat

Heat is a typical failing with gaming laptops, which are often designed more to the highest frame rates rather than the lowest operating temperatures. In our standard web surfing heat test, the underside of the laptop hit just over 111 degrees Fahrenheit—nearly 30 degrees hotter than the touchpad and the center of the keyboard, and above our 95-degree threshold. Things got even hotter during our gaming heat test with Metro: Exodus, where the same spot underneath the laptop shot up to nearly 129 degrees.

All this, however, was on the default Performance setting for the fans in Control Center 3.0 (see below). Switching the fan speed from Automatic (the default) to Maximum lowered temperatures around the laptop by 2 or 3 degrees. It also increased the amount of already-considerable fan noise, but, I never found them unbearably loud. Every little bit helps in high-heat situations, but even so, you’re probably still better off keeping the EON15-X on your desk and away from your lap.

Origin EON15-X webcam

The webcam on the EON15-X, well, takes pictures. But you’re not going to want to send them home to mom as pandemic souvenirs. Photo resolution is limited to 720p, and they looked dark and grainy, even in a well-lit room. The color of my bright blue shirt took on a darker-than-actual hue that only looked accurate compared against my heavily shadowed mask and eye sockets. Occasional video calls will be passable, but it's clear that this laptop was not designed as a photo station.

Origin EON15-X software, warranty and extras

The key utility bundled with the EON15-X is the Control Center 3.0 software. This allows one-click access to change between four power modes: Performance, Entertainment, Power Saving, and Quiet), activate the Flexikey app to set up keyboard and mouse macros, change the keyboard’s LED backlighting, or adjust the cooling fan speed to your ideal balance of cooling and noise.

Also preinstalled on the system is Nvidia GeForce Experience, which provides a one-stop-shop for driver downloads and game optimization. Per Origin’s usual, there’s no additional bloatware to speak of.

Origin offers a number of warranty options with the EON15-X. Ours included 24/7 U.S.-based technical support, free lifetime labor, and a one-year warranty with 45-day free shipping. For an additional charge, this may be upgraded to as much as three years with part replacement and completely free shipping.

Bottom line

This new EON15-X shows that Origin—and the gaming laptop industry—have come a long way in two years, breaking down formerly imposing price and performance barriers. For $2,500, you get pretty much everything you need for a top-notch 15-inch gaming experience. Configuring for AMD’s newest processor and a not-quite stratospheric video card lets you reallocate spare money to memory, which can make a big difference in non-gaming performance, too.

If raw frame rates are all you care about, y the $2,999 MSI GE66 Raider, the $3,199 Razer Blade Pro 17, or the $2,199 Aorus 15G might be a better option. But the EON15-X holds its own nonetheless, with superior application performance to compensate and a price that puts it in a class of its own. MSI and Razer’s systems sparkle a little more brightly overall, but the money you save may be worth the few compromises— poor battery life, a mediocre display, high heat—you’ll have to make.